Seeking victory or engaging in endless mayhem?

Howie Carr writes:

The anti-war movement is MIA as this war, er, counter­terrorism operation, begins. Back when Bush was waging war, dissent was the highest form of patriotism. Now it’s “racism.” If you speak truth to power in the Obama era, they call it hate speech. The IRS will audit you.

But the president, a well-known theologian, has informed us that despite what the Muslims of ISIS say, the Islamic State “is not Islamic.” So I guess we’re in a war against SIS — the State of Iraq and Syria. But it still is a war, isn’t it, Mr. Secretary Kerry?

“I think that’s the wrong terminology,” he sniffed yesterday. “What we are engaging in is a very significant counterterrorism operation.”

It’s all very confusing. When George W. Bush considered invading Iraq without a declaration of war, the Democrats wanted to try him for war crimes in The Hague. When Obama does the same thing ... crickets.

Which raises another question: Where exactly is the anti-war movement?

And why is the president so outraged about a couple of beheadings? When a Muslim terrorist yelling “Allahu akbar!” murdered 13 servicemen at Fort Hood, Obama shrugged it off as “workplace violence.”

Read more here.

Paul Rahe asks us to

Consider this. Why did the President not seek Congressional authorization? There is no question that Congress would have voted to approve military operations in Iraq and Syria. But, had the President asked for authorization, there would have been a problem. There is a faction in the Democratic Party — the faction that made Barack Obama, rather than Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Presidential nominee in 2008. Its most resolute members would have voted against the resolution; and the party split, which would have been bitter, would have further depressed Democratic turnout in November. With this President, domestic political calculations trump everything else.

The President no doubt supposes that he will be able to extricate himself from the consequences of his folly by further speech-making. He is adept with his tongue, and our servile media will doglike come to the man’s aid. But, in this regard, Barack Obama is like the little boy who cried, “Wolf!” The time is coming when only the most slavish and shameless of his partisans will pay him heed.

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