No Sale, Mr. President

I watched the speech. The President sounded like a Ronald “shining city on a hill” Reagan one minute and a George “for us or against us” Bush the next. Talk about a transformation, this guy has gone from “ISIS is a JV team” and “the Syrian rebels are just a bunch of pharmacists and doctors” to ISIS is a cancer that must be destroyed and the Syrian rebels are a fine fighting force in less than thirty days!

I said before the speech that I was “persuadable” and I was. I was waiting to hear information that would convince me that ISIS posed a clear and present danger to America and our interests. I’m still waiting.

What I heard instead was that we have no knowledge of any pending threats, but that in the President’s informed opinion, there “could” be threats “in the future.”

So, which is it? If ISIS is so uniquely dangerous and such an existential threat to us, then why was the President unwilling to commit ground troops? Quick, name for me one single war in the history of the planet that has ever been won by air power alone? Apparently, even though ISIS represents an unprecedented threat to hearth and home, the President is willing to rely on the ground troops of Iraq, and the untrained army of pharmacists in Syria? Something just doesn’t add up. Just four weeks ago the President was unwilling to arm the Syrian resistance. Now after a couple of videos surface showing American journalists getting their heads sawed off with dull box cutters, suddenly he’s George Patton?

Sorry, nothing I heard in the President’s speech convinced me that this conflict is worth even one drop of American blood.