Mark Steyn: "Baghdadi Bagged"

This weekend, half a decade after that shameful image, US special forces arrived at the door of the wannabe caliph. After dragging three kids and two missuses down into a dead-end tunnel, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi blew himself and his family to Virgin Central. He left his head, more or less intact, which I wouldn't be averse to Trump putting on a spike across the street from The Washington Post. The Post's obituaries department, to general derision from the Internet, marked the Caliph's unexpected self-detonation with the headline "Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48".
[snip]
Four months after Kayla Mueller's execution, Donald Trump came down that escalator. He is not to everyone's taste stylistically but he is a more serious man than his predecessor, and than many of his GOP rivals, who simply assumed that a Republican restoration would mean a return to Bush-style "war on terror". Trump grasped a simple truth but one apparently beyond Bill Kristol & Co - that there are no takers for ineffectual warmongering. If "shock and awe" had actually shocked and awed, things might be different. But it didn't. As I wrote in The Spectator a little over sixteen years ago, or about six months after my mixed grill in post-Saddam Rutba - October 11th 2003:

In a nutshell, Iraq is the last war. That's to say, the last war in which the Bush Administration will spend the months beforehand amassing a quarter of a million troops on an enemy's borders. Doing it that way gives the enemy too long to enlist his own forces — the Western media, the UN and the moth-eaten French pantomime mule of Messrs Chirac and de Villepin. All these parties are dedicated to ensuring that even when the Americans win, they lose. The speed with which they've managed to taint victory in Iraq is impressive, though it bears no relation to anything so tiresome as reality. So from hereon in engagements in the war of terror will be swift, sudden and as low-key as can be managed. The US will depend not on multilateralism but bilateralism — the many agreements the Americans have signed for base rights and training missions and other below-the-radar stuff from the Middle East through old Soviet Central Asia to the Pacific. There will be, faute de mieux, a reliance on light and mobile configurations and special forces.

If you're an old-school imperialist such as myself, one might wish it were different. But America has not an imperialist bone in its body and, without it, long-term occupation, ever more confined to Iraq's "Green Zone" or Afghanistan's "crusader forts" (as an Aussie PM described the allied bases to me), is a fool's errand. So we have to figure out how to win with "light and mobile configurations".

Thus Trump these last two-and-a-half years: When he took the oath of office, the Islamic State was a nascent Saudi Arabia, bloodsoaked and oil-rich and merely awaiting diplomatic recognition. Month by month, he shrunk it, and reduced it from a caliphate back to a terrorist group - but without committing vast numbers of American infantrymen: low-key shock and awe. That culminated this weekend with a brilliantly executed raid on the holed-up Caliph - and with his head as a highly apt trophy of war.

With their usual unerring timing, NBC's "Saturday Night Live", winner of thirty-seven Emmies for Best Toothless Committee-Written Satire, opened this weekend with a sketch in which Trump's Syria pullout, widely derided by all sides in Washington, is credited with "bringing jobs back" ...for Isis. I wonder how many comic geniuses it took to come up with that rib-cracker.

Nevertheless, thanks to Trump (the real one, not Alec Baldwin), the leaden jest came true - at least in the sense that Isis now has an opening for Caliph, no previous experience required. For good measure, even as the President was giving that remarkable and masterful one-hour Sunday press conference, news came that the Islamic State's Number Two guy is unlikely to be promoted:

Likely Successor to Dead ISIS Leader Also Reported Killed

President Trump Announces The Death of ISIS Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi…

This is the face of the ISIS sex slave market

During more than a year of being passed from one militant to another, Bashar attempted to flee many times. On her fifth attempt, in March, she finally reached fighters in a Kurdish-controlled region.

Think about this as a squad of Democrats defend Islam and attack America.

Bruce Bawer of PJ Media: "Death by Entitlement"

The setup:

On August 7, the New York Times ran a story by Rukmini Callimachi about Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, a young American couple, both graduates of Georgetown University, who decided to quit their humdrum office jobs and go on an epic bike ride and camping trip that would take them all over the world.

And the pitch...

So in July of last year, they flew from Washington, D.C., to Cape Town, and from there bicycled through South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, and Malawi to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. From there, they flew to Cairo, and after seeing the pyramids flew on to Casablanca, from which they cycled through Morocco, Spain, France, Monaco, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Greece, to Turkey. From there, another flight took them to Kazakhstan. They biked through Kyrgyzstan and entered Tajikistan. It was in that country that their journey came to an abrupt end this past July 29, when five ISIS members deliberately plowed their car into the two adventurers, killing them along with two temporary cycling companions, one from Switzerland and the other from the Netherlands. “Two days later,” wrote Callimachi, “the Islamic State released a video showing five men it identified as the attackers, sitting before the ISIS flag. They face the camera and make a vow: to kill 'disbelievers.'”

The NYTimes called them heroes. They were not; they were deluded about the world and now they're dead.

The conclusion:

Times readers called the couple heroes. No, the heroes are not these poor fools who stumbled into an ISIS-controlled area; the heroes are the soldiers from the U.S. and elsewhere – most of them a decade or so younger, and centuries savvier, than Austin and Geoghegan – who, while the two 29-year-olds were on a year-long cycling holiday, were risking their lives to beat back ISIS. What, then, is the moral of this couple's story? In the last analysis, it's a story about two young people who, like many other privileged members of their generation of Americans, went to a supposedly top-notch university only to come away poorly educated but heavily propagandized – imbued with a fashionable postmodern contempt for Western civilization and a readiness to idealize and sentimentalize “the other” (especially when the latter is decidedly uncivilized). This, ultimately, was their tragedy: taking for granted American freedom, prosperity, and security, they dismissed these extraordinary blessings as boring, banal, and (in Austin's word) “beige,” and set off, with the starry-eyed and suicidal naivete of children who never entirely grew up, on a child's fairy-tale adventure into the most perilous parts of the planet. Far from being inspirational, theirs is a profoundly cautionary – and distinctly timely – tale that every American, parents especially, should take to heart.

But they are more than fools, they are victims of a culture and educational system that lies to them about reality. It tells them fables that made them believe that the world is just a larger Disney Land. That an enemy is just a friend you have not persuaded yet.

Strictly Rhetorical Question: Why Does the Media Not Report That ISIS Was Defeated in Iraq and Its Capital City of Raqqa in Syria Has Been Captured by US-Allied Troops?

Ace of Spades:

I would imagine for much the same reason the media is silent on the economy.

Though this is consistent: after all, the media was largely silent on the economy and ISIS under Obama, too. For different reasons, of course.

ISIS Fighters, Having Pledged to Fight or Die, Surrender en Masse

What a difference Trump makes.  Yet not one word in the NY Times story about the change in military policy from that under Obama, when ISIS grew, to it's defeat under the Trump administration.

It Wasn’t Me: Obama Blames ISIS On Bush, Climate Change and the 2nd Amendment

In his final address to the troops as commander-in-chief, President Obama took the opportunity to cap off his eight-year presidency by blaming President George W. Bush, climate change and the Second Amendment as reasons why ISIS nutballs seem to keep popping out of the ground like daisies. Because, of course, the rise of a radical Islamic terrorist group can’t possibly be the fault of Obama’s failed policies.

Obama took aim at Bush pretty early on in his speech, setting the former president up to take the fall for ISIS even before the group ever existed in its current form.

“And in shaping our response, we refused to repeat some of the mistakes of the 2003 invasion that have helped to give rise to the organization that became ISIL in the first place,” Obama said of his counterattacks against the group, which appear to have worked about as well as pouring napalm on a forest fire.

But lest the never-ending crutch that is the Bush administration fail to serve as an adequate excuse for why crazy Muslims are chopping people’s heads off right and left, Obama also pointed to a changing environment to explain radical terrorism.

“Sectarian conflicts rage. A changing climate is increasing competition for food and water,” Obama declared, basically likening violent zealots to a couple of lions fighting over a watering hole. Really, it’s not their fault.

Aside from a president who hasn’t been in office for nearly a decade and a whole mess of CO2 in the atmosphere, the right of the American people to keep and bear arms also holds some responsibility for why we can’t simply eliminate ISIS.

According to Obama, “We will not achieve the kind of clearly defined victory comparable to those that we won in previous wars against nations. We won’t have a scene of the Emperor of Japan and Douglas MacArthur in a surrender. And the reason we won’t have that is because technology makes it impossible to completely shield impressionable minds from violent ideologies. And somebody who is trying to kill and willing to be killed is dangerous, particularly when we live in a country where it’s very easy for that person to buy a very powerful weapon.”

Yes. Yes, gun rights -- this must be the problem! Because terrorists never think to, you know, attack a bunch of people with a knife.

In fact, just about everything under the sun can and should be blamed for the rise of ISIS other than Obama himself and, of course, the untouchable religion of Islam. Because terrorist groups that commit atrocities in the name of Mohammed and Allah are after all, nothing more than “false prophets [who] are peddling a vision of Islam that is irreconcilable with tolerance and modernity and basic science.”

At least, thus sayeth Obama.

But of course, if none of these excuses satisfy in justifying the past, one can always just point to future failures and make excuses for those, too.

“Now, to say that we’ve made progress is not to say that the job is done,” Obama said in his speech. “We know that a deadly threat persists. We know that in some form this violent extremism will be with us for years to come.”

Basically, it’s not Obama's fault that ISIS exists and that they haven’t been put down like rabid dogs. And don’t expect it to change anytime soon, because...coal plants. Or something.

ISIS

ISIS, Palestinians and Democrats vs. Civilization

When ISIS operatives bomb civilians creating mass casualties, cut the throats of elderly priests and shoot up a Christmas party in San Bernardino, militant Muslims celebrate.  The 9/11 hijackers were praised by Al-Qaeda.  

Osama bin Laden was hailed and adored by much of the Muslim world.  Here’s how he is described by a Saudi journalist: “He’s the father, he’s the brother, he is a leader, he is the Imam.”

Successful terror attacks on Israelis are followed by Palestinians passing out candy in celebration. 

Taking a page from the ISIS, al-Qaeda, Palestinian play-book, in the U.S., when a thug robs a store, attacks a policeman, tries to take his gun and charges him before being shot, Democrats erect memorials to the thug, call him a “Gentle Giant” claim he was hunted down and shot in cold blood while his hands were raised, throw a party and invite the thug’s mother for a prime time speech.  

In between these two events they loot Ferguson, Missouri and burn down the rest.

In Baltimore, a city run by Democrats for over 50 years, Freddy Gray, a 25-year-old with over 20 criminal court cases behind him, was arrested and died in police custody.  Six officers were accused of killing him, all were exonerated but the city gave his family a payday of $6 million.   That beats getting a piece of candy but this is America, not the Middle East.

When you celebrate cop killers and accuse cops of systematically murdering young black men you should not be surprised that a meaningful number of your young admirers decide to shoot a cop on their own.    

“What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!” and "Pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon" is not a cry and response that sane people want chanted.  To simply pass by without comment or claim it wasn’t you when your lunatic fringe begins a murder spree - killing five cops in Dallas and three in Baton Rouge, ambushing cops in their cars or during traffic stops - is totally unacceptable. 

And let there be no mistake, the Democrat lunatic fringe is going mainstream.  Today it's impossible to tell where responsible Democrats leave off and advocates of shooting cops begin but they're all in the same party and no one is trying to drive them out.  The Black Lives Matter cop haters are just too big a part of the Democrat voting block so they are catered to.

To make heroes or heroines of people who were shot trying to kill cops is not OK.  It puts the Democrats in the same camp as the Muslims cheering the death of infidels and Jews.  And it encourages more of the same in the same way that ISIS encourages more “lone wolf” attacks by its fans in Europe and America by idolizing those who murder in its name. 

A talk radio host in Norfolk, Virginia was bothered by the Democrat’s celebration of moms whose kids were killed in a segment called Mothers of the Movement.  These speakers included the mother of Michael Brown, the so-called “Gentle Giant” who was killed after he tried to wrestle Officer Wilson's gun away from him in Ferguson, Missouri.  Another Mother of the Movement was the mother of Trayvon Martin who was shot while trying to batter a neighborhood watchman to death by slamming his head against the pavement.  One irate caller with a bad connection ranted for several minutes about the unfairness of police in New Jersey, New York and – I assume – Norfolk, Virginia.  His high-speed complaint was mostly undecipherable but appeared to justify the attacks on cops.  I would suggest that police in Norfolk watch their backs because someone has a grudge.   It's worth noting that the Virginian Pilot, the city's main newspaper, is a big supporter of Black Lives Matter and has a history of covering up crimes committed by black gangs.  

The Liberal press went wild when Gabby Giffords was shot by a nut of no known political persuasion when someone found that Sarah Palin had targeted Giffords for defeat in the upcoming election by placing cross-hairs on  a map of her district.  Palin was accused by every Liberal with access to the media of being responsible for Gifford’s shooting.

 

Let me just get ahead of the next cop shooting.  

Unlike Palin who did nothing to encourage anyone to shoot Giffords, Hillary and the Democrats have blood on their hands.  The German public understands this and shows Angela Merkel drenched in the blood of the victims of Muslim immigrant crimes.  Replace Merkel’s face with Hillary’s and you see the reality of race, crime and Democrat politics in America.

'Defies reality': Kerry takes heat for claiming airport attack a sign of ISIS desperation

Sounding every bit like Baghdad Bob

Secretary of State John Kerry faced swift criticism Wednesday for suggesting the terror attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport was evidence the Islamic State is getting “desperate” – an assessment one top Republican official said “defies reality.”

Kerry made the remarks late Tuesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, referring to ISIS by the name Daesh.

Crediting coalition efforts, Kerry said it’s been over a year since the group launched a “full-scale military offensive.”

"Now, yes, you can bomb an airport, you can blow yourself up. That's the tragedy. Daesh and others like it know that we have to get it right 24/7/365. They have to get it right for ten minutes or one hour. So it's a very different scale,” Kerry said. "And if you're desperate and if you know you’re losing, and you know you want to give up your life, then obviously you can do some harm.”

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mike McCaul, R-Texas, slammed the secretary’s assessment.

Texas congressman reacts to Istanbul airport bombing on 'Fox & Friends'

“They’ve said they’re on the run for many years, and they’re not,” McCaul told Fox News Wednesday morning. “I think the airstrikes have ramped up external operations … This is an unprecedented pace of terror in modern times. And so to say they’re on the run … absolutely defies reality.”

This has the whiff of Hitler ordering non-existent divisions to attack Russia.

Apparently Obama's, Hillary's, and Kerry's plan is to show how much we're #Winning by allowing them to murder us at whim.

ISIS Supporters Release Video with Exploding Eiffel Tower

A new video posted online by ISIS supporters shows the Eiffel Tower exploding and crashing to the ground in stylized, video game animation.

The video begins with a river of blood pooling and dripping off a wooden table filled with stacks of American money, guns, knives and bullets.

It's ripped from a video game, as betrayed by the name of a video game designer with a U.S. company carved in the wood of the animated table.

The video is titled "A message to the Western Kafir [Disbelievers] from the Supporters of the Caliphate." It's narrated in English and subtitled in Arabic, and was posted on YouTube and other file-sharing sites.

But we are assured that ISIS is not an existential threat.

Trump: Maybe Obama doesn't want to defeat ISIS

Pentagon orders commanders to prioritize climate change in all military actions

Cures All Aches and Pains

Richard Fernandez:

The following list was seen on Twitter listing out the most recent terror attacks around the world:

Tuesday - Suicide bomber kills 10 in Instanbul

Wednesday - Suicide bomber kills 15 in Quetta

Thursday - Suicide bombers kill 14 in Jakarta

Missing from this sequence was important context: president Obama's assertion in his State of the Union speech, uttered just before the Jakarta attacks, that the terrorist threat is overblown. He said:

“In today’s world, even a handful of terrorists who place no value on human life, including their own, can do a lot of damage. But as we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands,” he continued, using the administration’s preferred term for the Islamic State group.

When situated in this context the list of attacks is trivial. If 14 people die in Jakarata -- maybe 7 according to some reports -- so what? These are small potatoes in a planet populated by billions. It's nothing to get excited about.

The defect in the administration's reasoning isn't the assertion that direct terror deaths are still few in absolute number. The problem it is that he hasn't got a clue about how to contain it. Obama's like a doctor who tells you the tumor in your lung is "still small", in fact just a speck. Shouldn't you be reassured? Every patient knows the size of a tumor is not as important as the doctor's admission in the next breath "but I don't know how to cure it."

The reason why the assurances of the president sound hollow despite the comforting "it's still small! it's still tiny!" is because what is important is the delta, the change in the problem over time. You want it to shrink. You want the disease, while small, to stop spreading and and are naturally uncomfortable with a doctor helpless to even slow it. In fact, Dr.Obama can't even name the disease he's looking at beyond remarking that it's "nothing to do with Islam".

His approach is basically to prescribe painkillers and hope the symptoms go away. This approach was one full display when Iran captured 10 US Navy sailors and John Kerry made five calls to the Iranian foreign minister. Agence Press France reports that "US Secretary of State John Kerry told Iran's foreign minister that Tehran's capture and release of 10 US sailors could be turned into a 'good story' for both countries, a US official said Wednesday." It's all about the management of symptoms.

The good story, from Iran's point of view were images of American sailors kneeling with their hands up and a junior officer apologizing to the Islamic Republic. The "good story" from the administration's point of view was that the sailors were released at all, even though it comes on the heels of an unbroken string of provocations by the regime in Tehran, including rocketing a passing US aircraft carrier and testing ballistic missiles.

John Kerry's "good story" doesn't mean Iran will stop it's provocations. On the contrary. It will almost certainly be back, more virulent and more aggressive than ever.

Fred Hiatt, writing in the Washington Post notes that the president has never been known to say anything but 'take an aspirin and quit worrying'. “The Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia,” Obama said. It's just a phase. The only problem is that the upbeat message is belied by the cadaverous appearance of a patient in one Dr. Obama's backrooms: Syria, who believe it or not is almost cured.

But in an almost surreal moment Tuesday night, he pointed to Syria as an example of his “smarter approach, a patient and disciplined strategy that uses every element of our national power.”

“That’s our approach to conflicts like Syria, where we’re partnering with local forces and leading international efforts to help that broken society pursue a lasting peace,” the president said.

But if that's the cure it's not a dime's worth different from a terminal disease. Syria too once had nothing to worry about. When asked about the threat posed by Islamic State by David Remnick in January, 2014 Obama said that it was only "a jayvee team". In that former middle-income country many are reduced to eating pets and grass soup to survive. The rest have gone in their millions to Europe.

Most patients would feel a whole lot more confident if the doctor could explain the diagnosis more clearly, which is to say articulate a foreign strategy beyond references to 'learning to hope' and 'not fearing the future'. But that is probably beyond the power of incumbent. If he had any more it would have come out in the last SOTU.

But it's no use having regrets. The past is all water under the bridge. In November the world will get a chance to choose a new doctor, though by then the speck will doubtless be bigger. The best one can hope for is that is not too late.

David Cameron: All Britons need to show loyalty in war against Isil

Sarah Hoyt: AFTER YEARS OF THE MEDIA AND EDUCATION DISCOURAGING LOYALTY TO THE WEST WESTERN POLITICIAN WAKES UP.

Mr Cameron, who has previously warned of the dangers posed by people in Britain who "quietly condone" IS's extremist ideology without explicitly supporting violence, reinforced his message that it was not only the gunmen and bombers who needed to be tackled.

He said: "When our national security is threatened by a seething hatred of the West, one that turns people against their country and can even turn them into murderous extremists, I want us to be very clear: you will not defeat us.

"And we will not just confront the violence and the terror; we will take on their underlying poisonous narrative of grievance and resentment.

"We will come down hard on those who create the conditions for that narrative to flourish.

"And we will have greater confidence in, indeed we will revel in, our way of life.

"Because if you walk our streets, learn in our schools, benefit from our society, you sign up to our values - freedom, tolerance, responsibility, loyalty."

Rush Limbaugh predicted it: An ISIS Trump Video Will Materialize

And here it is.

Islamic State ruling aims to settle who can have sex with female slaves

Well, this is embarrassing. It appears that devout Muslims have complex rules about who can have sex with their slaves.

The fatwa was among a huge trove of documents captured by U.S. Special Operations Forces during a raid targeting a top Islamic State official in Syria in May. Reuters has reviewed the document, which has not been previously published, but couldn't independently confirm its authenticity.

Among the fatwa's injunctions are bans on a father and son having sex with the same female slave; and the owner of a mother and daughter having sex with both. Joint owners of a female captive are similarly enjoined from intercourse because she is viewed as "part of a joint ownership."

The United Nations and human rights groups have accused the Islamic State of the systematic abduction and rape of thousands of women and girls as young as 12, especially members of the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq. Many have been given to fighters as a reward or sold as sex slaves.

Far from trying to conceal the practice, Islamic State has boasted about it and established a department of "war spoils" to manage slavery. Reuters reported on the existence of the department on Monday.

In an April report, Human Rights Watch interviewed 20 female escapees who recounted how Islamic State fighters separated young women and girls from men and boys and older women. They were moved "in an organized and methodical fashion to various places in Iraq and Syria." They were then sold or given as gifts and repeatedly raped or subjected to sexual violence.

DOS AND DON'TS

Fatwa No. 64, dated Jan. 29, 2015, and issued by Islamic State's Committee of Research and Fatwas, appears to codify sexual relations between IS fighters and their female captives for the first time, going further than a pamphlet issued by the group in 2014 on how to treat slaves.

The fatwa starts with a question: "Some of the brothers have committed violations in the matter of the treatment of the female slaves. These violations are not permitted by Sharia law because these rules have not been dealt with in ages. Are there any warnings pertaining to this matter?"

It then lists 15 injunctions, which in some instances go into explicit detail. For example:

"If the owner of a female captive, who has a daughter suitable for intercourse, has sexual relations with the latter, he is not permitted to have intercourse with her mother and she is permanently off limits to him. Should he have intercourse with her mother then he is not permitted to have intercourse with her daughter and she is to be off limits to him."

Islamic State's rape of female captives has been well documented, but a leading IS expert at Princeton University, Cole Bunzel, who has reviewed many of the group's writings, said the fatwa went beyond what has previously been published by the militants on how to treat female slaves.

"It reveals the actual concerns of IS slave owners," he said in an email.

Still, he cautioned that not "everything dealt with in the fatwa is indicative of a relevant violation. It doesn't mean father and son were necessarily sharing a girl. They're at least being 'warned' not to. But I bet some of these violations were being committed."

The fatwa also instructs owners of female slaves to "show compassion toward her, be kind to her, not humiliate her, and not assign her work she is unable to perform." An owner should also not sell her to an individual whom he knows will mistreat her.

Professor Abdel Fattah Alawari, dean of Islamic Theology at Al-Azhar University, a 1,000-year-old Egyptian center for Islamic learning, said Islamic State "has nothing to do with Islam" and was deliberately misreading centuries-old verses and sayings that were originally designed to end, rather than encourage, slavery.

"Islam preaches freedom to slaves, not slavery. Slavery was the status quo when Islam came around," he said. "Judaism, Christianity, Greek, Roman, and Persian civilizations all practiced it and took the females of their enemies as sex slaves. So Islam found this abhorrent practice and worked to gradually remove it.”

In September 2014 more than 120 Islamic scholars from around the world issued an open letter to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi refuting the group's religious arguments to justify many of its actions. The scholars noted that the "reintroduction of slavery is forbidden in Islam."

There seems to be a difference of opinion within Islam about slavery and what you can do with slaves. Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re saying, these are ISIS warriors who take sex slaves, not true Muslims. But wait: these are Islamic State theologians. Who are you or anyone else to question their faith and deny that they are Islamic and true followers of Muhammad who, lest we forget, was also a warlord, kept slaves and had intercourse with at least one 9 year old girl. In the Muslim faith, Muhammad was the perfect man whose precepts are not to be overthrown. So from the perspective of true Islam, it's the scholars who are trying to deny Muhammad who are the apostates and ISIS represents the real Islam.

ANN COULTER: IT’S TIME FOR THE OTHER 13 CANDIDATES TO DROP OUT

At what point in Donald Trump's inaugural address do you figure the GOP establishment will finally grasp what's been happening?


...


Trump is a runaway hit with Americans for the simple reason that he's the only candidate saying anything Americans care about.


After the San Bernardino terrorist attack, committed by Muslim immigrants -- which followed the 1993 World Trade Center terrorist attack committed by Muslim immigrants; the 9/11 terrorist attacks committed by Muslim immigrants; the Fort Hood terrorist attack committed by a Muslim immigrant; the Boston Marathon terrorist attack committed by Muslim immigrants, and on and on -- Trump suggested a temporary pause on Muslim immigration.


The other candidates responded by attacking him viciously. Now, the eunuchs are duking it out over who has the most aggressive approach to ... fighting ISIS!


Asked why he called Trump's proposal "unhinged," Jeb! explained: "Well, first of all, we need to destroy ISIS in the caliphate."


Marco Rubio said: "The problem is we had an attack in San Bernardino," adding that "what's important to do is we must deal frontally with this threat of radical Islamists, especially from ISIS."


Ted Cruz said: "We need a president who understands the first obligation of the commander in chief is to keep America safe. If I am elected president ... we will utterly destroy ISIS."


Why are Republicans talking about starting a war in Syria to stop Muslim immigrants from killing Americans in America? Is it our job to straighten out Syria? Can't our government just stop bringing the terrorists here? If Rubio thinks he knows how to govern Syria, he's free to run for president there. (Except he'd have to stop talking about his dad the bartender because Muslims don't drink.)



Republicans love pointing out that all the gun restrictions proposed by Democrats after every mass shooting would have done absolutely nothing to stop that particular mass shooting.


But the GOP's demand that we take out ISIS would also have done nothing to prevent the San Bernardino attack. As we know from Jim Comey, the director of the FBI: Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik were planning a terrorist attack against Americans before ISIS existed.


It's as if there's a law of toughness conservation: The weaker a candidate is on protecting our borders, the more aggressively he talks about bombing foreign countries, a move known as "the Lindsey Graham."


....

Here's an idea: We let backward, poverty-stricken, misogynistic, clitorectomy-performing Third Worlders scratch out a living in their medieval hellholes, and just keep them out of our country. Also known as: the Trump Plan.


Except the fun parts when Trump was speaking, the candidates talked about almost nothing else at the debate but carpet-bombing the Middle East, taking out this leader or that group, sending American forces to train Sunni Arabs, touting the Kurds, announcing their specific strategies for defeating ISIS, giving perfect little answers about our nuclear throw-weights and the "nuclear triad" and correctly identifying the "good guys" and "bad guys" -- all of whom live 7,000 miles away from us.


When do we get to talk about Americans?


Only Trump seems to care. Asked about dictators running the Middle East, Trump said:


"In my opinion, we've spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly, if they were there and if we could've spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems; our airports and all of the other problems we've had, we would've been a lot better off. I can tell you that right now ..."


The nice thing about having your own helicopter is you can see the terrain below. The rest of them keep bumping into one another, as if they're 9-year-olds trying to out-precocious one another on knowing unimportant military terminology and the pronunciation of foreign names.


As we learned from Spelling Bee champ Rubio, the "nuclear triad" refers to the fact that we have nukes on (1) the ground, (2) airplanes and (3) submarines.


Wow, isn't that fascinating? Having learned it, I now have to excise it from my brain, as Sherlock Holmes would, as useless knowledge.


Did FDR know how to change the oil on a landing craft vehicle?


These debates have turned Republicans into self-parodies of wonkery over common sense. Without Trump in the debate, the entire audience would have been asleep in 30 minutes.


Rubio lectures Americans that "we need to understand who ISIS is." Rubio needs to understand what a border is.


At this point, the most important question facing the Republican Party is: When Trump's the only one with the poll numbers to make the main stage at the next debate, what should he do? Card tricks? Juggle? Sing "Danny Boy"?

ISIS Adherents Praise San Bernardino Massacre, "America Burning"

Want to import thousands more?

ISIS extremists began celebrating the mass shooting in San Bernardino hours after the massacre, creating the hashtag #America_Burning, Vocativ discovered. The Islamic State, however, did not take credit for the shootings in the ghoulish postings.Vocativ deep web analysts used our technology to discover the sickening ISIS posts on web forums where the extremists frequently share information.More San Bernardino Shooting Is The Deadliest Since Sandy Hook“Three lions made us proud. They are still alive,” one ISIS adherent tweeted in Arabic after the shootings at Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino. “California streets are full with soldiers with heavy weapons. The Unites States is burning #America_Burning #Takbir”ثلاث ليوث اثلجوا صدورنا بفضل الله مازالوا أحياء ويتجولون شوارع كاليفورنيا بالزى العسكرى وبأسلحة ثقيلة#أمريكا_تشتعل #تكبيـر— ﺳ̲ﻟ̲آﻣ̲يےﻋ ﺂ̲ﻟ̲ﺩ̲ۆﻟة (@alSaoD__yahoD__) December 2, 2015

'We will cut your filthy head': Child ISIS jihadi taunts 'Dog of Rome' Obama to submit to the 'Caliphate' or die in direct video threat

Russia Destroys ISIS Training Camp and Command Center That For Some Curious Reason Was Still Standing After a Year of Obama's "Degrade and Destroy" Air Campaign

Ace of Spaced comments:

I guess Obama just didn't notice the ISIS Command Center there.

Remember the ferocious air campaign that Obama said we were conducting against ISIS?

I also note that Obama and his lickspittle acolytes in the media are predicting that Putin is going to get sucked into a morass.  He's where I also agree with Ace:

I'm going to guess this is 100% wrong, because the Idiot Princeling is saying it....

Obama, feeling humiliated (as he ought to), went on to offer other impotent insults, specifically saying Putin is acting out of "weakness" and not strength of the sort shown by the feckless, incompetent coward Obama....

Obama went on to, as usual, suggest that Putin doesn't properly understand his own interests and goals and if he did he would agree to whatever faggity shit Obama is babbling about.

Obama is confusing Putin with the Republican congressional leaders who have all the courage of kicked curs.