Well, why wouldn't you feel safe with these guys in charge?

So, John Kerry, allegedly our top diplomat, says Al Qaeda is "neutralized." How's that working out?\



In keeping with administration policy, Kerry talked about al-Qaeda being "neutralized" within hours of an al-Qaeda attack in Mali. He takes his talking points from Emperor Barry I, who declared ISIS "contained" mere hours before they killed over 120 people in Paris. Let's face it -- with these guys directing U.S. "smart power" in foreign policy, what could go wrong? Somehow, I don't think their "smart power" involves the same kind of "smart" most of us are used to.

On the other hand, they are killing a lot of people

Well, as Ace says, I don't think the SAS is worried. ISIS, that lovely group of terrorists in Syria and Iraq who have absolutely nothing to do with Islam, despite their name, propaganda, and Koran citations, are training special forces guys. Or ninjas. Or something. Be afraid. Be very afraid:

Okey-dokey. On the other hand, never underestimate a fanatic. These guys will be tough to beat, and our current president doesn't actually want to, which will make it impossible. We're going to be dealing with these fucks for years to come.

Jobs for ISIS

State Department spokesperson Marie Harf apparently believes that while we cannot kill our way to victory over ISIS -- an hypothesis falsified by every successful war waged in the history of mankind -- we can job-create our way to victory. I guess if we can convince Starbucks to expand to the Middle East, ISIS is finished. While her larger point -- stable countries do not tend to produce terrorists -- is correct, that isn't what she actually said, and I don't even know that's what she meant. She was simply taking part in the administration's determined effort to deny that religion has anything to do with Islamist terrorism. Good luck with that.

However, since the administration apparently thinks that jobs are the answer, Clash Daily has collected some funny tweets about what sort of jobs might be appropriate for ISIS terrorists. I'm not going to excerpt -- you have to go there. Enjoy.

President Shit-For-Brains proves how wrong he is

Barry is famously wrong on all kinds of things. The list is far too extensive to detail here, certainly not with links, but even just recently we can include his assessment of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant ("jayvee"), ebola (highly unlikely to come to the U.S.), and the IRS (not a smidgeon of corruption there). Go back to 2007, and we have the gut-buster that Ryan Lizza reported in The New Yorker that Barry said to Patrick Gaspard when he interviewed for the position of political director for Obama in 2007:

I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.

So, we get it. Barry knows more than everyone about everything. So why is it that he was so eager to cancel weapons programs that he now is relying upon in the air campaign against ISIL?* I've been sitting on this for a month, but it still bears noting: When the U.S. first started hitting ISIL targets in Syria, a primary weapon was Tomahawk cruise missiles. They are powerful, accurate, and difficult to stop, all of which make their use a natural choice. So of course, Barry wants to cancel that program:

The problem, as we reported back in March, is that the Tomahawk was slated by Obama to be phased out of the Navy's inventory, with no timely replacement ready. Under his budget proposals, the Navy, which as recently as last year had plans to buy 980 more Tomahawks, the primary cruise missile used throughout the fleet, would see purchases drop from 196 last year to just 100 in 2015. The number will then drop to zero in 2016.
Doing the math, we see that Obama has already consumed in one night of strikes 47% of next year's planned purchases. The naval inventory will soon be depleted at this rate unless we crank up the arsenal of democracy and stop beating our swords into solar panels. As Thomas Lifson at the American Thinker calculates, the U.S. supply of roughly 4,000 Tomahawks would be exhausted in about 85 days at that rate of use.

Barry used a lot of Tomahawks against Libya a few years ago, too. For a guy who wants to cancel Tomahawk production, he sure uses the fuck out of them, doesn't he? Maybe he got his Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to eliminate the U.S. stocks of Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Anyway, Tomahawks aren't the only weapon Barry wants to cancel but needed to hit ISIL in Syria:

A Syrian campaign is going to be tougher than the effort in Libya, where there was no sophisticated air defense weaponry to worry about, which is why the Air Force chose to use the F-22 Raptor for the first time in combat. Its ability to evade radar detection plus its high-speed maneuverability make it ideal for high-risk environments.

Yeah, we don't need no stinking Raptors. We'll never fight another country that has aircraft to compete with ours, right? Not like China is building up its military.  Or that Russia is building up its military. All we'll need to worry about in the future is a bunch of goat-herders with no airplanes, right? So let's cancel the best fighter aircraft ever built.

I wouldn't worry about all this, though. We'll probably never need the Tomahawk or the Raptor ever again. Barry knows best, right? Why does anyone ever listen to this guy about anything?

* The media and administration usually call the group ISIS -- the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. ISIS calls itself ISIL. The difference is not inconsequential. The key is the Levant -- the Levant historically includes not only Syria, but a good chunk of Turkey, pretty much all of Lebanon, some of Jordan, some of Egypt and, of course, all of Israel. That is what they are claiming as their caliphate, not just Iraq and Syria. Given how ISIL has been killing pretty much everybody in territory it controls who is not a Sunni Muslim who agrees with them, what do you think the survival odds for Israelis are if these assholes win? Or Christians, or Shiites, or anybody else who isn't a nutbag Islamist?

Just be glad you don't have to be this committed to your faith

Apparently the radical Islamists in ISIS are trying to avoid committing crimes against humanity by only killing certain portions of humanity. They are marking Christian homes in the territories they invade with the Arabic letter "N,", which stands for "Nazarene" in this case and marks a home for special treatment:

Sounds great to me:

Apparently ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham) have been painting it on the houses of Christians in the city of Mosul in Iraq. Basically these Christians are being asked to either a) convert to Islam, b) pay a ridiculously high tax or c) be killed. Pretty crazy stuff. Thankfully many Christians have come up with a fourth option and d) fled.

I have heard at least three versions of the translation of ISIS. There is the above, which is new to me, the "Islamic State in Iraq and Syria," which appears to be the government-favored version, and, of course, ISIL, which stands for "Islamic State in Iraq and Levant." This strikes me as most accurate. The Levant is not just Syria, but includes part of Turkey, pretty much all of Syria, part of Iraq, most of Israel and Lebanon, part of Jordan and part of Egypt. It clearly is more than just "Iraq and Syria:"

The Levant (/ləˈvænt/), also known as the Eastern Mediterranean, is a geographic and cultural region consisting of the "eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatoliaand Egypt".[2] The Levant today consists of the island of Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and part of southern Turkey (the former Aleppo Vilayet).
Precise definitions have varied over time, and the term originally had a broader and less well-defined usage.[3] The Levant has been described as the "crossroads ofwestern Asia, the eastern Mediterranean and northeast Africa",[4] and the "northwest of the Arabian plate".

So, these guys are claiming pretty much all of what we know as the Middle East. What could go wrong?