In February, President Obama took out a selfie stick, winked at himself, and stated, “YOLO, man.” In June, Obama said it was time for him to fulfill his “something that rhymes with bucket list.”
He’s living up to his standard.
While traveling in Paris, Obama dropped one rhetorical bombshell after another, all laced with toxic doses of ignorance and foolishness. Here are his top eight:
Obama Says That The Climate Change Conference Represents “An Act of Defiance That Proves Nothing Will Deter Us.” Yes, clearly ISIS is sitting around waiting for the world to give the go-ahead to further carbon emissions – and President Obama has thwarted their evil plans by refusing to cater to such environmental brutality. Obama added, “We salute the people of Paris for insisting this crucial conference go on…What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to save it?” Well, a greater rejection could come in the form of, you know, killing them. Also, ISIS is quite happy to watch the West tear down its own economy based on the chimera of climate change. Certainly Osama Bin Laden was. He repeatedly blamed the West for climate change and insisted they pay impoverished countries for their sins.
“In Some Ways, [Climate Change] Is Akin To The Problem of Terrorism and ISIL.” Obama said this on Tuesday in Paris. Why, pray tell, was a marginal change in temperature unconfirmed by consistent scientific modeling anything like an ideologically-driven radical religious movement seeking to murder Westerners and other outsiders? Because, said Obama, they require similarly determined and prolonged responses. So, presumably Obama should have compared both ISIS and climate change to herpes.
Obama Compares Planned Parenthood Shooting to Paris Attacks. Asked specifically about the Planned Parenthood shooting while in Paris on Tuesday, Obama answered:
We are rightly determined to prevent terrorist attacks wherever they occur whether in the United States or with friends and allies like France, and we devote enormous resources and properly so to rooting out networks and debilitating organizations like ISIL and maintaining the intelligence.
Comparing a lone insane person – legitimately insane – shooting people near a Planned Parenthood in Colorado to a highly-organized terror assault in France is the height of cynicism.
Obama Says That Mass Shootings “Just [Don’t] Happen in Other Countries.” Obama said this in France. In Paris. Where three weeks ago, ISIS-affiliated gunmen shot and killed 130 people. Where in January, Muslim terrorists murdered 12 people at
Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket. Yes, mass shootings happen in other countries. And they are actually deadlier, if less frequent, in other countries.
Obama Says People Must Stop “Demonizing” Planned Parenthood. Obama also added that it’s the “only organization that provides health services to impoverished women,” which comes as news to American taxpayers who foot the bill for state and federal Medicaid, and to doctors who must care for those who show up in emergency rooms under penalty of law. As far as the notion that pro-life critics are “demonizing” Planned Parenthood, and that such demonization contributed to the shooting outside Planned Parenthood, it is
not demonization to point out that Planned Parenthood murders unborn children in the womb and sells baby body parts to research facilities. That is fact.
Obama Says America Must “Reaffirm Our Commitment That Resources Will Be There For Countries Willing to Do Their Part to Skip The Dirty Phase of Development.” This is entirely too vague. The thing about development is that it actually has to occur. It turns out that most Third World countries are not entirely ready to graduate directly from subsistence economics to full-scale service economies, and that their best shot at national growth lies in open markets and comparative advantage in developing more rudimentary products. We could prevent carbon emissions from such countries if we refused to buy from them, but we’d also have to pay higher. No checks that we cut will be sufficient to make their economies competitive in the absence of actual competitive businesses that often require carbon emissions.
“For Some Reason, Too Often In Washington, American Leadership Is Defined By Whether Or Not We’re Sending Troops Somewhere.” Nobody has ever defined American leadership in this fashion. We didn’t define American leadership under Reagan as sending troops abroad. We defined it as taking sometimes unpopular stances in the face of great risk in order to strengthen the country. But for Obama, American leadership is always about us signing the checks for someone else’s priorities, or about undermining America’s role in the world. Obama cited as evidence of his leadership “making sure that Iran didn’t get a nuclear weapon.” Iran loves that type of leadership. As Obama said, “We’ve got to have partners, and that’s the kind of leadership that we should aspire to.” That’s not leadership. That’s a tactic, not a value system.
“I Think People Should Be Confident That We’ll Meet Our Commitments On [Climate Change].” Obama said that Republicans would keep his commitments on climate change – commitments he wants to make without any Congressional support in non-treaty fashion. Yeah, right.
There was plenty more idiocy where all of this came from, but then again, the President of the United States is a font for such idiocy. Then again, it’s not truly idiocy: it’s principled opposition to American values ranging from free market economics to foreign policy strength. And his words have consequences.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News, Editor-in-Chief of DailyWire.com, and The New York Times bestselling author, most recently, of the book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.