Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), vice chairwoman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee – and so a Republican version of a foreign policy expert – Monday took to Newsmax TV to accuse President Barack Obama of living in fantasyland if he thinks Americans believe he isn’t putting troops on the ground to defeat ISIL.
“They know that if you’re going to do airstrikes you’ve got to have some boots on the ground, and if you’re going to have some boots on the ground, then you’re going to have to make a decision about American troops,” she said on “The Steve Malzberg Show.”
“They’re trying to say, well, in Iraq we don’t have boots on the ground. As of this week, we will have 1600 troops in Iraq.”
She further complained that the Obama administration can’t decide if it’s at war or not. “Bear in mind, this is pretty much the way they have operated since they went into office,” she said on
“Words matter, actions matter . . . You can’t just go say [we’ve] changed all the rules and well, now being at war is going to mean something different.
No, it does not, and they are absolutely living in fantasyland if they think the American people are buying this.
Of course, there ARE boots on the ground. There are Kurds, there are Iraqis, there are Syrians, and there are even Iranians.
Newsmax complains,
According to The New York Times, the White House says a number of Arab countries have now committed to joining the airstrikes against ISIS, also known as ISIL, but it has stopped short of naming them.
You mean he didn’t reveal the full extent of his plans? This is at the same time, mind you, that Newsmax has another headline that says “Obama tipped off ISIS with ‘gift’ speech” outlining his plans.
“The mistake was announcing too much of the strategy, and this was a free gift to [Islamic State leader Abu Bakr] al Baghdadi, to prepare and counter what has been revealed,” Hisham Alhashimi told CNN in a report aired on Monday.
Decide how you want it, conservatives. Do you want Obama to reveal his plans, or do you want to accuse him of revealing his plans? You cannot reasonably have it both ways, though we know you’ll try.
Maybe Newsmax didn’t listen to Blackburn, who said in this very interview, “Words matter, actions matter . . . You can’t just go say [we’ve] changed all the rules.”
Turns out that if you are a Republican, where Obama is concerned, words do NOT matter and you can change all the rules you want.
Surely by now the world should have come to realize that Obama has always thought two or three moves ahead. Well…ok, maybe not Republicans.
Finally, Blackburn pulled out the mythical and oft-debunked Obama apology tour:
Blackburn said the nation still remembers Obama’s 2009 “apology tour,” in which he traveled through Europe and the Middle East and “apologized for the sins of America” caused by his presidential predecessors.
Except – and here we go back to where words DO matter (Benghazi anyone?) – there was no 2009 apology tour, and as Jason Easley pointed out earlier this year, “When a Republican breaks out the old apology tour line, they are really fishing for an excuse.”
And the fact is, Republicans have had no ideas since Bush left office. All their thinking, if a visceral loathing for a black man can be called that, has gone into making a ruin out of the Obama presidency. Their excuse here then is that they have no idea themselves what to do about ISIL except to oppose everything Obama wants to do about ISIL.
So they trot out foreign policy “experts” like former NFL quarterback Terry Bradshaw, former reality show star Phil Robertson, and energy and commerce committee member Marsha Blackburn to tell America that Obama and Clinton and now Kerry, are wrong on foreign policy.
Not only have they blown the threat of ISIL out of all proportion as a distraction of their own, but they criticize Obama now in order to distract us from the fact that THEIR president created ISIL and that they have nary an idea themselves about what to do about it now.
Unfortunately, you cannot run a country on negation of policy. You have to actually have a policy or two of your own, and going into the 2014 midterms and the 2016 presidential elections, that’s one thing the Republicans absolutely do not have. Don’t let them distract you from that little fact.
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