Good morning. In his Oval Office address last night, President Obama marked an unsettling shift in the violence of our time. It was lots of great charts showing countries highlighted across the globe, with some groups having pledged allegiance to ISIS and others leaning towards it’. Rubio said on Fox News after the speech. ‘Instead, we will prevail by being strong and smart, resilient and relentless’. The U.S. has increased its bombing of Islamic State oil infrastructure and will continue to train and equip moderate rebels in Iraq and Syria. “Let’s not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear”.
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SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: President Obama had kept a relatively low profile in the days immediately following the San Bernardino shooting.
Americans largely forecast that the Islamic State will launch terror attacks in the United States in the near future.
To that end, Obama did not announce any new measures on Sunday. “Our rights aren’t the problem, our unwillingness to act to defeat extremists is the problem”. “It sounds to me that the President is more interested in protecting the reputation of Islam, than he is in protecting the American people”, said a critical Mike Huckabee, reports CNN. This is not just the next president’s problem.
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, expressed support for the president’s push to revamp a program that allows foreigners from friendly nations to visit the US without a visa.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, who is campaigning in a long-shot bid to be president, is the only Republican candidate who has come up with a specific number of USA troops on the ground to fight ISIS – 20,000.
“Since the attacks in Paris, we’ve surged merged intelligence sharing with our European allies”. “We are constantly evaluating our strategy to determine when additional steps are necessary to get the job done”. He acknowledged a pattern of attacks against the United States. At least the president was saying he did not want to wage war by putting troops on the ground in Syria. A bill to do the former has languished on Capitol Hill, and a bill to do the latter was defeated in the Senate last week.
HORSLEY: Obama warned terrorist plots have evolved over the years from complex and spectacular 9/11-style attacks to simpler but still deadly assaults like the ones in Paris and San Bernardino. ‘The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it’. But the string of recent attacks claimed by the terrorist group – including the downing of a Russian airliner over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula – have alarmed the public and become a leading issue on the 2016 campaign trail. “One must wonder who has contained who”, said Republican Ben Carson in his statement, according to CNN.
Comments on Obama’s speech by Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley are awaited.
“They’re on that list by mistake because they share a name with someone else, and the notion that a radical jihadist who is on the no-fly list is going to walk into a local gun shop to purchase a gun is absurd”, Rubio said. We have to do everything we can with our friends and partners around the world. “I think that’s what we’ll hear from the president, an intensification of the existing strategy. That would make things worse”. Jeb Bush called the president “weak” and his approach “business as usual”.
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“We can not turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam”. That’s what groups like ISIL are hoping for.
