Pres. Obama's Speech Not Particularly Reassuring

Captions: 1. Presidential candidate and former Democratic Gov. of Maryland Martin O’Malley. 2. On left, Phil Hemingway, Iowa City Community School District Board Director; on right, presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders.

“No-drama” Obama’s speech about terrorism Sunday night did nothing to reassure me. He had nothing new to say, which means he thought he was giving Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” speech. Pres. Obama can’t give that speech because he’s not the mover and shaker that FDR was. He also can’t emotionally connect with masses of fearful and discouraged citizens the way FDR could because he doesn’t inspire the same kind of faith in his ability to change the status quo. He’s been aloof, secretive, and cold too long.

To be fair, he can’t change the status quo in large part because he has strong and effective opponents in the Republican Congressmen who, incredibly, are willing to vote down a bill proposing that we stop people on the no-fly terrorist watch list from purchasing guns. Irrational, determined opposition like that makes rational, bipartisan governance very difficult.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in her interview on ABC’s “This Week” on December 6, 2015, indicated that she has firm, clear ideas on what she would do about the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. She differs from the president in that she would have a no-fly zone over Syria.

I don’t think she would be afraid to enforce the no-fly zone with the Russians. She agrees with the president in that she would not send ground troops into Syria or Iraq except for the special forces Obama is sending in now to gather intelligence, direct bombs, and conduct raids to kill ISIS fighters and rescue hostages. However, she would do more to support the Peshmerga, or the Kurds, the only effective fighting force against ISIS other than U.S. special forces, which have been fighting ISIS far longer than Pres. Obama has been willing to admit, according to the Guardian per the Peshmerga, who have seen U.S. snipers in battle and complimented their skill set.

The Obama administration insists that the Kurds get their weaponry and financial support through the Shia government in Baghdad, which responds to non-Shia forces with glacial slowness or not at all. Most of the weaponry the Kurds acquire are from dead ISIS fighters.

The Shia have been worthless in fighting ISIS, fleeing from danger so quickly that they leave American Humvees and weaponry behind for ISIS to pick up and add to their arsenal, so why do Kurdish weapon requests have to go through the sectarian Shia government, the toothless tiger that fired competent Sunni generals and replaced them with incompetent Shia generals in Baghdad?

Antagonizing the Sunnis has certainly added to the ranks of ISIS. Sunni resentment began when American Ambassador to Iraq L. Paul Bremer III fired all of the Baathists in Iraqi government (pp. 73, 158-61, 162-64, 165) after the American invasion of Iraq, including the Iraqi army and government civil servants. Bremer left a lot of Sunnis unemployed, resentful, and heavily armed. Did Bremer ask anyone before doing so? No, he did not. It was a disastrous decision.

One American raid on ISIS already happened. U.S. special forces rescued a number of hostages from ISIS within an hour of their planned execution. Unfortunately, U.S. Sgt. Joshua Wheeler died in the raid.

Hillary is willing to be tough with recalcitrant “allies.” When a Pakistani journalist complained to her that the U.S. was ”humiliating” Pakistan when she was Secretary of State, she said, “You don’t have to take our money. We’re not forcing our aid upon you.”

On the economy, I trust former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders more to stand up to Wall Street. Since 1989, most of Hillary’s campaign funds have come from Wall Street, with Citigroup and Goldman Sachs leading the top donors. It’s too bad we can’t have Hillary managing international affairs, since Americans currently trust her more than they trust Republicans to handle terrorism, with Sanders or O’Malley managing the economy. That’s unlikely, given each candidate’s current standing in the polls. As of today, Dec. 7, 2015, Hillary seems likely to be president and will choose her cabinet.

The Republicans are the hysterical opposites of no-drama Obama. They’re heavily engaged in whipping up xenophobic hysteria and fear. Donald Trump, still leading the next most popular Republican candidate, Ted Cruz, by 20 points (36% to 16%), is full of bluster and promise, but can’t flesh out a single policy, not even a little bit. He’s sometimes enjoyable as performance art, but I seriously doubt that he is capable of formulating sensible policy. I definitely wouldn’t want him to have access to nuclear weapons.

Then there are the Republican candidates like Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, as well as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who remind me of “The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State,” an excellent book by Frances Fox Piven that we were required to read in the University of Iowa School of Social Work graduate program. Former Pres. Ronald Reagan’s turning on the poor and blaming the victims of poverty, calling ketchup a “vegetable” in terms of nutrition for the poor and the like, was a theme of that book.

Republican Gov. Terry Branstad’s (IA) privatization of Medicaid by putting a federal program in the hands of four for-profit health care agencies, at least one of which (WellCare) has questionable ethics and practices is more of the same kind of mean-spirited transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich that “The Mean Season” discusses at length. How can for-profit managers of Medicaid make money except by cutting medical services to the poor? According to Gail Murphy, who wrote a letter to the editor published in the Des Moines Register 12/6/15, one of her family members in Dubuque was assigned to Amerigroup, one of the four managed care agencies managing Medicaid under the privatization plan adopted by Gov. Branstad. Amerigroup Iowa doesn’t even have a physician, a physician’s assistant, or a nurse practitioner among their staff in Dubuque. What is her relative supposed to do if she needs a prescription?