White House: Dear Leader expresses his grief by golfing, or something
The point of this discussion about "optics" is not to establish that Obama feels bad about the savage murder of James Foley by ISIS, although it's telling that so many of his defenders seem to think it's necessary for him to demonstrate basic human responses, and feel he deserves applause for getting over that threshold. He's the President of the United States, and even more than most politicians, he's all about emotional manipulation and communication through gestures. He's a master of gesture liberalism, the belief that polices are an expression of morality, and only the announcement of a billion-dollar program to combat something proves that you really care about it. He also leans heavily on the other major argument of gesture liberalism, which is that the utter failure of a policy doesn't matter, as long as it was implemented with good intentions by The Right People.
And the policy of this Administration is to treat Foley's murder as a criminal offense, with the ISIS head-choppers as perps, not military enemies. Hapless State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf (mocked with brio over at Twitchy) was dispatched to insist that the Islamic State is not at war with America, no matter how often they declare war on us, and they're not Muslims, no matter how loudly they assert themselves as masters of Islam and no matter that thousands of Muslims from around the world are answering their call to battle...Also read:
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