King Barack's War Against America (GOP)

“IDEOLOGY AS COMFY SLIPPERS.” In his latest G-File, Jonah Goldberg writes, “After 9/11, big swaths of the Left immediately wanted to talk about censorship and the threat to Americans’ First Amendment rights…It is a natural human tendency to want to just go and play with your toys when the world is crashing down around you. The campus Huns pillaging higher education these days only want to talk about “white privilege” — unimpeded by debate, facts, reality, or anything smacking of an opposing point of view — because it is psychologically comfortable and politically empowering. Contemplating that your problems don’t have all that much to do with systemic bigotry is discomfiting. So they want safe spaces to play with their conceptual Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys:”

And that is why, as I argue in my column today, Barack Obama is so eager to respond to the Paris attacks with a rhetorical fusillade against Republican bigotry. It is a ploy as brilliant as it is disgustingly cynical. Obama is a co-author of this refugee crisis. As Walter Russell Mead writes, “No one, other than the Butcher Assad and the unspeakable al-Baghdadi, is as responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria as is President Obama.” Somewhere deep inside Obama’s supposedly Niebuhrian conscience even he must suspect there is some truth to this. And even if his denial is total, he must understand that a great many historians will side with Mead in this appraisal.
Rather than face this unthinkable truth, Obama seeks to change the story line so that he is the noble and besieged martyr fighting the forces of reaction at home, rather than the hapless and bumbling nutty professor who let the world go to Hell on his watch. “Sanctimony over refugees is Obama’s way of restoring his own moral superiority over people who’ve been complaining for years, entirely correctly, that his Syria policy is FUBAR and has contributed to the disaster,” as Allahpundit writes.

Read the whole thing.

The notion of ideology as a safe space during a time of both real and ideological crisis also helps to explain how the left’s waging “the moral equivalent of war” on vaporous “climate change” has run on such a long parallel track to Islamic terrorism since shortly after 9/11. And why Obama has said that “there’s no greater threat to our planet than climate change” so many times while simultaneously engaging in what Jonah correctly dubs his “phony war on the Islamic State [that] was always more about seeming to do something while running out the clock until his successor inherits his mess.”