San Bernadino

    The shootings in San Bernadino produced intense media coverage followed by a flood of comments and opinions from all corners of the political spectrum.

    As expected, we got knee-jerk reactions from the anti-gun lobby, with President Obama leading the pack. The screams for more gun control ignored the fact that California has the strictest gun laws in the nation. No matter how loud the screams, no gun-control laws would have prevented the carnage.

    Then there were those, like the president, who would have preferred the killings to be seen as an act of workplace violence; the word terrorism did not fit their political agenda. Even when the FBI stated that this had indeed been an act of terrorism, no one on the left qualified it as Islamic terrorism, in spite of the evidence that one of the shooters had pledged her allegiance to ISIS before spaying bullets into a room full of innocent people. And now we have growing evidence of an overseas Islamic banking and training connection as well.

    In his speech to the nation on Sunday evening, the president did not admit to discounting intelligence reports on the growing threat of Islamic terrorism, nor did he tell us he was revising his strategy for fighting the enemy. On the contrary, he offered nothing new: no more boots on the ground, no arming the Kurds, no change in the ineffective air war's rules of engagement. Let's remember that this president recently said revealingly, “I'm not interested in posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning.”

    The president, however, did spend an inordinate amount of time warning us not to discriminate against Muslims, echoing Attorney General Loretta Lynch's earlier anti-constitutional vow to prosecute anyone guilty of anti-Muslim speech.

    I'm glad at least that he didn't remind us that the greatest threat facing the world today is climate change.