Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

Emperor Nero has been reincarnated.

I don't actually know how to approach this blogpost.  I have a stream of consciousness that just wants to spew, so if this appears to be disjointed, it probably is.

Over the last year, I've commented on the rise of ISIS, its conversion into one of the most evil outfits the world's ever known and the administration's abject ineptitude for dealing with what it first termed the JV squad.  Recent events, however, have queered the equation ever more.

After the barbaric burning death by ISIS of the Jordanian fighter pilot and the shotgun murder of the Syrian soldier, ISIS reverted to beheadings but added to its scale, taking twenty-one Coptic Egyptians to the shores of the Mediterranean and decapitating them simultaneously.  I've seen the videos; each is as bad as the one that came before it and the one that came after it.  Today's news is that ISIS increased its burnings by killing forty-five Iraqis by fire.

I can't say I understand fully the strategy ISIS is employing, because so far it's gotten scant military reaction from the countries whose citizens are being slaughtered.  Is this a true manifestation of its religious fervor?  Is it a negotiating strategy run amok?  Is it trying to draw countries into an ambush? Is it trying to foment unrest in certain countries with peoples it believes are disaffected?  Is ISIS just crazy?

Whatever the psychological underpinnings, the administration's fetid response has been nothing short of underwhelming, if not downright scary in its reasoning.  The administration is hellbent on worsening the crisis by its well-intentioned but misguided approach to ISIS that begins with its very name.

Everyone in this country refers to it as ISIS -- the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.  Perhaps that's wrong, but it's what the country knows.  For reasons known only to itself -- because it refuses to explain this -- it refers to it as ISIL  -- the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.  I've heard arguments as to why Mr. Obama prefers ISIL over ISIS, and I don't know whether those arguments have any weight to them, but since the rest of the country is saying ISIS, why does he persist in using ISIL?

Yet, that's the least of the administration's problems.  Basically, the administration's policy is rudderless.  Days after asking for an extension of the War Powers Act (for three years, which despite criticism from some quarters, seems somewhat reasonable to me) the administration, with mounting evidence of the barbarity of ISIS, has spokespersons who spout such pablum that it's hard to believe this administration is the result of the American electorate and not some high school election for senior class officers.  Days after the beheadings of the Egyptian Christians, the State Department spokeswoman, an apparently educated woman but someone devoid of common sense whatsoever, announced that we wouldn't be able to defeat ISIS by killing all of them; we'd have to provide employment opportunities for them to arrest their spread.

Imagine, if you will, Neville Chamberlain heading Hitler off with the promise of employment.  Or Roosevelt telling Hirohito that the United States would provide the same for struggling Japanese. Then try to imagine World War II not happening.  The absurdity of those hypotheticals is about the same as the absurdity of our State Department issuing this method for stopping ISIS.

The President himself couldn't be outdone on the absurdity quotient.  He decided that the attack on the kosher deli in Paris was a random attack.  Again, using the analogy of World War II, Auschwitz and other concentration camps must have been random efforts to keep Jews and other persons declared to be undesirable localized for census purposes and bad things just happened to them while they were waiting to be counted.

Other nabobs put in front of the American public, like that smooth-talking liar Josh Earnest, suggest that climate change/global warming are greater threats to most Americans than is ISIS.  Again, going back to World War II, oil spills on our coasts were greater threats to most Americans than were the Nazis.  It is unbelievable how gullible the administration believes the American people to be.  How do these people sleep at night knowing that they are simply spewing rhetoric that is incongruous to what the American people perceive?

When the Egyptian Christians were killed, the administration referred to them as Egyptian citizens. This is beyond curious, because the only known Muslim who was killed in this assassinations were the Jordanian pilot and Peter Kassig, an American aid worker who used to be a Ranger.  Everyone else killed was either a Christian or a Jew.   The crucifixions, the burials alive of young children and other dastardly killings were done with religious overtones.  ISIS itself is the Islamic State, not the Non-Denominational State.  Yet the administration continues to play word games.

By far, this administration is redefining cognitive dissonance.  No matter what the evidence, this President and his willing minions refuse to publicly acknowledge the evil for what it is.  Instead, it tries to tiptoe through a minefield that everyone acknowledges exists, everyone realizes will result in more deaths but that everyone admits must be confronted.

Feckless.  That's the only word to describe the President and those willing to do his bidding.

(c) 2015 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles