The future of an illusion

As ABC and other news outlets had it, the White House billed President Obama’s speech at the National Defense University on the status of our efforts to thwart agitated acolytes of a certain belief system as “The Future of Our Fight Against Terrorism” (for that lapse into Bushspeak regarding “Terrorism,” read “Violent Extremists”). The White House text of the speech is posted here without a title.

I thought the speech might more aptly have borrowed its title from Freud’s take on religion: “The Future of an Illusion” would be more like it. Paul ably dissected the speech and collected astute commentary on it in “Obama signals retreat in the war against terrorism.”

The quality of the thought on display was (John) Lennonist. The small print on the sign below doesn’t quite come into focus. The sign reads “WAR IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT.”

Obama declared: “This war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.” In our efforts against agitated acolytes of a certain belief system, Obama intimated that we have won, but he didn’t exactly say so, and the evidence to the contrary is not insubstantial.

In the groves of the utopian left, “WAR IS OVER!” is something like timeless wisdom. Recall Jimmy Carter’s Notre Dame commencement speech of May 1977. Carter announced that we had overcome our inordinate fear of Communism. One could only groan in disbelief. Obama’s analysis is approximately as sapient as Carter’s. Speaking of drones, the President of the United States drones on in Year 5 of the Age of Obama about closing Gitmo. Assessing Obama’s speech, Michael Ledeen speaks for me: “He’s actually getting worse.”

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