Death Of A Talking Point: Obama Flacks Give Up Defending His ‘Random Attacks’ Gaffe

Alex Wong/AFP
Alex Wong/AFP

Barack Obama, in what was supposed to be the friendliest softball interview ever given to an object of worship by his devoted followers, specifically the hilariously inaccurate left-wing “explanatory journalism” website Vox:

Look, the point is this: my first job is to protect the American people. It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris. We devote enormous resources to that, and it is right and appropriate for us to be vigilant and aggressive in trying to deal with that — the same way a big city mayor’s got to cut the crime rate down if he wants that city to thrive. But we also have to attend to a lot of other issues, and we’ve got to make sure we’re right-sizing our approach so that what we do isn’t counterproductive. I would argue that our invasion of Iraq was counterproductive to the goal of keeping our country safe.

This is what happens when a bored politician repeats his own poorly-thought-out talking points too often. Obama followed his obsession with describing Islamist violence as completely and totally non-Islamic – unlike, say, the completely and totally Christian Crusades and Inquisition, which he thinks every churchgoer around the world is still supposed to feel ashamed of – all the way down the rabbit hole, and ended up claiming that the deliberate targeting and killing of Jews by an Islamist terrorist was merely a bit of random violence against “folks” of no particular description.

For extra added fun, consider that this was all part of Obama’s response to a question about whether the media was over-hyping trivial concerns, such as Islamist terrorism, when they should be spending more time persuading Americans to panic over the real threats, such as global warming.

If he honestly believed what he was saying (spoiler: he didn’t), Barack Obama would be virtually the last person on Earth who doubted that the kosher deli shooting in Paris was a calculated anti-Semitic attack. The president of France, Francois Hollande, went out of his way to describe it as such. Perhaps more to the point, the killer himself did the same. Amedy Coulibaly, the decidedly non-random murderer of four “folks” at that deli, went to the trouble of filming a seven-minute martyrdom video before going on his rampage, parking himself in front of a black Islamist flag with a gun at his side and rambling on about the duty of Western Muslims to conduct terror attacks against their infidel neighbors, throwing in some verses from the Koran superimposed on images of himself doing push-ups to train for the jihad. He also reportedly spoke with a French journalist during his siege of the deli and explicitly stated his desire to target Jews, who he reasonably suspected were likely to be found shopping in a kosher delicatessen.

The President of the United States knows all this, assuming he gave enough of a damn to pay attention during his security briefings, but he’s so determined to insulate Islam from terrorism that he lazily conjured an outrageous talking point about random violence that his munchkins proceeded to spend a day vigorously defending… until suddenly, with the crisp abruptness of a light switch being flipped, they didn’t.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest took a stab at explaining how “the adverb that the President chose was used to indicate that the individuals who were killed in that terrible tragic incident were killed, not because of who they were, but because of where they randomly happened to be.” In other words – I am not making this up – when Obama said Coulibaly “randomly shot a bunch of folks,” what he meant was that the jihadi killer didn’t know their names.

Here, see for yourself, courtesy of the Washington Free Beaconwhich loaded all seven minutes of this agonizing experience onto YouTube:

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki took a different tack for defending her boss’ idiocy, floating the idea that since the people in that kosher deli weren’t “all victims of one background or nationality,” then there just had to be a little randomness to Coulibaly’s actions. This exchange wasn’t nearly as much dimwitted fun as Josh Earnest’s tap dance, because Psaki spent most of her time saying that she didn’t have anything to say. “I don’t think we’re going to speak on behalf of French authorities and what they believe was the situation there,” she whined, even though the issue was Barack Obama’s words, not the beliefs of French authorities – which, as previously noted, run strongly counter to Obama’s idea of aimless mayhem against victims of no particular background or nationality.

And then, suddenly, Random-gate was over, as the Obamanoids fired op their trusty Memory Hole and ordered the entire world to forget the words that tumbled out of the Presidents mouth:

Who are you going to believe, Jen Psaki or your lying eyes? Your eyes are clearly the problem here, my fellow Americans. You insist on seeing things Barack Obama’s ideology requires you to ignore, such as the nature of the enemy that has declared war on Western civilization, and the identity of its preferred victims.

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