WHAT IS HE TALKING ABOUT NOW?

DATELINE: NoWhere’sville, September 3 –  President Obama is the most muddled in his messaging when he scrambles to be clear. Take his statement this morning that a coalition of nations must “degrade and destroy” ISIS by shrinking it into a “manageable problem.”

This declaration was made in response to heavy criticism from both parties over his admission last week regarding ISIS, “we don’t have a strategy, yet”.

It also was intended to staunch the political bleeding over the revelation yesterday that the President has received daily ISIS briefings for the past year. How long does strategy formulation take?

More urgently, Obama wanted to make a strong response to the beheading of a second American journalist, also reported yesterday.

Obama’s pronouncement today failed to achieve any of his objectives. Problems are not destroyed by being made manageable. They are destroyed by being demolished, leveled, crushed, devastated, obliterated, eradicated, exterminated. Destruction is annihilation.

Obama’s assertion that “we can continue to shrink ISIL’s sphere of influence, its effectiveness, its financing, its military capabilities to the point where it is a manageable problem” is a bureaucrat’s notion of how to deal with a deviation from the norm. It is not the way to destroy a brutally effective military operation.

It was also not the end of Obama’s statement. He concluded his remarks with, “And the question is going to be making sure we’ve got the right strategy but also making sure we’ve got the international will to do it.”

So, in conclusion, the President reminds us, yet again, that there still is no ISIS strategy. But, he does have at the ready his ever-handy security blanket of inaction – international cooperation. The insistence on working together is just another way of saying that we will sit on the sidelines and watch as ISIS continues its march.

Maybe the President was just jet-lagged today when he decided to step up to the microphone and be more clear. After all he is in Estonia, which is a long way from home. On the other hand, he seems to live, politically speaking, an even longer way from home.