President Barack Obama, United States

Source: This piece was originally posted at The New Democrat: News Receiver: President Obama’s Oval Office Speech on Syria

I watched President Obama’s speech on CNN and then saw the so-called experts talk about it. And one of them was Michael Weiss whose written a book about ISIS and is very familiar with that cult of death. I don’t think the President’s speech was as bad as Mr. Weiss said it was and I don’t think the President is ignoring the treat of ISIS, or trying to give a much prettier picture of the situation than what is actually going on. But I do agree with him on one thing that the speech did fall flat. It was basically more of the same talking about what is currently going on in Syria and steps that the President’s administration has taken against terrorism since he took office.

Which was not the task of his speech tonight. Tonight’s speech should have not have been a status report. But instead, “this is the threat that we’re facing and this is what we’re doing to address it.” As well as laying out what additional steps that need to be taken. And I agree that tightening gun control laws will help reduce gun violence in America, but will do almost nothing if anything at all to deal with ISIS in the Middle East and Europe. But would defeat ISIS and Syria, Iraq and wherever else they are stationed in the world.

And we’re going to need an international coalition to do this. President Obama, didn’t even mention that now Britain, Germany and France, as well as Turkey and Iraq, are all onboard to taking on ISIS in the Middle East. He didn’t call on Saudi Arabia and Jordan to do more n defeating ISIS. It was instead really just a status report about what his administration has already done and what they’ll continue to do. I think this speech is memorable only on what he didn’t say and what the President left out. Instead of hearing, “this is what we’re doing right now. These are the challenges and this is what we need to do in the future to go along with what we are already doing.” Didn’t hear that from President Obama, which is why this speech was flat and could have been better.