President Obama shows “willful blindness” to the threat of Islamic extremism, Sen. John Cornyn tells Newsmax.
During an exclusive Newsmax interview, the Texas Republican cites Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent refusal in a Senate hearing to say that radical Islam played a role in recent terrorist incidents.
Holder was “almost defiant in acknowledging that that actually exists, and we see him persisting in really wrong-headed decisions like trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court in Manhattan,” says Cornyn, a member of the Judiciary Committee.
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“I think you see a triumph of ideology over a rational examination of the facts, as exemplified by this man-caused disaster term the secretary of Homeland Security came up with,” Cornyn says. “I think it is sort of a willful blindness to the threat of Islamic extremism.”
Cornyn notes that Holder still hasn’t taken off the table the possibility of trying the architect of the 9/11 attack in Manhattan. At the same time, Holder wants to “subject the American people to these very dangerous folks” by closing the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, and he insists on giving Miranda rights to terrorist suspects such as the Christmas Day bomber.
Holder and the administration are “confusing the job of law enforcement and investigating and punishing criminal acts after they happen and the very different and important role of gaining intelligence and preventing terrorist attacks from occurring in the first place,” Cornyn says. “They seem to only understand about half of that equation.”
The fact that Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano would say that they oppose the new immigration law in Arizona while admitting they have not read the law shows the administration does not do its homework, Cornyn says.
As noted in the Newsmax story,
Media Covering Up for Obama, if President Bush’s appointees had made such a blunder, the press would have pursued the story as aggressively as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein pursued the Watergate scandal.
“I mean we’re all entitled to our opinions, right, but we’re not entitled to our own set of facts, and here clearly they were engaged more in political spin than they were in actually understanding what the law said and, in fact, the words on the page that refuted their characterization of what the Arizona law was all about,” Cornyn observes.
Obama’s economic and healthcare policies demonstrate the same adherence to ideology over practical reality, Cornyn says.
“What we have seen is more of a commitment to an ideology rather than a commitment to competence or actually fixing the problems that have radiated from the failed stimulus bill,” Cornyn tells Newsmax.
The administration insists that the stimulus bill is working “even though it failed their own test at keeping employment under 8 percent.” In the case of the healthcare bill, the administration “simply defied the wishes of the American people and forced it through Congress, using this extraordinary budget reconciliation process.” Then it had “the audacity — let me put it that way — to say you will come to love it, and I read now they are getting ready to spend $50 million trying to sell it because the American people don’t want it,” Cornyn says.
In fact, “The more they [Americans] found out about it, the more they find out that it’s just “more runaway spending and reckless accumulation of debt.”
The private sector created only 41,000 new jobs in May because of the “general uneasiness within the business community about what the future holds,” Cornyn says, citing factors such as efforts to regulate greenhouse gases and the Internet.
The administration is good at creating government jobs but not jobs in the private sector, Cornyn notes.
Regarding the disappointing jobs report, he says, “I think a lot of it is not just the policies but just the political uncertainty of what comes next. If you are a small business man or business woman, you would be, I think, crazy to create new jobs or start a new business, not really knowing what sort of financial and regulatory burdens would be imposed on you.”
On the foreign front, Cornyn sees Obama’s response to the Turkish flotilla incident involving Israel as an example of a tilt against America’s friends.
“It’s pretty clear to me that the flotilla was a premeditated provocation,” Cornyn says. “Israel has every right to examine those shipments to make sure that contraband and weapons are not smuggled into Gaza and used by Hamas to kill innocent Israelis.”
Obama is “very passive against our enemies, which only emboldens them,” Cornyn says. With friends, he is “if not hostile, at least neutral,” tending to treat enemies “in some respects, better than our friends and allies.”
Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com. View his previous reports and get his dispatches sent to you free via e-mail: Go here now.
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