Imagine! When you signal you have no intention of really doing any kind of heavy military retaliation against the march of the Caliphate, the Caliphate becomes emboldened. But no worries, the Administration is working to “authenticate” the video (one of Foley’s friends has already done so, but hey, if they can stretch this out long enough, Obama can finish his vacation, and, you know, priorities), and once they do, they’ll offer a firm verbal rebuke — just before they blame Bush.

Hot Air:

“ISIS had recently threatened to kill U.S. journalist James Foley to avenge airstrikes the United States has conducted in Iraq, a senior U.S. official told ABC News,” ABC reporters Arlette Saenz and White House correspondent Jonathan Karl reported on Wednesday.

The White House had been aware of the threat prior to the release of a video Tuesday night that appears to show the beheading of Foley and warns that militants will carry out a similar act against U.S. journalist Steven Sotloff, who went missing in August.

President Obama was briefed on the video aboard Air Force One Tuesday night as he returned to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, from Washington to resume his August vacation. The White House said the intelligence community is working to authenticate the gruesome video that allegedly shows Foley’s beheading.

Combined with the unconfirmed revelation that Foley’s killer, an ISIS militant with a pronounced British accent, may have been a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, this is shaping up to be a particularly bad news cycle for the White House.

[…]

[…] the revelation that the White House was aware of the threats to Foley’s life and was unable to provide for his safety will prompt administration critics to sharpen their attacks on Obama’s approach to the crisis in the Middle East. In the wake of what may have been a preventable atrocity, some of that criticism will be quite valid.

Of for Chrissakes, what the hell has happened to us? Whether the actual beheading of a photojournalist was preventable or not — good thing we got Bergdahl back, though! SCORE! — the bottom line is this: Obama is, by inaction, the intentional and preemptive removal of force from the table, and a consistent show of allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood, helping to forge a new Hell in the Middle East, where slaughter is now the norm, and Obama’s response is to pass the buck and tee it up on the Vineyard.

Let’s stop being pretend journalists hewing to ostentatious and strained feints toward objectivity. Obama has greatly weakened the US at home and abroad, and the fact is, this was his plan: fundamental transformation.

The Marxist ideologue wanted to “level the world’s playing field”; he’s always felt the US got rich off the backs of others, and that as a colonialist, capitalist exploiter, it deserved some comeuppance. Opening the borders, turning the middle east over to the Islamists while kneecapping the Israelis, the Kurds, and the eastern Europeans who’d broken from the hell of communism with the help of Obama’s school-age bete noire, Ronald Reagan — in combination with opening the borders to change the nature of citizenship and create an electoral tipping point toward takers who will always vote for more corrupt government so long as they get their freebies, and rekindling racial and identity animus — well, this is who he was, is, and always will be.

Some of us saw that. Others decided it was more important to pick a not-previously used color from the crayon box and take our chances, in the process, washing away “our national guilt” — which I daresay doesn’t belong the vast majority of us anymore than does winning the revolutionary war.

I’m repulsed by all that’s going on. I barely recognize this country anymore. And worse, I barely recognize a good portion of its citizenry, who have been so programmed to follow PC dictates and are so suckled on the idea they “deserve” unearned “esteem,” creating a public discourse that’s filled with boisterous ignorance, that some days I just want to go tend to my garden and tune everything else out.