It is unclear to me why Barack Obama bothered giving his speech last night on the latest radical Muslim terrorist attack Wednesday. There was nothing new and, considering how our immigration system let in a terrorist from Pakistan to kill 14 Americans, nothing reassuring for those who have figured out that Obama is an empty suit.

The best thing about the speech was what wasn’t in it — namely, from dire online predictions gun control via executive order. Of course, California already has banned “assault weapons,” and open-carry, requires background checks and waiting period for all firearms purposes, and limits magazine sizes. All that did was give the terrorists more gun laws to violate. (Beyond, that is, the fact that killing 14 people, whether by gun, pipe bomb or any other method has been illegal since laws were created.)

What also wasn’t in Obama’s speech, however, was the acknowledgement of radical Islam as a worldwide security threat. The Wall Street Journal posted this Sunday before the speech, and nothing Obama said contradicted it:

President Obama entered the White House believing that the “war on terror” was a misguided overreaction driven by political fear, and his government even stopped using the term. Seven years later Mr. Obama is presiding over a global jihadist revival that now threatens the American homeland more than at any time since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

That’s the distressing lesson of the recent spate of terror attacks that this week arrived at a center for the disabled in San Bernardino, California. FBI Director James Comey said Friday that his agency is now investigating Wednesday’s massacre of 14 people as an act of terrorism and that the two Muslim killers showed “indications of radicalization.”

Mr. Comey added that while there is no evidence so far that the killers were part of a larger terror cell or plot, there are some indications of potential foreign terror “inspiration.” The latter would have to mean Islamic State or al Qaeda, perhaps through the Internet.

The FBI director said more than once that the investigation is in the early stages, but he deserves support for speaking frankly about the evidence and dangers. Every instinct of this Administration, starting with the President, has been to minimize the terror risk on U.S. soil—perhaps because it contradicts Mr. Obama’s political belief that all we have to fear is fear of terrorism itself.

The President made this explicit in his May 23, 2013 speech at National Defense University in which he said Americans should move past the country’s post-9/11 war footing and compared the Islamist terror threat to “many forms of violent extremism in our history.” Few speeches in presidential history have been repudiated so quickly by events.

San Bernardino is an example of the domestic terror nightmare that Mr. Comey has been warning against as he’s told Congress about the thousands of Americans who are now Islamic State sympathizers. That neither Pakistani-American Syed Farook, born in Illinois, nor Tashfeen Malik, his wife by way of Saudi Arabia, was on the FBI’s watch list is all the more worrisome. Their quiet stockpiling of guns, ammo and bomb-making material even as they led seemingly average lives shows that the U.S. may have a larger problem of homegrown terrorism than the government has wanted to admit.

Americans have tended to think they are safer than Europeans and their Muslim immigrant enclaves of Saint-Denis, Molenbeek and Birmingham. But by the account of his friends and even his family, Farook gave no hint of radical conversion until he mowed down the same colleagues who had thrown his wife a baby shower. He shows that jihad is possible even among native-born Americans who give every sign of abiding by U.S. norms.

CNN interviewed Michael Weiss, co-author of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, and, Hot Air reports:

Barack Obama’s speech on ISIS and gun control from the Oval Office didn’t get a very good reception on CNN, especially not from The Daily Beast’s Michael Weiss. When asked about his prediction of ISIS’ reaction to the speech, Weiss started off by saying that they would “laugh, frankly.” That started a nearly three-minute analysis that excoriated Obama for self-indulgence and fantastical thinking:

Among the many salient points made by Weiss was that Obama still seems convinced by earlier cooked intel analyses that his strategy against ISIS has been effective. Even with a new report on his desk commissioned by the White House itself that strips away that fantasy, Obama tried to sell the idea that his 15-month-long strategy has succeeded in some measure. As Weiss briefly references in the clip above, The Daily Beast’s Kimberly Dozier reports that the new analysis makes it clear that it hasn’t succeeded at all in even slowing down ISIS’ expansion:

A new U.S. intelligence report on ISIS, commissioned by the White House, predicts that the self-proclaimed Islamic State will spread worldwide and grow in numbers, unless it suffers a significant loss of territory on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria, U.S. officials told The Daily Beast.

The report stands in stark contrast to earlier White House assurances that ISIS had been “contained” in Iraq and Syria. And it is already spurring changes in how the U.S. grapples with ISIS, these officials said.

It’s also a tacit admission that coalition efforts so far—dropping thousands of bombs and deploying 3,500 U.S. troops as well as other coalition trainers—have been outpaced by ISIS’s ability to expand and attract new followers, even as the yearlong coalition air campaign has helped local forces drive ISIS out of parts of Iraq and Syria.

One can understand why Weiss predicts hearty peals of laughter from Raqqa after this speech. Even with this report on Obama’s desk, the President broadcast a rare Oval Office speech outlining his strategy to “destroy ISIL,” which was nothing more than a regurgitation of his original strategy to “degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL” …

In other words, we’ll conduct some bombing raids along with a handful of allies, send in commandos to train native forces that never seem to materialize — like the 60 or so fighters we spent $500 million to train — and we’ll demand that Bashar Assad will step down. That’s exactly the same strategy we’ve been using since Obama’s offhand admission in August 2014 that we had no strategy against ISIS forced him to articulate one a month later.

This is what Weiss means when he rebukes Obama for “self-congratulating and cheerleading.” Obama isn’t serious about “destroy[ing] ISIL”; he’s serious about making us think he’s serious about it. What Obama does take seriously, however, is gun control, and his belief that the biggest threat here in the US is the risk of offending Muslims, the latter of which Obama spent almost as much time discussing as his military strategy against ISIS.

Obama talked about preventing those on the no-fly list from being able to own guns. Independent of the fact that Wednesday’s murderers were not on the no-fly list, consider not merely the basic incompetence of the federal government (the Defense Department classifies Roman Catholics and evangelicals as extremists, while 72 Department of Homeland Security employees are on the federal terrorist watch list), but also the lack of due process involved in getting on, or off, the no-fly list. It took U.S. Rep. Justin Amash (R–Michigan) to point that out:

Putting someone on a no-fly list without due process and infringing on someone’s right to keep and bear arms without due process are both wrong. The latter is a Second Amendment violation, and both are Fifth Amendment violations.

Remember when Democrats believed in civil liberties? That apparently was so 20th century. And does any reader believe the feds under Obama wouldn’t have a selective definition of “terrorist” (for instance, gun owners and known conservatives)?

Former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown (R–Massachusetts):

Ben Franklin said that death and taxes were the two certainties of life. A third certainty in our country used to be strong leadership from the individual in the Oval Office. Abraham Lincoln, F.D.R, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and many others have used their position as our commander in chief to exude America’s strength on the world stage and promote our nation’s unique exceptionalism.

However, on several recent big issues, President Obama has not taken the challenging, but necessary step up to the plate to demonstrate why America needs to lead in the world. His actions instead seem to suggest that we can lead from behind, which goes against everything that our country has stood for in the past.

The best example of this is President Obama’s utter failure to address the danger that ISIS presents to the United States. Their sickening attacks in Paris are still fresh in our mind, but it is important to note that just hours before the terrorists attacked the city, President Obama said that ISIS was “contained” and “on the run.”

Following the attacks, instead of stepping forward and adopting an aggressive strategy to take the fight to ISIS, the president deferred and continued to give off the impression that our current strategy to combat radical Islamic terrorism is working. His response showed that he is either delusional to the real threat ISIS presents our nation or he is simply incapable of providing authentic leadership for the sake of the country and the globe.

Then last week, following the devastating tragedy in San Bernardino, President Obama immediately leapt to blame gun laws and Republicans, when in fact the attacks appear to have been perpetrated by ISIS sympathizers. The fact that the President would try to score political points instead of committing to once-and-for-all going after America’s greatest threat is emblematic of his entire presidency, putting politics and party before country and leadership.

While it seems President Obama has already checked out on his White House responsibilities and is looking forward to writing his memoirs and building his library, the absence of American leadership has now become a defining issue of the 2016 presidential election. …

For the past seven years, we have seen what it looks like when America doesn’t take charge, but instead sits in the backseat as a global observer. As a result, our country is less safe, less secure, and people have a rational fear of another heinous act of terrorism coming to our shores.