Obama Meets With Victims' Families

President Obama has met with the survivors and families of those killed in the recent shooting. He said, after the meeting, "I've got very strong feelings about this because when you talk to the families you are reminded this could be your child ... or your mom or your dad or your relative or your friend."

But these weren't families affected by the San Bernardino martyrdom operation on December 2. These were the families of the survivors of the Umpqua Community College shooting, two months ago.

Obama has met with the families of the survivors of Sandy Hook and Aurora, and delivered the eulogy for the victims in Charleston, S.C. He lobbed a phone call to Sandra Fluke. What urgent business is keeping him away?

The President is a very busy man, certainly. Today's schedule consists of the daily briefing at ten, a meeting with Secretary of Defense Ash Carter at three, and a DNC Roundtable at the Jefferson Hotel at 4:40.

I think the daily briefing item is boilerplate. It's well known that Obama routinely skips his daily briefings. Maybe that's by design. Maybe he believes that allows him to claim that the first time he heard about this crisis or that scandal was when he read it in the papers.

Maybe it is a way to deflect blame for mismanagement, such as laying responsibility for the rise of Islamic State at the feet of his Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper.

"I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria," Obama said.

Which is total bullshit. Obama only wants happy talk from his intelligence assets. Intelligence reports are being changed by CENTCOM to "adhere to the administration’s public line that the U.S. is winning the battle against ISIS and al Nusra."

That three-o'clock meeting with SECDEF Carter must be a situational update on the implementation of the U.S. military's newest battlefield asset. This new asset will be heavily scrutinized, as it will be replacing field combat units in all forward situations. The SECDEF must be able to demonstrate that he will be able to withstand criticism of this operational conversion, even in the face of the fact that the new unit will perform more poorly than the unit it replaces, and it will break down and fail twice as often.

This new field unit is the female combat soldier.

What I want, is for the President to be seen in San Bernardino. Talk to local authorities. Meet with victims' families. Meet with survivors. Receive a direct briefing from the local FBI person in charge. I'm concerned about Obama's seeming disconnection from the events that occurred a hundred miles from my front door. I'm dismayed that Obama is deflecting blame for the slaughter towards the guns used.

Why can't we be more like France? France has conducted 2,235 raids, closed three mosques, and seized hundreds of Kalashnikovs. And us? We've searched a house belonging to a former neighbor of Farook.

Obama's approach to any situation is desultory, unless there is a political objective.