Ken Berwitz
It\’s beyond surrealthat the president of France is making the American president look like acheese-eating amateur.
The terror attacks inParis Friday took scores of lives andthrust the entire civilized world into paroxysms of grief and despair. Thensomething unexpected happened.
French PresidentFrancois Hollande stepped up to the soccer goal. And he displayed the kind ofleadership one normally does not associate with the randy politician presidingover the land of vintage Champagne and Brie.
No sooner had ISISclaimed responsibility for the butchery than Hollande got in front of TVcameras and told the traumatized public that the savagery was an “act of war.” He vowed to pound ISIS intosubmission.
Compare that to theAmerican president\’s initial reaction. President Obama, who once ridiculed ISIS(or “ISIL,” as he calls it) by comparing it to a junior varsity squad, wasloath to point fingers. “I don\’t want to speculate at this point in termsof who was responsible for this,” he said.
On Friday morning,just hours before Paris turned into ground zero, Obama declared on ABC\’s “GoodMorning America” that ISIS (ISIL, whatever) was not gaining ground and that theUS military “has contained” it. The statement should become his epitaph.
