President Obama's Oval Office address on fighting ISIL

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http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/06/politics/ ... is-terror/

I voted for him twice and have a great deal of respect for the President, but this speech was not successful, I fear.

I do not think he provided the leadership, vision or imaginative response that is needed in the wake of the San Bernardino attack.

Very disappointing.

i thought he covered all the important bases. what would you have liked to hear?

I think he has always had trouble hiding that all he wants to say in these speeches is: "give us a minute to think, or two, because this s**t is more complicated, and we don't want to mess up yet another middle-eastern muslim country for no good reason and pour napalm into the fire"

I still have respect for him tackling healthcare reform. And I'm refusing to loose it over his inability to extinguish a rampant fire that started with the fall of the ottoman empire, or even earlier, and was so forcefully fed by the bloodlust that came about everyone since 2001.

He did seem to go through a checklist of points, none of which were unreasonable.

What I did not hear, and would have liked to have heard, is:
Some concrete way to fight radicalization domestically;
Some sense of new leadership in the international fight against this, rather than chiding our allies and reporting on the status quo;
Some real answer to Hillary Clinton's admission that the current strategy is not working.
Some vision of a better way forward than a shabby replay of cold war nonsense between Russia and America with these regional conflicts getting caught up in that contest (as now seems to be happening in Syria.)

Obama is capable of some very impressive oratorical displays and brilliant ideas, these qualities were not in evidence tonight. This could have been a great moment, like FDR's "fear itself" speech, but instead it was a missed opportunity.

he called on american muslims to counter radicalization within their midst. there was no chiding of our allies. did you and i hear the same speech?

Everybody is going to look good after Bush or compared with Trump. At least he is not calling ISIS the junior varsity or contained anymore.

The chiding of our allies was outside of the speech, I was hoping that the fight against IS would be an opportunity to repair the alliance with wise American leadership.

Two areas of crisis related to the Islamic State are Turkey's relations with its neighbors and Europe's response to the refugee crisis. Turkey's bad relations with the Kurds is complicating their involvement in efforts against ISIS, much as Russia's need to prop up Assad is complicating any role it might play in the region. It's a mess and we have had to release critical statements about allies, but we are not rallying them to a coherent vision of a response.

This is the context of the call for American Muslims to resist radicalization:


I agree with all of this, particularly in response to some of the more impassioned voices we have been hearing calling for systematic discrimination against Muslims, but it's not much. I was hoping for more. I like the speech better as text than I did hearing it. It was not inspiring.