“Enough talking about being tough on terrorism,” he snapped. “Actually be tough on terrorism and stop making it as easy as possible for terrorists to buy assault weapons.”
.. He said that U.S. Special Forces fighting on the ground in Iraq and Syria know full well who the enemy is, as do the intelligence and law-enforcement officials who spend “countless hours disrupting plots and protecting all Americans, including politicians who tweet”—here, he paused for effect—“and appear on cable-news shows.” There was, he added, “no magic to the phrase ‘radical Islam.’ It’s a political talking point; it’s not a strategy.”
.. Obama insisted that for him to resort to this sort of language would validate claims by groups like isis and Al Qaeda that America is at war with Islam. “That’s their propaganda; that’s how they recruit,” he said. “And if we fall into the trap of painting all Muslims with a broad brush and imply that we are at war with an entire religion, then we are doing the terrorists’ work for them.”
.. The shooters in the attacks in Orlando and Fort Hood, and one of the killers in San Bernardino, were all U.S. citizens, Obama noted. “Are we going to start treating all Muslim Americans differently? Are we going to start subjecting them to special surveillance? Are we going to start discriminating against them because of their faith? We’ve heard these suggestions during the course of this campaign. Do Republican officials actually agree with this?”
.. It was a Commander-in-Chief—flanked by a four-star general, Joseph Dunford, who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and by James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence—making the case that Trump, and Trump’s approach to fighting terrorism, represent every bit as big a threat to the United States as the terrorists themselves do.
.. “We don’t have religious tests here. Our founders, our Constitution, our Bill of Rights are clear about that. And, if we ever abandon those values, we would not only make it a lot easier to radicalize people here and around the world but we would have betrayed the very things we were trying to protect: the pluralism and the openness, our rule of law, our civil liberties. The very things that make this country great. The very things that make us exceptional. And then the terrorists would have won. And we cannot let that happen. I will not let that happen.”
Democrats unleash coordinated barrage against Trump
Obama, Clinton, Sanders and down-ballot Democrats deliver withering takedowns of the presumptive Republican nominee.
.. “Not once has an adviser said, ‘Man, if we use that phrase, we are going to turn this whole thing around.’ Not once,” Obama said, speaking from the Treasury Department following a counter-Islamic State meeting. “So if someone seriously thinks that we don’t know who we’re fighting, if there’s anyone out there who thinks we’re confused about who our enemies are, that would come as a surprise to the thousands of terrorists who we’ve taken off the battlefield.”
.. Ryan, who called Muslims “our partners.” “And I think the smarter way to go in all respects is to have a security test, not a religious test.”
.. Trump, in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity that will air Tuesday evening, boasted that he shamed Clinton into saying “radical Islamism” on Monday.
.. “Yes, she was shamed into it by me, and that’s because of the pressure I put on her,” Trump told Hannity
.. “But in this instance, Donald’s words are especially nonsensical because the terrorist who carried out this attack wasn’t born in Afghanistan, as Donald Trump said yesterday,” she continued. “He was born in Queens, New York, just like Donald was himself.
Obama’s War on Inequality
.. Donald Trump: The presumptive Republican nominee — who has already declared that he will, in fact, slash taxes on the rich, whatever he may have said in the recent past — once again declared his intention to do away with Dodd-Frank, the financial reform passed during Democrats’ brief window of congressional control. Just for the record, while Mr. Trump is sometimes described as a “populist,” almost every substantive policy he has announced would make the rich richer at workers’ expense.
.. It can also engage in what is sometimes called “predistribution,” strengthening the bargaining power of lower-paid workers and limiting the opportunities for a handful of people to make giant sums.
.. The middle-class society that baby boomers like me grew up in didn’t happen by accident; it was created by the New Deal, which engineered what economists call the “Great Compression,” a sharp reduction in income gaps. On one side, pro-labor policies led to a striking expansion of unions, which, along with the establishment of a fairly high minimum wage, helped raise wages, especially at the bottom. On the other side, taxes on the wealthy went up sharply, while major programs like Social Security aided working families.
.. the average federal tax rate on the top 1 percent has risen quite a lot. In fact, it’s roughly back to what it was in 1979, pre-Ronald Reagan, something nobody seems to know.
.. And even these medium-size steps put the lie to the pessimism and fatalism one hears all too often on this subject. No, America isn’t an oligarchy in which both parties reliably serve the interests of the economic elite.
Obama previews his Trump attack plan
It boils down to this: Trump, in Obama’s mind, is a buffoon-charlatan hybrid who’s only gotten as far as he has because the Republican Party’s a mess and reporters have fallen for the act. The president’s going to keep pointing out that being president isn’t a joke, all while he keeps laughing at Trump and chastising reporters for not asking enough follow-up questions (though of course, Obama took only four questions himself, and no follow-ups as he made this point).
The question that brought Obama the most visible amusement was one about House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) distancing himself from his own party’s nominee.
.. “I think you have to ask Speaker Ryan what the implications of his comments are,” Obama said, his face breaking out in a smirk born of seven years of being told his problems with the Republican Party stem from what he’s done wrong, and the last six months watching the evidence mount in increasingly fireball-in-the-Metro type ways that there’s something wrong with the Republican Party.