OH, WAIT, SOMEONE IN THE MSM NOTICED – AT 10:25 A.M. ET:  Some in the mainstream media have, using their keen eyes and sonar-like ears, noticed that many Americans are upset over this president's squishy-soft vocabulary...when applied to enemies of the United States.  Well, it's so good to attract the practiced eyes of such seasoned professionals:

“Rogue states” is being pushed aside in favor of the less confrontational “outliers.”

“Islamic radicalism” is being converted to the less religiously freighted “violent extremism.”

And in one of the most important speeches of his presidency, Barack Obama omitted a term that was the Bush administration’s obsession: terrorism – part of a larger effort to de-emphasize the problem in Obama's relations with Muslim states.

Diplomats, academics and foreign leaders are hotly debating whether Obama, who won the White House promising dramatic change in U.S. foreign policy, has actually changed much substantively. But there’s little question that he's made a pronounced shift in how the U.S. talks about the rest of the world – and in a way that has opened him up to charges of being soft in the face of America’s enemies.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) was so incensed at the administration’s recent step towards ending its use of the phrase “Islamic extremism” that he fired off a letter to Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan. Lieberman worries that if Obama doesn’t confront the true nature of the threat, he can’t stop it.

“The failure to identify our enemy for what it is—violent Islamist extremism— is offensive and contradicts thousands of years of accepted military and intelligence doctrine to ‘know your enemy,’” Lieberman wrote, later calling the decision “absolutely Orwellian” in a TV interview.

COMMENT:  Imagine what this "change we can believe in" looks like to soldiers in the field, and the families of those killed and wounded.  Imagine if President Roosevelt, after Pearl Harbor, had called the Japanese "misguided adventurers," or the Nazis "upsetters of peaceful peoples."  Just imagine.

The Obamans behind this Orwellian vocabulary shift are from the same crowd that had fainting spells when Ronald Reagan described the Soviet Union as "the evil empire."  That didn't exactly lead to World War III, did it? 

Will this change of wording increase our "respect" in the Islamic world?  Well, let's answer it this way:  No nation in Europe, during the 1980s, was more solicitous of the Arabs than was France.  And what nation in Europe saw more Arab terrorism on its soil in that decade?  I'm sure you've figured it out.

Osama bin Laden is right on one thing:  In the Muslim world, people back the strong horse.  What do you think this change in vocabulary makes us look like?

April 18, 2010