Chattanooga or Damascus?

The Commander-in-Chief visited the Volunteer State today to give a speech in Chattanooga, in which he spent a lot of time condemning his enemies.

Not his foreign enemies, the Republicans.

But not all Republicans, just those who oppose him.

Meanwhile, how many high-profile speeches has he given about WMD use in Syria, which triggered our involvement in a civil war through the supply of lethal arms?  How many prime time--or even non prime time--press conferences has he done on the subject?  How many addresses to the nation from the Oval Office, or even the hallway?  After all, AQ is involved over there along with other terrorist groups, along with Russia.  Anything?  Not recalling anything.

Curiously though Obama is not the only one playing this down, his enablers in the Senate are helping with the stealth:

There was no public debate and no public vote when one of the most contentious topics in American foreign policy was decided – outside of the view of constituents, who oppose the president’s plan to aid the rebels by 54 percent to 37 percent, according to a Gallup Poll last month.

In fact, ask individual members of the committee, who represent 117 million people in 14 states, how they stood on the plan to use the CIA to funnel weapons to the rebels and they are likely to respond with the current equivalent of “none of your business:” It’s classified.

The silence is amazing when one considers how much time and energy Bush's detractors put into bashing his foreign policy despite him going to Congress to authorize both wars with full votes.  Just remember, the world was supposed to breath a sigh of relief after he left, such was the level of damage he supposedly did and the level of importance of foreign policy at one point a few years ago.   These days everything else has become more important.   An amazing feat, really.  

By the way, while in Chattanooga today Obama used an interesting phrasing in discussing the threat of his enemies perhaps trying to shut down the government. He said the following:

The bad news is that rather than keep our focus on what should be our priority -- which is growing our economy and creating good middle-class jobs -- we’ve seen a certain faction of Republicans in Congress hurt a fragile recovery by saying that they wouldn’t pay the very bills that Congress racked up in the first place, threatening to shut down the people’s government if they can’t get rid of Obamacare.

Have past presidents used that bolded term before? Sounds a little Chinese-y.  Besides, some of  those 'people' elected people called Republicans who work in the very government he leads.  That is unless he means something else by 'the people's government'.  Surely Media Matters will be along to tell us that Reagan used it all the time.  Even if he did, it would certainly have come off with a different feel.  Anyway, if he could only defeat that one true enemy he never gets tired of talking about he'd basically have nothing left to talk about, since he doesn't want to discuss world troubles anymore.