Try as they may, President Obama’s critics (of which I have been one) have tried to infer he is many things. He’s been called a socialist, a far-left liberal and so many other names that you could probably fill a small library with all of the very pointed language directed at him. People will use all sorts of facts and inferences to back their words up but one word and invective that will never stick is “wimp.”
In his third State of the Union Address, the President opened and closed with very powerful descriptors detailing the raid that killed the world’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden. Those may have been the only times that both sides of the political aisles were absolutely silent in their applause and vocal reactions as they rose and applauded more than 80 times last night. The silence and locked-on attention were well deserved because the man giving the description was the same guy who gave the ultimate orders to execute the successful raid.
Unbeknownst to all but a handful of people in the U.S. Capitol was the further fact that another successful raid by US Navy SEALS had just been completed in Somalia hours before. Two aid workers, an American, Jessica Buchanan, 32, and a Dane, Poul Hagen Thisted, 60, who had been held captive by Somali pirates since October were successfully rescued.
To see the man who is Commander in Chief today and remember him as a candidate four years ago is to see a very different individual. The inspirational orator that many thought was a weak-kneed, no guts, can’t face the tough guys in the world’s rough neighborhood has become remarkably effective and efficient as the leader of forces that take out bad guys and get rid of some of the world’s most pungent trash.
The responsibilities of the Commander in Chief are truly monumental and consequential. Every Presidential memoir and historical analysis describes the pressure and anguish that each of the 42 men have felt with those responsibilities. You take a look at President Obama and see how three years in the world’s toughest job have aged him, and I have no doubt his military responsibilities have greatly contributed to his thinning and increasingly gray hair.
Through the use of drones, Special Forces, Navy SEALS and all of the other military resources at his disposal, the President has scored a kill sheet that no one could have ever imagined. The left practically labeled him as Messiah while the right saw him as unqualified and incapable of being up to the toughest security job. For all of the shock and awe on both sides of the political aisles, it cannot compare to the jaw-dropping that the Nobel Prize Committee must feel after delivering its most coveted prize to the man who seems to have a penchant for terminating some very bad people.
Barack Obama can and will be called many things in this very political year. History will record all of those words and sort out the fact from the fiction but one word that he cannot be called is “wimp.” His record proves it.
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Bugs52
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Bugs52
