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Mark Steyn starts today’s look at the poor excuse for leadership in DC.

On Tuesday the Islamic State released a 22-minute video showing Flight Lieutenant Muath al-Kasasbeh of the Royal Jordanian Air Force being doused in petrol and burned to death. It is an horrific way to die, and Flt Lt al-Kasasbeh showed uncommon bravery, standing stiff and dignified as the flames consumed him. And then he toppled, and the ISIS cameras rolled on, until what was left was charred and shapeless and unrecognizable as human.

King Abdullah’s response to this barbaric act was to execute two ISIS prisoners the following morning, including the evil woman who was part of the cell that blew up the lobby of my favorite hotel in Amman, the Grand Hyatt.

President Obama’s response was to go to the National Prayer Breakfast and condescendingly advise us – as if it’s some dazzlingly original observation rather than the lamest faculty-lounge relativist bromide – to “remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition,people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ”.

Gee, thanks. If you’re watching on ISIS premium cable, I’m sure that’s a great consolation when they’re reaching for the scimitar and readying you for your close-up. …

… civilization is a fragile and unnatural state of affairs. Droning on about the Crusades and Jim Crow, Obama offers the foreign policy of Oscar Wilde’s cynic: He knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. …

Roger Simon posts on obama’s biggest lie. 

Unlike Nixon and Clinton, who lied in self-defense, Obama lies proactively, which is decidedly more dangerous.  He will say practically anything to achieve his goals without regard to the truth.  The repeated assertion about keeping your doctor and your health insurance under the Affordable Care Act is just one famous example.  But only a few days ago on Fareed Zakaria’s show the president made a statement that dwarfed his claims about Obamacare.  When asked if we were in a war with radical Islam, the president replied:

….”I reject a notion that somehow that creates a religious war because the overwhelming majority of Muslims reject that interpretation of Islam. They don’t even recognize it as being Islam, and I think that for us to be successful in fighting this scourge, it’s very important for us to align ourselves with the 99.9 percent of Muslims who are looking for the same thing we’re looking for — order, peace, prosperity.”

99.9 percent?!  I will bypass for the moment Obama’s rather self-serving definition of Islam and focus on that outrageous number, which is absurd on the face of it and not remotely supported by any of the numerous polls on the subject. …

Jonathan Tobin on the prez’s anti-Semitism blind spot. 

There has been a great deal of justified criticism about President Obama’s unwillingness to respond to terrorist outrages with the sort of moral leadership that can rally the West to fight back. His comments at last week’s National Prayer Breakfast in which he sought to create a false moral equivalency between ISIS’s horrific burning alive of a captured Jordanian pilot and the Christian West’s past sins during the Inquisition and even the Crusades have been rightly blasted for his tone-deaf approach to terrorism. The president seems so mired in his deep ambivalence about the West’s role in world history that he is unable to play his part as leader of the free world in what is, like it or not, a life-and-death struggle against truly evil forces. It is also revealed in his administration’s refusal to call Islamist terrorism by that name. But just as troubling is his unwillingness to address one of the primary characteristics of this brand of terror: anti-Semitism. In an interview with Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, he described the terror attack on a Paris kosher market as a “random” event rather than an act of murder motivated by Jew hatred. Though it won’t get the same attention as his outrageous speech last week, it gives us just as much insight into the president’s foreign-policy mindset.

It should be recalled that in the immediate aftermath of the shootings at the Hyper Cacher market by killers associated with those who perpetrated the Charlie Hebdo massacre days earlier, President Obama also refused to call it an act of anti-Semitism. That was, in its own way, as shocking as the president’s decision to not send any high-ranking U.S. official to the Paris unity march that took place to protest the murders or to go himself as did many other Western leaders. …

Peter Wehner says someone ought to get off his “high horse.” 

Part of the problem with President Obama’s recent National Prayer Breakfast speech, as Michael Rubin has pointed out, is that it provides a simplistic and incomplete understanding of the Crusades. (You might also read this First Things review, “Inventing the Crusades,” by Thomas F. Madden.)

But the president’s remarks also demonstrate a simplistic and incomplete understanding of Christianity. By that I mean when Mr. Obama, in warning Christians not to get on their “high horse” when talking about the problems in Islam, said, “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

True enough–but it’s also true that slavery and segregation were overthrown by those who justified their actions in the name of Christ. And if the president insists on making comparisons between Christianity and Islam, then it needs to be said that while Christianity has struggled with religious intolerance in its past, it has almost everywhere made its inner peace with religious tolerance and pluralism. On the other hand, true religious freedom has been quite rare in Muslim-majority communities throughout history. …

Jennifer Rubin says we’re left with a president who will not defend western civilization.

The confluence of events is striking. The president is capitulating in slow motion to the demands of Iran at the P5+1 talks. With regard to the Islamic State, which just this week burned alive a Jordanian pilot (a Muslim, remember), the president has empty words. Yemen, which was held up as a great success story, is now being taken over by Iranian-supported rebels with nary a peep from the president. Iran is effectively absorbing Iraq’s army. Iran continues to back terrorist groups throughout the region, including Hezbollah, which is increasingly more aggressive in attacking Israel.

All that is happening while President Obama throws a fit when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gets an invite to speak to Congress. And he lectures the country that Christianity is rotten, too — don’t you remember the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition?

His remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast may be the most memorable of his presidency for they so completely express his moral vacuity and personal arrogance: “Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.” Never miss an opportunity to indict the West, to ignore the current threat to Western civilization or to smear Americans who rightly see themselves as the defenders of decency and humanity against the barbarism of Islamic fundamentalists. The egregious comments and the thinking behind them was denounced not only by right-wing critics but also by thinking liberals, a variety of Christian leaders and centrists such as Joe Scarborough. …

… This is not trivial matter. It is the central dilemma of time: How do we defend Western civilization when the leader of the free world won’t, and doesn’t even like it all that much?

Liz Peek at Fiscal Times says the Crusade remarks will bolster ISIS propaganda campaigns.” 

President Obama has given ISIS a propaganda clip of incalculable value, and they don’t even have to edit it. As he stood at the Prayer Breakfast last week and likened the barbarity of current-day Islamic extremists to atrocities committed during the Crusades and the Inquisition, Obama seemingly validated the terrorists’ centuries-old calls for vengeance.

Moreover, his references to slavery and Jim Crow channeled Islamic recruiters who warn of coming Islamophobia in the U.S. by calling out black-white tensions. Given that our battle with ISIS is in large part a war for hearts and minds, Mr. Obama’s comments are symptomatic of profound ignorance, at best and were extremely reckless.  

The al-Qaeda hijackers brought down the World Trade Towers on September 11 because unbeknownst to most in the West, the date is an important one in Islamic history. It was in 1683 “that the conquering armies of Islam were met, held, and thrown back at the gates of Vienna,” as Christopher Hitchens wrote. This was, he explained, a “hinge” event, in that “the Ottoman Empire never recovered from the defeat. From then on it was more likely that Christian or western powers would dominate the Muslim world than the other way around.”

Hitchens notes, “In the Islamic world, and especially among the extremists, it is remembered as a humiliation in itself and a prelude to later ones,” and thus the perfect date to inflict on the West an equally humiliating injury.

History matters to Islamic terrorists; avenging past defeats suffered by Muslims is central to their cause. …

David Harsanyi posts on Axelrod’s revelations about presidential lying.

… In “Believer: My Forty Years in Politics,” David Axelrod claims that he knew Obama supported gay marriage back when he first ran for president in 2008. “I’m just not very good at bullshitting,” a far-too-modest Barack Obama supposedly told his advisor after a campaign stop. “There’s no doubt that his sympathies were on the side of allowing gay couples to marry,” Axelrod says. “He also recognized that the country wasn’t there yet—that we needed to bring the country along.”

Bullshit, according to unreliable sources across the interwebs, means “nonsense” or a rebuke of something misleading, disingenuous or false. The Urban Dictionary definition of “bullshitting” is “When someone has no f****ng clue what they are talking about, yet insists on trying to get others to believe him/her.” So, contra the president’s self-criticism, he excels at it. …

It is a terrible thing to end the week with lots of items on President Trainwreck. We’ll make up for that a little with late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at the Alfalfa Dinner: I can work with the president. We’re honest with each other. I told him once that I thought he was aloof and condescending. He said, ‘I am not condescending. I am just too busy thinking about far more important things than you would understand.’

Gates: Washington is the only place where you can see someone walking down Lovers Lane, holding his own hand.

Conan: An NFL player was arrested in Florida on gun charges. The news was shocking to anyone who knows nothing about the NFL or Florida.

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Streetwise Professor posts on how President Trainwreck wants to spread disaster to the internet.

… If the substance isn’t bad enough, the process is even worse. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler was originally leaning towards a less intrusive approach to net neutrality that would avoid dropping the Title II bomb. But Obama orchestrated a campaign behind the scenes to pressure an ostensibly independent agency to go all medieval (or at least all New Deal) on the Internet. Obama added to the backstage pressure with a very public call for intrusive regulation that put Wheeler and the other two Democrats on the Commission in an impossible position. (Another illustration of the consequences of Presidential elections: it’s not just the commander that matters, but the anonymous foot soldiers and the camp followers too.)

Yes, part of Obama’s insistence reflected his beliefs: after all, he is a big government control freak. And yes, part reflects the fact that some of his biggest supporters and donors are rabid NN supporters-primarily because they will benefit if they don’t have to pay the full cost that they impose.

But what convinced Obama to make this a priority was his personal vanity and his determination to engage in political warfare by pursuing initiatives that he can implement unilaterally without Congressional involvement. Read this and weep:

“While Obama administration officials were warming to the idea of calling for tougher rules, it took the November elections to sway Mr. Obama into action.

After Republicans gained their Senate majority, Mr. Obama took a number of actions to go around Congress, including a unilateral move to ease immigration rules. Senior aides also began looking for issues that would help define the president’s legacy. Net neutrality seemed like a good fit.

Soon, Mr. Zients paid his visit to the FCC to let Mr. Wheeler know the president would make a statement on high-speed Internet regulation. Messrs. Zients and Wheeler didn’t discuss the details, according to Mr. Wheeler.

Mr. Obama made them clear in a 1,062-word statement and two-minute video. He told the FCC to regulate mobile and fixed broadband providers more strictly and enact strong rules to prevent those providers from altering download speeds for specific websites or services.

In the video, Mr. Obama said his stance was confirmation of a long-standing commitment to net neutrality. The statement boxed in Mr. Wheeler by giving the FCC’s two other Democratic commissioners cover to vote against anything falling short of Mr. Obama’s position.

That essentially killed the compromise proposed by Mr. Wheeler, leaving him no choice but to follow the path outlined by the president.”

Read this again: “Senior aides also began looking for issues that would help define the president’s legacy. Net neutrality seemed like a good fit.” So to achieve a legacy, the Narcissist in Chief decides to interfere with the most successful, innovative industry of the past half-century, and perhaps ever.

What, screwing up the health care industry isn’t enough of a legacy? …

Kevin Williamson writes on the budget process.

President Obama has submitted a budget proposal to Congress. There are many possible responses that Congress might offer in return. The correct one is this: “Thank you for your input, Mr. President. But we’ll take it from here.”

We have three branches of government for a reason, and the Constitution invests each branch with certain powers and responsibilities, establishing divisions within government that have shown themselves, for more than a couple of centuries now, to be extraordinarily prudent. The president is not a prime minister, nor is he the republican model of government’s ersatz king. He is the chief administrative officer in the federal government and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He is given special responsibilities in the matter of foreign relations, notably in the negotiation of treaties and the making of war, though in both cases his authority is limited by that of the legislative branch, which can reject a proposed treaty and has the power to declare (or decline to declare) war.

He does not have any special constitutional role when it comes to budgets. The Constitution invests the House with the power to initiate revenue bills and the Senate the power to propose or concur with amendments to such bills. The president has a relatively large role in external affairs; in internal affairs, particularly matters of taxing and spending, Congress should — should — play the dominant role. Which is not to say that the president shouldn’t propose a budget plan, if he thinks he has some good ideas. (This one doesn’t, though he may think that he does.) But Congress is under no special obligation to act on them, or to give them any special consideration.

One of the problems with our currently lopsided mode of government — in which the president is the central player in government across the board — is that we have come to think of the president as the national actor and Congress as the national reactor. …

John Fund and Hans Von Spakovsky on Eric Holder’s politicization of Justice.

Departing attorney general Eric Holder’s claim this week in a press conference that there has “been no politicization” of the Justice Department under him makes it appear as if he is living in a Potemkin-like state of denial in the main Justice building. Holder went so far as to claim that he had been forced to clean up the department he took over from the Bush administration. “You want to look at a Justice Department that’s been politicized, you look at the one I inherited,” he claimed.

When we were researching our recent book on Holder’s six-year tenure at Justice, we talked to numerous career employees who were shocked at how much further Holder had gone than any previous administration in politicizing Justice. One longtime lawyer in the Civil Rights Division told us that Holder had

racialized and radicalized the Division to the point of corruption. They embedded politically leftist extremists in the career ranks who have an agenda that does not comport with equal protection or the rule of law; who believe that the ends justify the means; and who behave unprofessionally and unethically. Their policy is to intimidate and threaten employees who do not agree with their politics, and even moderate Democrats have left the Department because they were treated as enemies by administration officials and their lackeys.

Holder said that the “notion” that DOJ has been politicized is “totally inconsistent with the facts.” But the facts show that the politicization started almost immediately, such as when political appointees at Justice ordered the dismissal of the New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation case at the beginning of 2009 because they did not want to enforce the Voting Rights Act against black defendants, ending the race-neutral enforcement of the law. …

And Debra Saunders posts on Holder’s ” sorry sense of justice.”

… Holder’s big hurdle to win confirmation as President Barack Obama’s head enforcer in 2009 was rooted in his actions as deputy attorney general to President Bill Clinton. Holder infamously gave Clinton cover to issue his 177 out-the-door presidential pardons Jan. 20, 2001. Holder even gave a “neutral, toward leaning positive” recommendation to a pardon for Marc Rich, who fled the country after the feds indicted him in 1983 for evading $48 million in income taxes and illegally buying oil from Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis. Ex-wife Denise Rich was a prominent Democratic donor. The pardon wiped clean charges for which the fugitive evaded trial.

As attorney general, Holder has had a chance to atone for his bad pardon recommendations by pushing commutations for low-level federal inmates who don’t have cozy connections with Democratic heavyweights. But he has been slow to use the pardon attorney’s office to champion relief for low-level drug offenders — many of them minorities — sentenced to decades behind bars thanks to the excesses of federal prosecutors. Holder can be brutal when black communities charge racial profiling by beat cops, who don’t work for Washington, but not on overzealous federal law enforcement under his own jurisdiction.

In his first term, Obama issued one commutation. Finally, in December 2013, Obama commuted the sentences of eight crack offenders serving draconian federal mandatory minimum terms. That was great. But then in April, Holder announced a clemency initiative for nonviolent low-level drug offenders who had served at least 10 years and stayed out of trouble. There have been 11 commutations since then — which makes the new initiative a cover for the administration’s paucity on pardons and commutations.

That’s par for the course for Holder. …