While on the subject of the commander-in-chief of our armed forces--and the troops who keep us safe from one threat after another around the world--a little item in Friday's survey of the wires rang a bell. An alarm bell.
It seems the good guys came across a laptop that used to be owned by some high poobah in ISIS, or whatever that expanding terrorist horde is calling itself these days. While the hardware appeared to have been scrubbed clean, a little work by our IT types indicated that the Islamic State's crazies are fooling around with biological weapons. Because a 19-page guide to manufacturing biological weapons was said to have been discovered deep in the computer's memory. Its subject: how to weaponize the bubonic plague, aka the Black Death when it swept across medieval Europe.
How fabricate it? By using sick animals. No, not the ones that comprise ISIS, but innocent ones. Whoever wrote this computer program could hardly contain his enthusiasm: "The advantage of biological weapons is that they do not cost a lot of money, while the human casualties can be huge." Oh, boy! Or whatever the Arabic equivalent thereof may be.
Back in America the Beautiful (and Somnolent), the president of the United States and the commander-in-chief of its armed forces held a press conference Thursday to announce that his administration doesn't yet have a strategy for dealing with the Islamic State. As if this were supposed to be news.
Gosh, what do you think would be a good time to get such a strategy, Mr. President? From the commander-in-chief's response to every other crisis that's broken of late, and those now breaking all around him like a Perfect Storm, we'd guess he's still undecided between not now, too late and approximately forever.
Our considered editorial opinion: The best time would be now, Mr. President, if not sooner. In short, WAKE UP.
Editorial on 09/02/2014