There’s Containment, and There’s Containment

Recall President Barack Obama’s claim, on the morning of the Daesh’s terrorist attacks in Paris, that Daesh was contained.

Now he’s saying he was right in that assessment:

[H]e insisted that the reason he said they’re contained, hours before terror teams launched deadly raids across Paris, is because “they control less territory than they did last year.”

That may be marginally true: the Kurds have successfully pushed toward Raqqa in Syria, and they’ve driven Daesh from Sinjar in Iraq.

How important is that bit of geography, though? Daesh has expanded from attacks within and at the periphery of the geography it holds to attacks in two different continents—the airliner bombing in Egypt and those Paris attacks.

Physically contained? Geographically contained, maybe. Maybe. But plainly not physically contained—Egypt and France. And plainly not contained as a practical matter.

It’s hard to believe that neither Obama’s echo chamber nor Obama don’t understand this.

Trust

A black man was shot and killed by police in Minneapolis, and the mayor has requested a Federal investigation in what has become a PC requirement. What interests me in this matter is this.

Nekima Levy-Pounds, president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP, called the civil rights request a step in the right direction, “given that we do not trust Minnesota law enforcement officials to hold themselves accountable.”

On what basis does Levy-Pounds think a Federal law enforcement investigation will be any more objective? After all, it’ll be the DoJ that conducts the thing.