No Amnesty/No Formal War Declaration

Americans did not just vote for the John Boehner, John McCain War Party. Americans voted against Barack Obama, Obamacare, Marxist-tinged income redistribution, and Obama’s cozy relationship with the radical Muslim despots of the Mideast.

Here Pat Buchanan sends an important multi-purpose message to Americans. Pat leads with “The Kumbaya Temptation.” Pat’s first area of concern is the “rising clamor from Corporate America for the newly empowered Republicans to grant Obama fast-track authority and support his Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.”

Pat writes, “This would be a Republican ratification of the policies of Bush I and II that produced $10 trillion in trade deficits, hollowed out our manufacturing base, and sent abroad the jobs of millions of Reagan Democrats.”

Read more here from Mr. Buchanan regarding border security, immigration reform, and the Islamic State.

A third temptation will be Obama’s request for Congress to formally authorize the war he has begun in Syria and Iraq. If the GOP signs on, the party will own that war going into 2016, as it owned the Iraq war going into 2006, when it lost both houses of Congress.

That the Islamic State is brutal, barbaric and anti-American is undeniable. But its occupation of northern Syria and western Iraq is the problem primarily of Syria and Iraq, and their neighbors in Lebanon, Turkey, Iran, Kurdistan, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

This is, first and foremost, their war, not ours.

As Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno said last week, “The long-term war against [the Islamic State] needs to be fought by the indigenous capability there. It needs to be fought by Iraqis. It needs to be fought by Syrians. It needs to be fought by other Arabs, because it’s their country and they need to win that back.”

Before succumbing to the kumbaya temptation, Republicans should ask themselves not how to find common ground with Barack, but how to get America out of this Slough of Despond.

And anyone who thinks last Tuesday was a call to compromise with Obama has either an ax to grind or a serious hearing problem.