Team Obama: What Are You Talking About? Of Course We Decimated al Qaeda

May the semantic games continue! President Obama and pals have consistently claimed that al Qaeda has been “decimated” — after previously claiming that they were “on the run.” I’m pretty sure the pivot in language occurred shortly after the death of Osama bin Laden, but the irony is that al Qaeda is neither “on the run” nor has been “decimated.”

But tell that to this administration. President Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken sat down with Chris Wallace to break some bread on Fox News Sunday, where he was pressed on the address Mr. Obama delivered to the UN. Not the speech from this week, but the one from just one year ago, in which he insisted that al Qaeda had been dismantled.

“How could the president have been so wrong?” asked Wallace. “He said all our troops have left Iraq. In fact, he has just sent at least 1600 troops back into Iraq. He said we’ve dismantled the core of al Qaeda. The Khorasan, which you’ve struck in the first day, is an offshoot and follows the direct orders of the leader of al Qaeda, Ayman Al-Zawahiri.”

Facts are stubborn things, but Tony Blinken didn’t seem to care. “The president was exactly right. We said from day one that there would be groups that would emerge in other parts of the world — we’ve been relentlessly going after them,” he insisted. “What we’re not going to do is fall into the al Qaeda trap of sending hundreds of thousands of Americans back. That’s exactly what they want. They want to bog us down, tie us down, and bleed us. We’re going to be smarter than this.”

Smarter than what? Smarter than the strategy which has already produced failure after failure on the world stage? This, of course, is far from the first time the Obama administration has been pressed on the “decimated” lie. The standard answer given by them throughout the past year or longer has been that “CORE al Qaeda has been defeated.” Of course, I don’t recall Obama using the word “CORE” in any of these campaign speeches:

Sure sounds like “Mission: Accomplished,” does it not?

The fact that we’ve now been forced into debating “al Qaeda” versus “CORE al Qaeda” is precisely the kind of confusion that the Obama administration thrives upon. It’s simply that much easier for them to deflect blame when they can randomly toss in new adjectives and qualifiers to try and rewrite the president’s own past statements. And because most of the media falls for it hook, line and sinker, they get away with it. But truth be told, I’m not even convinced that so-called “CORE al Qaeda” has been decimated, let alone the terror organization as a whole.

It’s all a bunch of stinkin’ thinkin’ from Tony Blinken. His blindness to the failures of his own boss reminds me of the “Blinkin” character from Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Although this Blinkin was clearly more intelligent: