It is simply inexplicable that Barack Obama would compare historical injustices by Christians a thousand years ago to the current atrocities being committed by Muslim jihadists today.

But that's exactly what the president did yesterday at a prayer breakfast in Washington.

The reaction: predictable -- the president getting hammered nearly everywhere except on the network news programs, which chose not to cover the story.

Today the president's National Security Advisor Susan Rice gave a major speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington about the strategy to protect America and the world.

According to Ms. Rice, the president believes that most threats can be defused by enlisting partners around the world to join together against the evildoers

But Ms. Rice completely avoided any definition of how to stop ISIS, for example, from committing daily atrocities.

Instead she said this:

SUSAN RICE: “While the dangers we face may be more numerous and varied, they are not of the existential nature that we confronted during World War II or during the Cold War. ((EDIT)) We will always act to defend our country and its people, but we aim to avoid sending many thousands of ground forces into combat in hostile lands.”

That was the most specific thing Ambassador Rice said, that American ground troops would not be confronting the terrorists because the threat they pose is “not existential,” meaning not an Armageddon-type situation.

To me she is diminishing the issue.  Certainly ISIS was an existential threat to the Jordanian set on fire and the Americans beheaded.

Hitler was not an existential threat until 1938.  To flail around while killer groups gain power is unwise to say the least.

But the Obama administration believes the bombing campaign and other secondary measures will eventually downgrade the ISIS savages.

Meantime, thousands of people are dying and thousands of people are plotting to come here to kill Americans.

The rest of the speech was your standard issue “we are doing great in Washington so what's the problem?”

It was kind of bizarre to hear Ms. Rice refer to climate change as a strategic talking point, but hey that's standard issue for the left. 

There was mention of universal values and international order, that kind of stuff which means nothing. 

Summing up, the president believes that ISIS can be degraded without ground confrontation, that his policies in Iraq and Afghanistan have made the USA stronger, and that Iran will give up nukes in the face of world pressure.

That is what Barack Obama believes.

And that is the memo.