http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-as-threats-multiply-the-state-of-the-union-is-nonchalant/2015/01/20/c6969768-a0d5-11e4-903f-9f2faf7cd9fe_story.html
Earlier this month, President Obama delivered his annual State of the Union address. The State of the Union is given annually to provide citizens with the administration’s view of how well our nation is doing, as well as legislative plans for the next year. Although the president did address many important topics about things going on in our nation, he almost completely ignored a huge one that effects all of us; national security. He failed to address any of the new threats from rapidly growing extremist groups such as ISIS, even though those threats have been acted on as close to home as Canada. The president briefly addressed this issue saying that the government would “continue to hunt down terrorists and dismantle their organizations”.
There are two ways the American Citizen could look at the president’s failure to address the issue of terrorism. Many people, including the journalist who wrote the article see it as the president neglecting our national security and the issue of terrorism completely. Anyone who has watched the news in the past couple months has heard quite a bit about ISIS and what they have done in other countries around the world; Because of this many people were expecting much more information regarding these terrorist groups, from President Obama.
The other, less negative way one could look at this issue is that, possibly, President Obama didn’t want to cause unnecessary panic amongst the citizens and media by dwelling on the subject of terrorism. It is obvious that the president has greater knowledge of our national security issues than the majority of the population, and considering the fact that he is the president, it would be impossible for him to actually ignore these issues, as the article accuses him of. With these things in mind, it is easy to conclude that the president is not actually ignoring our national security, but instead made a decision about how much was necessary to say based on his knowledge of what is going on with these terrorist groups. If the man who knows the most about this problem isn’t overly-concerned, is that not a good sign?