Obama's On-Message Message: It's Messy Out There, But Not THAT Messy

Frank Bruni writes (in the NYT, of all places):

Speaking at a fund-raiser on Friday, he told donors, “If you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world is falling apart.” He had that much right. 

But it wasn’t the whole of his message. In a statement of the obvious, he also said, “The world has always been messy.” And he coupled that with a needless comparison,  advising Americans to bear in mind that the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the rapacity of Putin, the bedlam in Libya and the rest of it were “not something that is comparable to the challenges we faced during the Cold War.” 

Set aside the question of how germane the example of the Cold War is. When the gut-twisting image stuck in your head is of a masked madman holding a crude knife to the neck of an American on his knees in the desert, when you’re reading about crucifixions in the 21st century, when you’re hearing about women sold by jihadists as sex slaves, and when British leaders have just raised the threat level in their country to “severe,” the last thing that you want to be told is that it’s par for the historical course, all a matter of perspective and not so cosmically dire. 

Where’s the reassurance — or the sense of urgency — in that?...

There isn't any. But then, what do you expect from a POTUS who is given to such vapid utterances as "Don't do stupid shit" and "The world has always been messy"? (It is a messy world--and you wouldn't believe the bloody mess left behind when a masked madman deploys a crude knife to decapitate a kafir.)

To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, Obama's words epitomize "the banality of drivel."