So, the president trotted out the old homecourt advantage last night, speaking to the nation from the Oval Office for one of the few times in his presidency. (By the way, just for historical note, is he the first president to speak from behind a lectern in the Oval? Don't they usually speak from behind the desk, so anchor-coiffures can tell us the story of the Resolute again? Maybe that's how they do it in Kenya.) The president tried to sell the nation on calm, on maturity, and on a proportional response to the murderous phenomenon of Daesh and its acolytes. He made the not unremarkable point that it would be far easier to fight a "war" on terror here if we made it a little harder for the terrorists to arm themselves. He told Muslim countries to get with the program of policing the murderous bastards in their midst. Basically, he asked this country if it wouldn't mind getting off the ceiling for a while.

My fellow Americans, I am confident we will succeed in this mission because we are on the right side of history. We were founded upon a belief in human dignity—that no matter who you are, or where you come from, or what you look like, or what religion you practice, you are equal in the eyes of God and equal in the eyes of the law. Even in this political season, even as we properly debate what steps I and future Presidents must take to keep our country safe, let's make sure we never forget what makes us exceptional. Let's not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear; that we have always met challenges—whether war or depression, natural disasters or terrorist attacks—by coming together around our common ideals as one nation, as one people. So long as we stay true to that tradition, I have no doubt America will prevail.

While it was another one of those moments in which I was glad that a trigger-happy adolescent was not in the White House anymore, it also was one of those moments in which the president seemed to be talking to some other, wiser, and more rational country. (The first of these was his eloquent, but intellectually misbegotten, debut speech at the 2004 convention.) He seemed to be talking to a country that would never fall for the snake-oil being peddled across the landscape by Donald Trump, to a country where the architects of the current disaster would be in jail, and not unveiling statues of themselves in the nation's Capitol, and to a country that knows something about history and the way the world actually operates. I would like to live in that country some day.

But, we don't, as was demonstrated by the general reaction across the aisle to the president's remarks. There was a general agreement that we should continue to allow law-abiding citizens like Sayd Farook to build whatever arsenal they choose to build. There was the expected chest-thumping from bellicose also-rans. But nobody went as deeply into the silly than Marco Rubio, the lightweight champion of the neoconservative division. This is something that Rubio said, a voice crying out from a wilderness of rakes:

We are at war with a radical jihadist group, more capable than any terrorist group, more capable than any terrorist group and any armed insurgency this nation ever has confronted.

What in the name of god is this man babbling about? Right offhand, I can think of one far more capable armed insurgency that this nation had to confront. And, in the category of foreign armed insurgencies, there's another one that piled up a pretty impressive winning streak, largely because the United States did in Southeast Asia precisely what the likes of Marco Rubio would like this country to do in Syria and Iraq. (And, as far as "terrorist groups" go, al Qaeda and Timothy McVeigh's circle of acquaintances are still pretty much in the lead.) If Rubio is sufficiently terrified as to forget most of what he once may have learned about American history, he should take to his bed until the tremors pass. But remember, if you read the elite political press, Rubio's exalted place in the passing circus parade is due to his "serious" foreign policy chops.

Also, too…whap.

The fact remains that there aren't a whole lot of good ideas that are politically salable in an election year. It would have been helpful if it had been a little tougher for the San Bernardino shooters to build up their firepower, but any solution to that is dead on arrival in Congress. The Gulf states are fully prepared to tell the rest of the world to go whistle. (Which is why Rubio's plan of a massive Sunni military campaign against ISIS is a pipedream.) A massive commitment to ground troops in Iraq and Syria also is off the boards, at least for the moment, thank god. It is entirely possible that the NSA will get back into the wholesale spying business again, assuming it ever really stopped, and that is both unfortunate and largely futile.

But there is one thing that's incumbent on the people in my business and that is to stop linking actual attacks by Daesh to something called "ISIS-inspired" attacks. If a crazy person decides to take out the rest of the people in the marketing department, and he claims that a mullah on the internet told him to do it, that's an individual crime committed by an individual criminal. It's not very different in its motivation from Brenda Spencer's alleged distaste for Mondays. To make those crimes part of a seamless whole with a paramilitary operation like the one we saw in Paris is to create a massive worldwide conspiracy out of one tightly knit organization. It is important to demolish the organization. It is also important to do a better job keeping firearms out of the hands of crazy people, whatever their motives are. I suspect we can do both at once, but then again, maybe we should all just vote for Donald Trump and hope for the best.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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