Vice President Joe Biden struck a significantly stronger tone against ISIS than his boss on Wednesday, angrily declaring that “we will follow them to the gates of hell!” while President Obama spoke dispassionately about “shrinking” the terror group to a “manageable problem.”
In a fiery speech on Wednesday, Biden denounced the brutal beheading of Steven Sotloff, the second American journalist executed by the savage Islamic fundamentalists from ISIS in Iraq.
“They somehow think that it’s going to lessen U.S. resolve, frighten us, and intimidate us,” he said. “But if they think the American people will be intimidated, they don’t know us very well!”
“The American people are so much stronger, so much more resolved than any enemy can fully understand,” Biden thundered. “As a nation, we’re united. And when people harm Americans, we don’t retreat. We don’t forgive. We take care of those who are grieving.”
“And when that’s finishes, they should know, we will follow them to the gates of hell until they are brought to justice!” the vice president thundered. “Because hell is where they will reside! Hell is where they will reside!”
The rhetoric contrasts sharply with comments made hours earlier by President Obama in Estonia. “We know that if we are joined by the international community, we can continue to shrink [ISIS’s] sphere of influence — its effectiveness, its finances, its military capabilities — to the point where it is a manageable problem,” he said.
“That’s awfully passive language to be using about this kind of brutality we’re seeing,” liberal journalist Ron Fournier told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Wednesday, criticizing President Obama’s “unsettling” inability to express the threat ISIS poses to Americans.
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