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The President has a big mouth. He just surrendered plausible deniability for anything bad that happens to North Korea, anything they can accuse the US of instigating in retaliation for the Sony fiasco, whether the US has underlying responsibility or not. Obama gave them a motive they can assign to us and painted us into another corner with his posturing. He's no Shaka Zulu.
Obama still hasn't learned how to walk softly and carry a big stick; or, that talk is cheap. That's reflected in his popularity polls. There are short term solutions to appease people's anger and long term solutions to counter problems like this. The short term solution isn't flapping your gums and making threats.
The short term solution requires action; but, this President just isn't astute enough to come up with something like having Sony immediately release the movie in all movie theaters on all US military installations around the world and inviting foreign VIPs from all walks of life to attend special viewings at our installation's theaters in their countries. That would send an appropriate message to both foreign hackers and domestic capitulators.
Posturing on the long term solution is a sign of weakness indicating the President may not expect to be in office long enough to implement it. Now he has to respond with something "proportional" [Obama] within a few months or else that impression will stick.
"The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing" [Disney] in situations like this. The talking should have been done in sequester and the first thing the public should have heard from him was about doings already in progress. I won't be surprised if a significant part of this President's legacy is that Americans had to settle for less due to his methodology of too often coming up a day late and a dollar short.
And that's that.
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