Obama AWOL Again Just 3 Hours After American Beheaded

• Presdident walks to Marine One past journalists while ignoring their shouted questions 
• State Department's chief Iraq-Iran deputy said 'stay tuned' for a strategy: 'we are building now a broader campaign plan'
• CNN anchor pounces: 'You say "stay tuned," but in the meantime ISIS is busy beheading our colleagues'
• Georgia Republican senator tweets 'There's only one way you deal with ISIS: You kill them'
• California Democratic senator warned Sunday that Obama is 'very cautious. Maybe in this instance too cautious'
• The president will be in Europe for three days, attending international meetings in Estonia and then a NATO summit in Wales

Barack Obama left for a three-day European swing Tuesday afternoon without saying a single word in response to a terrorist video showing the beheading of Steven Sotloff, the second American journalist to die that way on camera.

The president's departure came amid equally deafening swirls of helicopter rotors and tough questions about whether and when the U.S. will strike back in a meaningful and public way against ISIS, the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham.

News of Sotloff's execution broke online at 1:05 p.m., shortly after White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest began his daily briefing with reporters; he said four minutes later that he hadn't heard the news.

By 3:40, Obama was lifting off from the South Lawn of the White House on his way to a waiting Air Force One, which was 'wheels up' by 4:00.

Just two weeks ago, the president was widely criticized for being pictured fist-bumping on the golf course minutes after solemnly addressing the nation about an ISIS video showing photojournalist James Foley's death.

As Obama's chopper left the White House on Tuesday, CNN posted video of an interview with Brett McGurk, the Deputy U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Iraq and Iran, who said Americans should 'stay tuned' for a reaction from the Obama administration. 

The U.S. is 'developing a broad regional coalition, a broad international coalition, working to get a new Iraqi government stood up, working to get our plans in place,' McGurk said. 'So stay tuned.'

'You cannot just go in militarily and start dropping bombs and hope that it's going to work out,' he said. 'You have to have a very sophisticated approach to this.'

'We are building now a broader campaign plan that we’ll develop over the days and weeks ahead,' he toldCNN.

The remark sounded like an affirmative echo of what Obama himself said five days ago, admitting that he hadn't decided whether to expand his anti-ISIS airstrikes beyond the borders of Iraq and into Syria .

'We don’t have a strategy yet,' he said then.

CNN's Christiane Amanpour seemed out of patience on Tuesday.

'You say "stay tuned," she snapped at McGurk, 'but in the meantime ISIS is busy beheading our colleagues, threatening more of them, massacring people on the ground and conducting the kind of brutality that we haven't seen in a long, long time.'

Shortly after McGurk finished his interview, Obama strode past reporters on his way to Marine One without acknowledging them.

'No questions could be heard above the helicopter engine and no answers were given by the president,' according to a White House pool reporter.

The U.S. State Department, meanwhile, tried to drown out the bad news with press releases about a 'global sports mentoring program,' a groundbreaking ceremony for the U.S. Diplomacy Center,' and the '5th European Transgender Council Meeting.' 

After an eight-hour flight, Obama will wake up in Estonia for multilateral talks before continuing to Wales for a NATO summit. 

He will be accompanied by a subset of the White House press corps, as he was on Martha's Vineyard when his golf game became international news.

Barely ten minutes after reading a resolute anti-ISIS message from a makeshift podium following Foley's beheading, the vacationing Obama was at the first tee.

The photos that emerged hours later angered Americans who saw the commander-in-chief's grins and fist-bumps as a sign of disrespect while the dead journalist's family mourned. 

Members of Congress from the political left and right showed Tuesday that they are growing weary of the White House's slow-developing approach to combating ISIS.

Republicans especially – but with Democrats softening – are demanding a plan to crush the group in its Syrian safe haven. 

'Mr. President,' South Carolina Lindsey Graham tweeted on Tuesday, 'if you can't come up with a strategy, at least tell us what the goal is.'

U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican, added on Twitter that 'we need to send a clear message to the Middle East and the rest of the world. There's only one way you deal with ISIS: You kill them.'

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, a California Republican, told CNN that the Sotloff video 'is exactly the reason why we have to go after ISIS, why we cannot just let them wreak havoc. They’re killers. They’re brutal.' 

Seasoned Capitol Hill Democrats are beginning to question Obama's wait-and-see posture too.

Royce's counterpart Rep. Elliot Engel, who his the committee's ranking Democrat and a New Yorker, said he favored airstrikes in Syria.

'Yes, I do,' he told CNN.

'ISIS is obviously across the [Iraq] border, into Syria ... and they really have to be defeated,' he said.

Senate Intelligence Committee chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, told NBC on Sunday that she has 'learned one thing about this president, and that is he’s very cautious. Maybe in this instance too cautious.'