“Reassures the gallant Filipinos”...and right around this time was when SecWar Henry Stimson made his infamous note “There comes a time when men must die”.
and re: fleet “is not idle”
Even if matters had not gone so badly in the opening days the USA simply had not deployed the kinds of air and naval units in the western Pacific that had any chance of stopping Japanese advances.
Atlantic commitments plus slow re-armament meant that we had no plausible hope of keeping the Japanese out of the Philipines, Indonesia etc.
Whether or not the relevant US leaders understood this before Dec. 1941, the Japanese certainly knew it....