Fox News provided “reaction” to President Obama’s speech on countering terrorism with two right-wing activists guaranteed to trash him and the speech. We're sure nobody at Fox was disappointed.
First up was Ric Grenell, identified by host Neil Cavuto as a former U.S. spokesperson at the UN under the George W. Bush administration. What was not mentioned was that Grenell is quite the Republican operative. He worked as an advisor to Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential campaign (against President Obama) and regularly goes on Fox to blame Obama for just about anything bad that’s happening in the world. Grenell is also behind a PR effort (eagerly embraced by Fox) to use troops to attack Bowe Bergdahl and, by extension, President Obama, over the prisoner swap that got Bergdahl freed.
Grenell said angrily about President Obama’s speech, “He was meandering, he was unfocused, he was weak, he literally, Neil, talked about isolating terrorists. You can’t isolate terrorists. He won’t even send them to Gitmo to isolate them. You need to kill the terrorists. He doesn’t understand the threat that we face. I’d like to know over this last week if he’s had his intel briefing. Because that is a man who doesn’t understand what we are up against. People are being burned in cages, and he’s talking about more investments, empowering youth for greater services, entrepreneurship, not profiling. This is ridiculous.”
The other guest, Ret. Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer was next. What Cavuto didn’t tell the “we report, you decide” network’s audience about Shaffer was that he’s also a “blame Obama first” conspiracy-theorist – except when he was a “blame Clinton, not Bush for 9/11” guy.
Shaffer shook his head in response to Obama’s speech. “Neil, I don’t remember the last time the Druids went out and started cutting people’s heads off nor the Buddhists,” Shaffer said, by way of attacking President Obama’s semantics. “I am completely appalled at the President’s inability to understand and focus. And he actually said something which I think is dangerous. We need to reject certain premises here, that is code for ignore. …The only nation I’m aware of which actually practices beheading as a part of official punishment is Saudi Arabia. …He is actually setting up a straw man which is completely false. You go on CNN right now, you go on MSNBC, you go on any of the networks, no one is saying the Muslims are at wrong here. It is clearly ISIS, it is clearly Al-Qaeda, it is clearly the Muslim brotherhood. We know who these people are.”
Fair and balanced analysis, Fox News style.
Watch it below, from today’s Your World.