President Obama’s speech tonight about terrorism and ISIS lasted about 15 minutes. But Fox News spent the next two hours and 45 minutes attacking Obama and largely ignoring the substance of the issues he addressed. Typical Fox. However, Brit Hume took Fox’s obsessive Obama bashing to new highs (or lows) when he complained that Obama said we will do “what it takes” and not “whatever it takes” to eliminate the ISIS threat.
After the speech, The Kelly File assembled a panel without a single Obama defender, including Democratic Obama critic Kirsten Powers. What a coincidence.
Hume led off the criticism, I mean discussion, with this comment:
Nothing that we heard tonight was really beyond what we expected. I was eager to hear him describe the threat. Because there’s a certain logic to these things. If the threat is sufficiently great to American interests and to America itself, then it seems that one would do whatever it takes to eliminate the threat.
He didn’t quite go that far. He said he was determined to destroy ISIS but you heard him at the end when he was talking about what we do in these situations. He said, “We do what it takes.” He didn’t say, “We do whatever it takes.” And, of course, he couldn’t. Because if this campaign that he’s describing, with U.S. airpower supporting action on the ground by forces that he has belittled in the past – or in the case of the Iraqi military (which) has performed poorly in the past – doesn’t work, where does that leave us?
Yes, saying "what it takes" instead of "whatever it takes" is what passes for evidence on Fox that Obama is not up to the task of protecting us. Other than being a Democrat, of course.
On Monday, the New York Times quoted Congressman Jack Kingston (who supports Congressional authorization for the use of force) explaining why his fellow House Republicans would prefer not to have an authorization vote: “We like the path we’re on now. We can denounce it if it goes bad, and praise it if it goes well and ask what took him so long.”
Clearly, Fox is going to be a willing partner in that effort.
Watch the straw grasping below.
They started with a celebration of Dick Cheney’s no-holds barred attack on President Obama in the morning. They followed that up with a bunch of hysteria on the other programs, usually demanding that President Obama close our borders, publicly and tearfully announce how wrong he’s always been, and essentially resign from office. Then on Greta’s show, they decided to call on that great foreign policy sage, Mitt Romney!
So it wasn’t much of a surprise to see these guys waiting in the weeds to attack every single thing he said as soon as they could. I got the impression they were raring to go all the way through his remarks.
What’s interesting about all this nastiness is that I wonder how these guys would have reacted if CNN had done anything like this during the George W. Bush presidency. For example, when Bush announced he was going to invade Iraq, how would Fox News have reacted if Al Gore had pre-empted his announcement with a public statement that he didn’t think Bush knew what he was doing? How would Fox News have reacted if every single pundit on the other channels had spent that day personally and publicly attacking Bush for incompetence?
;^)
Btw, I wonder if polls this morning are showing the the folks liked/approved of the President’s speech. The reason I ask is because, while the F&F stooges are doing more than their fair share of bashing this morning, there was one segment this morning (between Lizzie and 3 Euphinisms for a Penis) that caught my eye because of the thumbs up it gave Obama.
While Penis3 made sure to slip in a shot by asking will the President’s “actions match the rhetoric” and that he needs to do better than he’s done in the past, he did at least say that the speech was made to great effect and that we should give the President a chance by standing with him to defeat ISIL. Penis3 did dishonestly claim that “for the first time we heard a President, President Obama, invoking American exceptionalism and American nationalism” but he did seem to like Obama’s speech and found it compelling. Okay, that was rather nice to hear from a FOX "news " talking head.
But what was rather telling is that, in order to give Obama some praise, Penis3 had make sure and diminish Obama a bit by saying that he and his speech writers must have looked back on the speeches of Clinton, Lincoln and Reagan. And then what does F&F do? They play a speech clip from St. Ronnie. (eye roll) Perhaps all Presidents do indeed draw inspiration from other Presidential speeches but I think it was a rather tacky/unneccessary remark to toss in there. I guess the remark was just Penis3’s way to justify the lame-ass airing of yet another Reagan clip.
And, just to make sure that Obama didn’t get full credit for what, by even his own admission was a compelling speech, Penis3 declared that Obama was trying “match that kind of compelling rhetoric” (meaning Reagan’s).
So, if polls show the folks approved of Obama’s speech (and maybe even his approval ratings go up), FOX “news” wants everyone to know that it really wasn’t because of Obama himself, what he said and/or the plans laid out in his speech. It was because Obama was trying to emulate Reagan. Reagan! Pffft.
Oh, and that Republican Congressman shows that Republicans (as usual) are more interested in what’s good for the Republican party than what’s good for the country. F*ck them.
