Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer claimed there was too much news to air President Obama’s address in Cuba in its entirety. But that “important news” was little more than an excuse to bring on a Fox News military analyst to criticize Obama and pre-blame him for a Belgium-style ISIS attack that is surely on the way.
Hemmer interrupted Obama’s speech, saying, “Without question, a day of history between these two countries, the U.S. and Cuba. The important statement from the president a moment ago, ‘I have come here to bury the last remnants of the Cold War between the United States and Havana,’ that’s the headline from there.”
That may have been the headline from President Obama’s prepared remarks but what he actually said was that he came “to bury the last remnants of the Cold War in the Americas.” Hemmer didn't even bother to listen, apparently.
Hemmer announced that we could watch the rest of Obama’s speech online “but there is a lot of other news to get to and we don’t want to ignore that, given the events of the day.”
So what was the important news they had to leave President Obama’s speech to get to? Why it was a Fox News military analyst criticizing President Obama.
In a Fox News alert, cohost Martha MacCallum said that security is being stepped up in the U.S. in the wake of the Belgium attacks even though “there is no specific threat.”
But that was no reason not to fear monger about threats anyway.
MacCallum brought on military analyst Jack Keane to do exactly that and lay the blame at Obama’s feet.
After Keane highlighted ISIS’ successful tactics and its ability to “pull this off with extraordinary operational security” despite heightened scrutiny in Brussels for the last four months, he went on to suggest that we’re about to suffer the same fate thanks to Obama. And MacCallum was there to help.
KEANE: The reality is, we truly do not have a strategy to cope with radical Islam as it’s morphing into a global jihad which is even larger than ISIS itself, Martha.
MACCALLUM: The president just spoke about this very briefly, General, at the top of his comments in Cuba. What did you think?
KEANE: Well, I was stunned by how little he spent on what took place in Europe. Obviously, he has a planned speech to talk to his foreign policy initiative, to reach out to it but you can’t help but see the irony of it. He’s in the arms of a communist dictatorship in Cuba and he’s reached out to Iran as well at the expense of our allies in the Middle East, at the expense of the Cuban people in Cuba and meanwhile, we have radical Islam that is on fire in the Middle East, in Africa and in Europe and this president is not standing up and exercising what traditionally has been an American leadership role.
It was an American president who was the catalyst in Europe, post-World War II to stand up against communist ideology. There would not be a National Atlantic Treaty Organization, a political and military alliance, if it wasn’t for American leadership that recognized a threat and formed a political and military alliance to do it.
Where is our president now doing very much the same thing to organize Europeans, to organize the Middle East, to stand up against this threat and defeat this ideology? It is a generational struggle and we’re way behind the power curb in not stepping up to it. And this president will not do it, Martha, he will not do it.
MacCallum went on to note the comments of the Republican presidential candidates this morning and asked Keane, “All of those constructive ideas in your opinion?”
Keane didn’t want to go there but he did fear monger that ISIS has a “safe haven” in Syria, much like Al Qaeda once had a safe heaven in Afghanistan and the result was, eventually, 9/11. “So what is our strategy to defeat the safe haven in Syria?” he asked.
In other words, there was no other news covered in this “Fox News Alert” that was supposedly more important than our president’s historic address. It was just political analysis of the sort we regularly hear on Fox, that offered no new facts and that could have been presented at any time.
Watch it below, from the March 22 America’s Newsroom.