Fox's Ed Henry gets his rear end handed to him during a press conference overseas, and so naturally his cohorts were ready to go on the attack and take up for him. After showing a very short portion of President Obama's presser last night, Special Report "all star panel" members Charles Krauthammer and Steve Hayes proceeded to do some damage control for Henry.
Heaven forbid they're going to let anything get in the way of their narrative of continually calling President Obama "weak."
KRAUTHAMMER: He seems to think, and he creates this straw man, that the only alternative to the policy of total weakness he's been showing in Ukraine is to land troops somewhere in Ukraine. There's nobody advocating that. He thinks all he has to do is say the word Iraq and he's made an argument. And then he says, as we just heard, that if anybody thinks that if arms in Ukraine will deter anybody. Instead he's saying these sanctions I'm doing are going to have an effect. Well, I'll tell you what kind of effect the sanctions he announced today are. The stock market in Moscow went up two percent and the Ruble went up one percent.
Krauthammer knows all about those straw men given the number he used himself here. He went onto insist that we ought to be giving the Ukrainians weapons and that President Obama ought to be taking lessons on containing the Russians from Harry Truman in 1946. I guess it's asking too much for Krauthammer to bring up some more recent history or to have learned any lessons from what happened when we armed our "friends" in Afghanistan.
Not to be outdone, Cheney biographer Steve Hayes attacked the Obama administration for saying they want to de-escalate the situation in Ukraine with Russia, and attacked President Obama for "not having any ideas of his own" and for god forbid, defining himself "in opposition to his predecessor."
HAYES: I guess what's really troubling about this is the President of the United States, nearly six years in to his administration continues to define himself in opposition to his predecessor. I mean, do you not have any ideas of your own?! It's not the case, as Charles suggests, that the only thing you can do is send in troops. And it wasn't even the case that George W. Bush sent troops everywhere.
I mean, there was discussion of starting a war in Iran. George W. Bush didn't do that. It's a mischaracterization of the Bush doctrine. President Obama seems to not even have his own doctrine in his response to Ed Henry. And finally, if you look at the way the president talks about these things, this is what he was supposed to be good at.
Remember, this is what they sold themselves on in the 2008 campaign. We are good at diplomatic power. We won't need to resort to the use of force, because we're so good at everything else and clearly I think the state of the world and particularly the state of the Russian Ukraine confrontation suggests they were wrong about that too.
President Obama and his administration had a mess on their hands to clean up after Hayes' heroes Bush and Cheney left office that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies. I guess they didn't clean it up fast enough to suit Hayes. It also seems he wants credit now for the Bush administration not invading Iran, even though the neocons are continually pushing for military intervention with Iran to this day. If there's some legitimate criticism of the Obama administration's foreign policy, it's for being too much like the Bush administration when it comes to their so-called "war on terror." It sure as hell is not for refusing to follow their constant aggression and chest beating that made America so hated around the world.
They wrapped thing up with the latest right-wing outrage of the day... attacking John Kerry for dancing around the fact that Israel is already an apartheid state. Juan Williams did manage to point out that there are Israeli officials that agree with Kerry's statement, but that didn't matter to Krauthammer. Get rid of him now!!!
The Obama administration needs foreign policy advice from these two like they need a hole in their heads.
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