On her Thursday broadcast, “The Kelly File” host Megyn Kelly brought on Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer to sound off on the latest excerpt of President Barack Obama’s interview with the New Yorker magazine’s David Remnick.
In that excerpt, Obama blamed Fox News and conservative talker Rush Limbaugh for the gridlock in Washington, D.C. Krauthammer noted Obama has “the commanding heights of the culture” in his corner and said it was unbecoming of the leader of the free world to complain on those grounds.
“At least he is not blaming it on climate change or George W. Bush,” Krauthammer said. “Look, it’s rather unseemly if you are the commander-in-chief, the leader of the free world and the most powerful man on earth who can reduce pieces of the planet to a cinder on his command, to get so whiny. You know when you pull the camera back and you look at the media landscape — on one side you got those elements in the media that are sympathetic or even worship at his feet. You’ve got ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, of course MSNBC. You’ve got Hollywood that’s sympathetic, the television/entertainment side. I mean, you got the major newspapers – The New York Times, The Washington Post. It’s what Lenin would call the commanding heights of the culture – are all on one side. And what do you have on the other side? Fox News and talk radio. And you’ve got a president of the United States complaining that that explains the failures of his administration.”
Krauthammer also took aim at Obama for failing to give respect to the other side when it comes to debating public policy.
“It goes way beyond that,” he said. “This is the best example you can find of Obama’s political and ideological self-righteousness. He truly believes that the way he sees the world, he says in this little snippet of the interview, that it’s pragmatic, it’s rational, all he wants to do is help the folks. And of course, anybody who is on the other side, anybody who sees say the biggest stimulus in American history or the takeover of one-sixth of the U.S. economy — with a scheme that is completely irrational and collapsing around him — anybody who says this is not working can only be either acting against the national interest or being suspicious of him without any reason.”
“He simply can’t accept the fact or at least in public he doesn’t accept the fact that one can actually have a view that contradicts his, that is in good faith, that is patriotic, and that also seeks the good of the country,” Krauthammer added. “So if you think as he does, self-righteously, that there is no way to oppose him and be honestly patriotic and sympathetic to the American people, then of course you have to attribute all of these evil motives to the other side who are preventing the people from receiving the message. I think it is a myopia, rather it is unbecoming, and in fact it often becomes repulsive. It is a refusal to give respect to the other side.”
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