Columnist Charles Krauthammer stated that President Obama’s reported quotation that he didn’t watch enough cable news to understand the anxiety people had about terrorism was him stating people “are not as cool, intelligent, and far-seeing as I am” on Friday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel.
Krauthammer said, “to me he was being sarcastic. He was — this is a way of dissing, of sort of showing condescension to the rabble our there. After all this is an interview he gave, January 23rd of this year. Asked, ‘Do you think the media sometimes overstates the level of alarm people should have about terrorism?’ Barack Obama, ‘Absolutely. And I don’t [even] blame the media for that. What’s the…saying…If it bleeds, it leads…You show crime stories [on local newscasts, right?]…because that’s what [the] folks watch.’ This is Obama essentially saying, well, you know, the reason people are upset about this, is because it’s been hyped on television, and they are not as cool, intelligent, and far-seeing as I am. This is his usual professorial condescension.”
Krauthammer later added, “What’s amazing to me is how he looks at himself in his role. He ended that little soundbite that you had by saying, Putin was wrong. I told him he was wrong. This is not going to work out well, and here we are five years later, I was right. And he sounds really satisfied with himself, because he won an upper common room argument over another professor. The fact is that whether he was right or not, is irrelevant. He did nothing about it. Yes he was right that it would be a terrible thing if you let Assad go, unrestrained, bomb his own people, you would end up with something horrible. So, he was right. But as president, you’re supposed to do something. He was urged by everybody in the administration, the military, diplomats, everybody, his advisers, to go and to do something. He does nothing, and yet he seems to be satisfied that because he had the analysis right, and he lectured Putin on this, it’s okay. His job to do something, not to offer analysis.”
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