-By Warner Todd Huston
On Wednesday, November 14, President Obama held his first full-scale press conference and despite continuing to speak in generalities, Reuters was somehow impressed by the supposed revelation of his second-term agenda. The President was “feisty” yet “conciliatory,” Reuters claimed.
Reuters was so gratified that Obama gave a “feisty defense” of U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice that it led its piece with that part of the presser. It was Rice who was one of the loudest, early voices claiming that the attacks in Benghazi that killed four Americans was the result of some unknown Youtube video — a claim solidly proven false soon after the attacks occurred.
During the presser, it was mentioned to the President that several Republican Senators vowed that if Obama offered up Rice as a candidate for Secretary of State in the stead of the departing Hillary Clinton, they would work to oppose the pick. Obama’s defense of Ambassador Rice was so strong one would think she might be a delicate flower that needs a strong man to come to her rescue.
But, the GOP Senators are right. Rice would be a disaster in that position, not just for the U.S., but also for our ally, Israel. Susan Rice is virulently anti-Israel and has shown her disdain for Israeli officials in the past.
In its coverage of the presser, Reuters does not note that Obama mostly tap-danced around nearly every question about his failures in Benghazi. But one thing he did say which seems to be an outright falsehood was that he ordered his administration to do all it could to make murdered Ambassador Stevens safe.
When Ed Henry of Fox News asked the President to address the families that lost their loved ones in the Benghazi attack, Obama disingenuously claimed he did all he could to keep them safe.
I can tell you that immediately upon finding out that our folks were in danger, that my orders to my National Security team were do whatever we need to do to make sure they’re safe. And that’s the same order that I would give anytime that I see Americans are in danger, whether they’re civilian or military, because that’s our number one priority.
This hardly seems right. We have several stories from folks on the ground that prove that Obama abandoned Ambassador Stevens and his protection detail. Worse, in the months leading up to the attack Obama denied Ambassador Stevens’ requests for more security. Even during the attack Obama refused to employ key assets to help Stevens.
Reuters somehow forgets to mention this as the news service gushes its favorite “feisty” President
Reuters went on to talk of Obama’s “relaxed banter” with reporters and his “conciliatory tone” as he talked about attempting to come up with solutions to the growing fiscal crisis the country faces.
But Reuters seemed to have missed that Obama also employed his common demagoguery in a subtle attack on Republicans, claiming that if they don’t agree with him on soaking the rich with new tax hikes, “disabled people” and children will be harmed. In response to a question from NBC’s Chuck Todd, Obama said,
I don’t want to find ourselves in a position six months from now or a year from now where, lo and behold, the only way to close the deficit is to sock it to middle-class families or to burden families that have disabled kids or, you know, have a parent in a nursing home, or suddenly we’ve got to cut more out of our basic research budget that is the key to growing the economy in the long term.
So, not soaking the rich necessarily means that disabled kids and people in nursing homes will be harmed?
Deploying more absurd demagoguery, Obama also claimed that the middle class might somehow be forced to “bear the entire burden” of the economic fiscal disaster. As if “the rich” already aren’t “paying their fair share.”
And if there’s — one thing that I’m pretty confident about is the American people understood what they were getting when they gave me this incredible privilege of being in office for another four years. They want compromise. They wanted action. But they also want to make sure that middle-class folks aren’t bearing the entire burden and sacrifice when it comes to some of these big challenges. They expect that folks at the top are doing their fair share as well, and that’s going to be my guiding principle during these negotiations but, more importantly, during the next four years of my administration.
As has been said ad nauseum, the “rich” already pay most of the taxes in this country.
Despite Reuters claims that President Obama laid out a real agenda and that he gave substantive answers to much of anything, what we really saw was a typical Obama performance filled with generalities, demagoguery and bullying. Not much of a second agenda. Sounds more like the first one he failed to achieve. Just more of the same.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.