On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” columnist Charles Krauthammer blasted the Obama administration’s reluctance to name Islamic extremist terrorism and argued that Democratic presidential nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is “tied to the hip” to President Obama’s “soft” ISIS policies.
Krauthammer said that while ISIS recruiting is slowing due to ISIS slowly losing on the ground, with the Obama administration’s view everything on ISIS, “Everything is soft. Everything is ideological, and nothing matters on the ground. Everything hinges on what happens on the ground.”
He added, [relevant remarks begin around 4:15 of the first video] that Clinton’s candidacy is a third term of Obama’s presidency, “It always is at the end of a two-term presidency, whether it’s a former vice president or secretary of state. It’s particularly true in this case, because she was involved in the decisions. Yes, according to the memoirs, she was more hawkish than Obama on Syria, Libya that’s not exactly a talking point, and other places, but nonetheless, she’s tied to the hip to Obama and the policies, and even when you hear the presidential spokesman today speaking about narratives, it washes over on her. There’s no escaping that.”
In the second segment, Krauthammer said, “[I]t is absolutely clear that the administration’s reluctance and denial hovers somewhere between the inexplicable and the delusional. This is time after time, as you showed, there is always an attempt to say anything other than what these things are. The way not to use the word terrorist, the way that the Fort Hood shooter was called workplace violence for months, and the way, even in this instance, which was obviously a terror attack, there’s a reluctance to use the term. And they’re still pondering now about the guy who stabbed the people in the mall in Minnesota. He, according to eyewitnesses, he went around and asked people if they were Muslim, and he used — he invoked Allah. what more do you need? and then the idea that somehow if it’s a lone wolf, it’s of a lesser category, as if in the absence of an absolute letter of instruction handwritten in Raqqa by the leader of ISIS, it counts for less. It counts for the same. And it’s only — the only explanation is a president who wants to deny what’s going on and to pretend it is not the threat it is, and that gives the fuel to Republicans in general, and to Trump in particular.”
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