Krauthammer: Obama ‘Either Delusional Or Cynical’ on Islamic State

Columnist Charles Krauthammer argued that President Obama is either “delusional or cynical” in his explanation of the ISIS threat on Thursday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel.

Krauthammer said, [relevant remarks begin around 5:00] “in this particular case, with Obama, he sent out the signal from the first weeks he was in the white house, when he abolished the term the war on terror, and then his theme in his re-election campaign, and this is what I think sort of trapped him into this status where he is now, in denying as much as he can deny. The theme of the 2012 campaign was, the tide of war is receding, al Qaeda’s on the run, and has been decimated. So — and he ran on that, and there was — there’s a lot of evidence that they tried to make that case, that’s why with Benghazi, they had to invent the video, because otherwise the truth contradicted this idea, and that carried him into his re-election.”

Krauthammer continued, “Now, he’s sort of stuck with that. I mean, I don’t really know whether he truly believes, for example, that ISIS is less of a threat than just about everybody in the world thinks, or whether he’s being cynical about this. It’s not a good choice. Either delusional or cynical, I’m not sure which to choose. The benign explanation is that he got trapped into this running into 2012, and he’s stuck with the narrative that the tide of war is receding, and he keeps trying to insist on that, as we saw in the press conference he had over in Turkey, which was a disaster, and I think that’s really where he is, a state of denial, but quite cynically doing it, because he knows that his claim to fame, his foreign policy achievements, such as it is was going to be, ending the tide of war, and suppressing and decimating the terrorists.”

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