Newsbusters:
ABC Frets Over Pickle McChrystal Has Put Obama Into: Look 'Petulant' or 'Weak'
By Brent Baker Tue, 06/22/2010 - 20:41
ABC, CBS and NBC all led Tuesday night with multiple stories on the “firestorm” over disrespectful coments by General Stanley McChrystal and his aides about President Obama and other administration officials, but ABC's Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos particularly despaired over the position in which McChrystal has put Obama.
Sawyer fretted that Obama “now faces a mind-boggling choice,” before Stephanopoulos kvetched “the President has really been put in a real political box” and “a very painful political position,” forcing him to choose between “looking thin-skinned and petulant” or “looking weak.”
CBS's Katie Couric didn't go that far, but she was disturbed by the burden on Obama: “This controversy is about the last thing the President needed on his plate as he deals with two wars overseas and another against an invasion of oil off the gulf coast.”
Sawyer asked chief political correspondent/Good Morning America co-host Stephanopoulos: “What are you hearing, George?” He worried about Obama's plight:
That a debate has been raging inside the administration since this article hit last night, and that the President has really been put in a real political box. If he fires McChrystal after this, he risks looking thin-skinned and petulant. But if he accepts these words, which some consider insubordination, then he risks looking weak. So it's a very painful political position right now for the President.Sawyer had led the June 22 World News:
Good evening. There was a giant explosion heard around the world today, and it
had nothing to do with weapons. Everything to do with words. General Stanley
McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, gave an interview to a
magazine. And in it, he and his aides took aim at everyone from the President to
the Vice President to Senators and diplomats.
The General has been summoned to the White House by President Obama, who now faces a mind-boggling choice. Does he fire the man central to the war right before a major battle? Jake Tapper takes us inside a stunned and furious White House.
4 comments:
He must have "orchestrated" it to some extent. No general would grant that sort of interview without understanding that it would probably result in his firing or resignation. Given his praise for Hillary Clinton, is it unreasonable to wonder if this has anything to do with her possibly trying to wrest the Democratic nomination from Obama in 2012?
ABC is worried about the Obama "narrative." Pfffft!
"nattative" = spin = lie
Any general in such a war is hamstrung inasmuch as it is, short of nuclear attack and probably even then, unwinnable. The Presidential concern must be, now, to deploy a General Staff which can assiduously manage withdrawal with honour, whilst White House spinners devise formulae to validate this volte face. It's what they do. America has not conclusively won a war since Hiroshima. Vietnam was a national catastrophe, Iran remains a bloodbath.
Why should this current Hellhole, which neither the British nor Russian empires could control, prove amenable to the stumblebum gesturing initiatives of a stupefyingly narcissistic, erstwhile community organiser?
Post a Comment