Forgetting and Deflecting on Terror: Unsupported Attacks from Monica Crowley and Gretchen Carlson

BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
by Jeffrey Joseph

BuzzFlash readers know better than to expect FOX News personalities to approach issues such as the Christmas Day attack with logic or truth. The main differentiation among them, rather, may be whether the individual's hubris is enough to boldly state obvious lies or if the person tries to repeatedly slant the personal views of "informed sources" to diminish personal journalistic responsibility.

Monica Crowley clearly prefers the former. Trying to criticize President Obama for his response to the Christmas attack and his broad national security stance, Crowley tried to argue during an appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor" that "after 9/11, President Bush and Vice President Cheney had a 100% perfect track record in keeping the homeland safe from an Islamic terrorist attack."

Showing a brief moment of clarity, Bill O'Reilly immediately counters, "What about the shoe bomber?"

"Well, that was coming into the United States, it was not a domestic terror attack. I mean, it was meant to be, but it was stopped by the folks on [the] plane." So thwarting an attack means it does not count by that logic, correct? "But so far this year we've had a dramatic uptick in the number of attacks that have actually been successful in being carried out," she continues, including "the arrest of five Muslim-Americans coming out of Washington, DC, in Pakistan on terrorism charges, and the list goes on, and now, of course, we have this Detroit bombing."

The arrests near DC, however, took place before any attack took place and the "Detroit bombing" Crowley refers to had also been on a flight on the way to the U.S. "stopped by the folks on [the] plane," very much like the shoe bomber.

Crowley's obvious contradiction in claims also glosses over several important points about terrorism under President Bush. For one, the U.S. did endure thousands of deaths in the 9/11 attack while in the first year of Bush's presidency. Based on that alone, President Barack Obama has done a significantly better job against terrorism in a very real, quantitative sense.

Furthermore, attacks such as the one in an LA airport in 2002 also included the tragic loss of lives. Local officials initially labeled the attack on the El Al counter an isolated incident, but Ephraim Sneh, the Israeli transportation minister, contended, "It's the most logical assumption that when someone opens fire on an El Al counter in an international airport, most likely this is a terror attack." Eventually, the Department of Justice agreed.

Crowley simply puts forth blatant lies to rail on the current administration. Gretchen Carlson prefers to disguise her criticism as the opinions of others. Discussing on Fox & Friends how National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter, someone put in place during the Bush Administration, did not immediately return from his vacation upon hearing of the Detroit attack, Carlson said, "That would be the microcosm of what some people would say is the macrocosm of this administration's viewpoints on the war on terror, that, some would argue, that if it's not taken seriously or if you have a different ideology about apologizing to these Muslim terrorists, some would say, instead of actually taking them on head on, then this is the kind of action that you get from your top people, that they also don't think that it's that important to get back from vacation."

Somewhere in the back of her mind, Carlson knows suggesting that indicting a would-be terrorist hardly qualifies as "apologizing to these Muslim terrorists," hence the repeated formulations of "some would say" and synonymous deflections. In around 15 seconds of airtime, Carlson tries to qualify her statement three times with phrasing implying that the unsupported attacks against the administration come not from her, but from some other unidentified source.

Either way, FOX News presents unsupported attacks against the Obama Administration as common knowledge or given fact when they are often far from either. Until FOX contributors learn to at least do some basic research before condemning their political opponents, they deserve to be ignored -- and the easiest way to do so is to Turn Off FOX.

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Originally posted at Turn Off FOX.

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