Fox News anchor Shepard Smith provided some useful history on Friday about many of the same people who are now pressuring the Obama administration to take military action in Iraq, where Islamic militants have overrun two cities in recent days as they march toward Baghdad.
Smith kicked off his afternoon broadcast with a recap of the deteriorating security situation in Iraq before he offered a barely veiled commentary on the debate playing out here in the United States.
“Are we about to be drawn back into a conflict in Iraq?” Smith asked. “The same people who 12 years ago told us this will be quick, this will be easy, this will be inexpensive, they will see us as liberators, it’s the right thing to do, are now telling us: It’s the right thing to do. What’s the endgame? Who’s thought this through?”
Later in the broadcast, Smith, who’s earned a reputation for occasionally bucking his employer’s conservative orthodoxy, told fellow Fox News host Chris Wallace he still hasn’t forgotten “being bamboozled” by the Bush administration before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
“Well, I remember it. I think it would be wrong for us to just sit around and listen and not ask big questions,” Smith said.
At the end of his interview with Wallace, Smith said he believes the media “will operate differently this time than it did the last time.”
“I hope we do, hope we do,” Smith said. “I hope we ask lots of questions.”
President Obama on Friday did not rule out some kind of U.S. military action in Iraq, but he said there will be no American ground troops deployed there.
Do they keep him on FOX just so they can show they are “balanced?” (even if such honest comments from him account for an infinitesimal amount of FOX “reporting”)
And here I thought FOX was still cheerleading for everything Bush? Why would they consider any other Republican any different?
Yes, the media will ask tough questions like, 'Pres. Obama, was John McCain right?" ‘Pres. Obama, would you agree that the problem in Iraq to be blamed on your administration?’ ‘Sen. McCain, do you feel vindicated about what would happen in Iraq?’
The media knows how to ask the tough questions and how to get to the truth.
Yup. That’d be the people your network have been blindly supporting for about 15 years.
I’m with Obama on this one. No more American women and men killed or wounded for these freaking medieval minded piece of crap of Iraqis. We have given them the once in a lifetime opportunity to be a different Country, to live past their differences, to not be afraid anymore of some Saddam and his sons killing and maiming and gassing them. They squandered the opportunity, the hell with them. I don’t want to see anymore American kids with the flag that covered their father’s or mother’s caskets in their hands, crying over their graves.
If they want the freaking sharia law let them have it, if they don’t, let THEM fight against it. And if they ever turn their guns on us, we have more than enough power, without going nuclear, to pound them stupid from the distance. Screw Iraq!!!