“I think history will show [that Iraq’s] the wrong battlefield, okay? And I think that you were perspicacious in your original assessment of the battlefield.” -- Bill O’Reilly during his interview with Barack Obama. (3:41.)
Right after Governor Palin’s shots heard ‘round the world on Wednesday, Barack Obama decided to relent in his boycott of Fox News and sit for an interview with Bill O’Reilly.
Some accused Barack of doing it when he did to bogart John McCain’s acceptance speech on Thursday. I don’t believe so, as the interview ran more than 90 minutes before McCain spoke, and Obama’s advisors would have known that.
But I do believe Barack made the decision in direct response to being so badly exposed by the Axis of Cheerful on Wednesday night (Giuliani--Thompson--Palin) as a man whose election would be as effective a guarantee of foreign and domestic policy disaster as the country can imagine.
I also believe that Barack knew that he had little to fear from O’Reilly. I’m sure Barack’s decision to grant a mutual audience with O’Reilly had been vetted long before he finally agreed to face him, with full reassurances from his crack political analysts that O’Reilly--in spite of being the figurehead of all the fascist lineup at Fox News--had plenty enough blind spots to allow Obama to escape serious damage. There simply are things that O’Reilly doesn’t get, and Iraq is one of them.
As seen above from O’Reilly’s words when he raised the topic of Iraq, it turns out that the most powerful man at Fox News holds the identical opinion that Iraq is “the wrong war at the wrong time” as Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Nancy Pelosi. How could O’Reilly possibly confront Obama effectively about the latter’s policy judgments on Iraq when he shares the same errors himself? Obama knew all this about O'Reilly in advance, because O'Reilly's been repeating his "wrong battlefield" opinions for a couple years now. Obama had no fears that on the one foreign policy issue on which he is most vulnerable, he would risk nothing by facing O’Reilly.
Can you imagine anyone who understands the peril we face from global Islamic jihadism describing Barack Obama as “perspicacious”? Did I really hear O'Reilly say that after all the sturm und drang our country has been through over Iraq, Barack Obama was the only one who got it right?
O’Reilly also blew it when he let go unchallenged Obama’s statement that Iran was not part of the same network of Islamic enemies that America has been trying to respond to since 9/11--merely because there are differences between Shia and Sunni. Nor did he slap down Obama’s ridiculous contention that the Bush administration hasn’t been working hard enough with the Europeans when it comes to Iran. Both statements were demonstrably false, and they went by unchallenged.
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