The problem is that reportedly the President doesn’t watch much television and receives his information about cable news secondhand. From guys like Rahm Emanuel. So he’s teed off at Fox News. He might not be if he actually watched us, although, to be fair, the hours from 5:00 to 6:00 P.M. and 9:00 to 10:00 P.M. would not exactly soothe Mr. Obama.
And so, there is no question that there is an animus between the Obama people and Fox News.
Quick story: After doing the aforementioned interview with then-Senator Obama in York, Pennsylvania, my staff and I had pictures taken with him. Shortly after he won the election, we sent the pictures to Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs and asked if the President would be kind enough to sign them. By the way, many of my staff voted for Obama, and mindful of the growing deficit, we included return postage.
The pictures did not come back.
So I called Gibbs and threatened to visit his house if the photos weren’t returned. A few weeks later, back they came.
They were signed by autopen. We took them to Christie’s auction house in New York City for verification. The writing expert we consulted actually laughed.
Thanks a lot, Robert Gibbs.
Several more weeks passed before I saw Gibbs at the White House Correspondent’s dinner in Washington and gave him some grief. He said it was a terrible mistake and asked me to please resend the pictures, which I did.
Months later, President Obama wrote this note on the picture of him and me: “To Bill—I enjoyed our conversation and look forward to more in the future.”
Then he signed it. Very nice, don’t you think?
Yours truly with then-Senator Barack Obama in a photograph that took almost as many months to sign as the health care bill!
Author’s Collection
When I told my colleague Glenn Beck about the signed photo, he said I should put it alongside the one President Andrew Jackson personalized for me. Beck loves age jokes.
The whole signed picture deal is a small thing, to be sure, but it is somewhat telling and speaks to the matter of respect. I am betting big money that NBC’s Brian Williams has a signed photo of him and the President hanging on his office wall, and that he did not wait more than a year to get it. Anyone care to take that wager?
Now I have a prediction: in order to demonstrate how petty I am toward the Obama administration, a number of left-wing book reviewers will pick up on the anecdote you just read and decry my “ego.” They’ll ignore the contextual message of the picture story and harp on my “bitterness.” After writing eight books, I know these people very well. Sadly, many book reviewers are ideological Pinheads, and readers are often deceived or driven away from worthy books by their biased remarks.
But back to reality. The White House war on Fox News lasted just short of two weeks. Then other events overtook the nonsense. But it was fun while it lasted, and very profitable. Fox News increased its lead over CNN and MSNBC by even wider margins. One CNN guy told me he asked Gibbs to declare war on Larry King. I mean, why not?
Let me put one final nail in the war-on-Fox-News coffin and offer a postscript that is fascinating. By doing battle with FNC, the Obama administration attacked some Democrats and Independents as well. According to a Pew Research Center study done in 2008, the Fox News audience breaks down this way:
39 percent Republican
33 percent Democrat
22 percent Independent
So the Obama administration must not have considered the “friendly fire” factor before launching the first missile. The administration also did not count on the ultimate unintended consequence. Ready? This is really sweet.
On January 14, 2010, the Public Policy Polling organization, a company that usually works for Democrats, issued a press release with the headline: “Fox the Most Trusted Name in News?”
Here’s the first part of the dispatch:
* * *
FOX THE MOST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS?
Raleigh, N.C.—A new poll asking Americans whether they trust each of the major television news organizations in the country finds that the only one getting a positive review is Fox News. CNN does next best followed by NBC News, then CBS News, and finally ABC News.
49% of Americans say they trust Fox News to 37% who [do not]…. 39% say they trust [CNN] compared to 41% who do not…. 35% trust NBC News, 44% do not….
[For CBS News the trust percentage was 32%, with 46% not trusting. ABC News clocked in at just 31% trusting, 46% not trusting.]
* * *
The release went on to say: “PPP conducted a national survey of 1,151 registered voters on January 18th and 19th. The survey’s margin of error is plus or minus 2.8%.”
Can you imagine the White House reaction to that poll? And it gets even worse for them. Men and women trust FNC equally. Fifty-three percent of Hispanic Americans trust Fox News, and African Americans are split: 38 percent trust us, 38 percent don’t. The rest aren’t sure.
The liberal media would have you believe the only people who trust FNC are angry old white guys. Apparently not. The poll says 61 percent of Americans ages eighteen to twenty-nine are confident FNC is telling them the straight story.
The Public Policy Polling exposition was a huge win for Fox News and embarrassed the other networks, all of which have been in the news business far longer than FNC.
The culmination of all this brouhaha came during the same week, January 18–24. Stunningly, Fox News was the highest-rated cable network—not news channel—in the United States. We beat USA, ESPN, the Caterpillar Channel, everybody. Thanks again, Obama administration! And I mean that.
My hypothetical interpretation is that only one TV news network did not outwardly root for Barack Obama: Fox. Therefore, when things began to go south for the President, voters were reminded of that, especially after the brief “war” between us. Again, it’s not that FNC is anti-Obama, it’s that we are not in the proverbial tank for him, as so many other news networks and commentators are. That is why viewers are coming to us and apparently trusting us.
MAJOR GAFFE
The disastrous shoot-out with Fox News was the first in a series of events that scorched the President’s cool image. On November 5, 2009, an act of terrorism rocked the country when an army psychiatrist, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, went on a rampage, murdering thirteen people and wounding twenty-nine others at Fort Hood, Texas. Almost immediately, a debate erupted over the description of the massacre: Why weren’t the media and the administration calling Hasan what he obviously was, a Muslim crazy with jihad?
As each day passed, evidence that the killer was a vicious terrorist mounted. Hasan had e-mailed a top al-Qaeda recruiter in Yemen eighteen times and had a history of making jihadist statements. He also carried a business card with the letters SOA: Soldier of Allah. But some politically correct folks, mainly in the media, simply refused to describe Hasan as a Muslim terrorist, making themselves look ridiculous.
President Obama’s reaction was interesting as well. Here’s how the conservative Washington Times described it:
Hours after the Fort Hood massacre, a grieving nation looked to the President for consolation and leadership. Instead, it got light banter and a “shout out” before President Obama read a perfunctory statement.
Mr. Obama was scheduled to speak at the Tribal Nations Conference hosted by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. Rather than canceling the photo op or addressing the tragedy from another venue, the President chose to open with the kind of obligatory thanks and recognition that would be appropriate in any other circumstance but not this one. The emotional shift was jarring and confusing. It was as though he were an actor switching scripts heedless of the emotional content of the event he was addressing.
[President] Bush also suffered his critics’ ire for reading The Pet Goat to a group of schoolchildren…after he was informed of the aircraft hitting the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
[This] was Mr. Obama’s Pet Goat moment.
Only it w
asn’t.
The national media quickly buried the story, leaving it to the conservative ideologues on talk radio. Although a few liberal organizations like the Boston Globe did criticize the President’s initial remarks, the media largely protected him.
So was the Fort Hood gaffe really that big a deal? The answer is no. Mr. Obama made a mistake, as Presidents often do. He also urged the nation to avoid “jumping to conclusions” about Major Hasan—nothing wrong with a call for temperance when emotions are running high. No, the President’s reactions to the Fort Hood horror were not a big deal. But his failure to confront the evil involved in the massacre is.
Major Nidal Hasan (left), the psychiatrist accused of gunning down thirteen people in Fort Hood, Texas, appears at a pretrial hearing.
Associated Press/AP
Photographed by Pool, Pat Lopez via WFAA
The pattern we are seeing with President Obama is that evil doesn’t really matter all that much; it’s treated as just another bump in the road. We now know that Hasan was a troubled man who got preferential treatment, despite prior instances of disturbing behavior and poor performance reviews, because he’s a Muslim. That insane situation directly led to the deaths of thirteen people.
Did President Obama address that situation? No, he did not. That is not the President’s style. Unlike President Bush the Younger and Ronald Reagan before him, Mr. Obama does not like to confront people with their sins. There is no “Axis of Evil” or “Evil Empire” rhetoric coming out of the Obama White House. That would be too “divisive.” Instead, the President prides himself on keeping cool while dealing with destructive elements. No heated dress-downs for him…unless we’re talking about Fox News personnel.
The problem with that approach is that it goes against the American way. We are a nation that makes value judgments and demands that the bad guys pay a price. Hasan is a terrorist, and that’s that. Most Americans reject nuance when dealing with mass murderers, and they don’t give a fig about political correctness.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, former CIA officer Reuel Marc Gerecht was blunt about Mr. Obama’s lack of passion in the face of persistent terrorism:
President Barack Obama’s determined effort not to mention Islam in terrorist discussions—which means that we must not suggest Major Hasan’s murderous activities flowed from his faith—will weaken American counterterrorism. Worse, the President’s position is an enormous wasted opportunity to advance an all-critical Muslim debate about the nature and legitimacy of jihad.
[Obama] could ask, as some Muslims have, why is it that Islam has produced so many jihadists? Why is it that Major Hasan’s rampage has produced so little questioning among Muslim clerics about why a man, one in a long line of Muslim militants, so easily takes God’s name to slaughter his fellow citizens?
TRIAL AND ERROR
That analysis leads us to the discussion of one of the most absurd decisions I have ever seen a President make: civilian trials for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four of his al-Qaeda thug friends.
As you most likely know, on November 13, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that KSM would be tried in a New York City federal court and that the government would seek the death penalty. Holder acknowledged that the terrorist could have been placed in front of a military tribunal, which would have protected national security information far better than the civilian system will. Military trials are also much less expensive.
By the way, when Holder made his controversial announcement President Obama was in Asia. Far away. Not close by.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a hard-core al-Qaeda operative who admitted planning the attacks on the World Trade Center and Washington, D.C. He also says he personally beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
After his capture in Pakistan, KSM was waterboarded and held at Guantánamo Bay for more than three years, so some believe that the Obama administration wanted to allow a full exposition of KSM’s captivity in order to embarrass the Bush administration. That’s speculation, but the initial decision to try the terrorists in New York City makes little sense unless there was indeed some kind of political component.
Anger mounted as reports said the trial was estimated to take years and could cost as much as $800 million, a tab that the taxpayers would have to pick up. Lawyers for the terrorists said openly that they intended to put the United States on trial. It is a foregone conclusion that the thugs are guilty, so the only thing they have to gain is the opportunity to spread al-Qaeda propaganda, which the terrorists would almost certainly do. Just look at how Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-born terrorist who admitted trying to set off a bomb in Times Square, used his arraignment hearing as a press op for his anti-American “cause.”
They love this stuff in Islamabad.
The word Pinhead does not even come close to describing what kind of person would support giving these killers more of a worldwide propaganda forum. I am on record as admiring Barack Obama’s intelligence and drive. But the New York City/KSM deal was flat-out stupid, and every poll showed that most Americans realized that. For example, a Gallup poll taken a few days after the KSM announcement showed 59 percent of Americans favoring military justice for old Khalid and his mates. Just 36 percent supported the ridiculous civilian venue.
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) addresses the impact of bringing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other terror suspects to American soil for trial.
Associated Press/AP
Photographed by Manuel Balce Ceneta
In addition, the Obama administration’s desire to allow these killers another shot at demeaning America brought pain to the families and friends of those murdered on 9/11. In my area on Long Island, hundreds of innocent people woke up that terrible morning, went to work, and never came back. And the President turns around and tells surviving family members that al-Qaeda members captured overseas are entitled to U.S. constitutional protections? What a foolish, foolish decision. And one that hurt the President’s job approval rating. It was just a matter of time before that confounding decision had to be reversed. Unfortunately, the President took his time righting this wrong, the same way he took his time deploying additional troops to Afghanistan. In the interim, the chaos made him look weak.
Remember, Mr. Obama told CNN that he did not personally order the decision to try KSM and the others in New York City but had allowed Holder to make it “based on the law.” The President also said KSM and his pals would be found guilty and executed.
Upon hearing that, ACLU lawyers jotted down these words: “polluted jury.”
A few days later, in a bizarre display in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Holder seemed befuddled by questions about his decision. He dodged and weaved before Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina finally knocked him out.
Lindsey Graham: Can you give me one case in United States history where an enemy combatant caught on the battlefield was tried in civilian court?
Eric Holder: I don’t know, I’d have to look at that, you know, the determination.
Lindsey Graham: We’re making history here, Mr. Attorney General. I’ll answer it for you, and the answer is: None.
By the middle of November 2009 Barack Obama’s job approval rating was crashing. The softness he showed on Fort Hood and the mind-boggling Khalid Sheikh Mohammed decision had made a deep impression. Also, the continuing health care chaos weighed heavily on his image, as did his reluctance to make a decision about sending more troops to Afghanistan. On November 18 the Rasmussen daily tracking poll of likely voters had showed 52 percent of Americans disapproving of the President’s job performance. That is a stunning number for a President who took office just ten months earlier with approval numbers in the high 60s because of his pledge to bring change we can believe in.
Roughly four months later, the Obama administration put up a white flag. During the first week in March 2010 unnamed “White House sources” whispered to Fox News and the Washington Post that the President
was “rethinking” Holder’s plan to try KSM in New York and most likely would return him and four other al-Qaeda thugs to the military for trial.
You can imagine how that went over in San Francisco, where the liberal ideology reigns.
Actually, for those clear-thinking Americans who want a robust defense against fanatical al-Qaeda members, the Khalid fiasco turned out to be a positive. Because the President had no idea what to do with the man and his cohorts, the prison at Guantánamo Bay remained open far longer than many Obama supporters thought it would. As time marched on, Khalid and his gang continued to cool their heels behind the barbed-wire-ringed facility. Attorney General Holder tried his hardest to give the al-Qaeda members a forum but failed dismally. Have I called Holder a Pinhead yet?
FIRE AND ICE
The presidential election of 2008 is just a distant memory for many of us, but one thing is clear: eighteen months after President Obama’s triumphant inauguration, the country had turned on him. A Gallup poll on June 24, 2010, said that 62 percent of Americans believed the country was heading in the wrong direction. That was the highest number since before Mr. Obama won the election. So what went wrong?