Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer turned heads this week when he criticized President Obama’s approach to dealing with the rise of the Islamic State. Hemmer said Tuesday he doesn’t regret it a bit.
Obama tried in a press conference Monday to assure reporters that he has ISIS under control, even after terrorist attacks in Paris last week left 129 people dead and hundreds more injured.
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The president later took questions from reporters, and that didn’t appear to go so well for him: His answers were terse and increasingly blunt as he repeated again and again that he has everything under control.
Following the press conference, Hemmer, who anchors in the morning, let loose with some personal remarks.
“If you were waiting to hear a US President say, ‘I feel your pain’ or if you were waiting to hear a US President say, ‘It’s them or us,’ that is not what you just heard,” Fox News Bill Hemmer said.
“President Obama has made it quite clear in that Q-and-A that lasted more than 45 minutes that he has accepted there are evils in this world and evils in places like Paris, France and this is something that we all must face today … If you’re at home wondering with your own set of anger and your own set of fears about what can happen next, you are not alone, because that is precisely what you feel here in Paris, France. And if you were awaiting clarification on your feelings through that Q-and-A, you weren’t gonna get it,” he added.
Considering that Hemmer is supposed to be a straight news reporter, a few wondered if he wasn’t a little out of line with his post-presser commentary.
He doesn’t think so.
“I guess my sense … was that 60-70 percent of people in American polling believe the strategy against ISIS is not a winning strategy. And after being here in Paris and just feeling the sense of grief that these people have… they wanted to hear how we can be successful,” Hemmer said Tuesday morning on Fox and Friends.
“My sense is [President Obama] knows this is a tough sell. My sense is he was in no hurry yesterday. My sense is that he wanted to explain it as well as he could. I had the feeling that this was George Bush in 2006 when the bulk of the American people were concerned about the way the war was going on Iraq and wanted to get out. And what did President Bush do?” he asked.
Answer: “He doubled-down, went with a surge, and ultimately that surge proved successful. This is the card President Obama is playing. The big distinction is: These were not marines or soldiers targeted here in Paris. These were innocent 20-year-old college students.”
(h/t Mediaite)
