Fox News host Bill O’Reilly said on his show Monday that the Obama administration’s inability to effectively combat the Islamic terrorist network Islamic State is due in large part to the president’s “incompetence.”
While discussing the ongoing battle against the Islamic State with conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, O’Reilly said many believe Obama deliberately chooses to take a weak stance against terrorism but that it is actually a matter of ineptitude.
“There are two schools of thought,” O’Reilly said. “There is my school that says Mr. Obama is incompetent. … He’s incompetent, can’t do the job. But then there are the people who believe he’s doing it all on purpose he wants to run the country down.”
Krauthammer disputed O’Reilly’s logic and posited that Obama is simply unanimated by the threat of the Islamic State.
“He is a man who thinks that the idea of radical islam is not an existential threat, it is a strategic nuisance to the United States,” Krauthammer said.
“He has to know he’s losing,” replied O’Reilly. “[He] has to know that this thing’s out of control; won’t admit it. And I believe he’s just absolutely an incompetent president and will go down in history as such.”
In a speech on Sunday, Obama maintained that the U.S. will “overcome” and “destroy” the Islamic State. Though even as he acknowledged that the threat had “evolved,” Obama did not indicate any major change in strategy, which largely relies on airstrikes and training opposition forces in Iraq and Syria.
Terrorism has emerged a dominant focus in the news and on the Republican side of the presidential race, after the Islamic State claimed credit for a recent mass shooting in Paris and after two people in the U.S., apparently inspired by the Islamic State, shot up a health center in San Bernardino, Calif.
