President Obama called recent bipartisan criticism of his Syria policy a bunch of hooey, reportedly labeling it “horsesh-t.”
Lawmakers of both parties have called into question the limited scale of the U.S.’s involvement in the Syrian conflict, and according to The Daily Beast, what set off the president were the comments of Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), Ranking Member of the Foreign Relations Committee, who assailed the president face-to-face over a range of foreign policy issues during a late-July White House meeting.
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“Obama answered Corker at length,” The Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin reported, citing a lawmaker present at the meeting. “Then, the president defended his administration’s actions on Syria, saying that the notion that many have put forth regarding arming the rebels earlier would have led to better outcomes in Syria was ‘horsesh-t.’ ”
As the news outlet notes, advocates of the idea Obama said was full of it include former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who put forth a plan during her time at the State Department that would’ve armed the Syrian rebels rising up against Bashar al-Assad. The White House rejected the idea.
Clinton has continued to distance herself from the White House, while Obama remains defiant, saying in an Aug. 8 New York Times interview that arming a ragtag band of “former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth” to battle a well-backed military force “was never in the cards.”
