Appearing on Fox News's America Live on Thursday, Daily Beast columnist and Democratic pundit Kirsten Powers ripped the liberal media for expressing more outrage over Mitt Romney's reaction to Tuesday's embassy attacks, than toward the attackers themselves: "I mean, it is just absolutely utterly insane the way that they have elevated this." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Powers worried that the blatant bias had "overshadowed any kind of outrage that you would see over the fact that you have Islamic flags being hoisted over American embassies, the fact that an American ambassador is dead."
Acknowledging the Democratic perspective, Powers explained: "...let's just stipulate that, for the sake of argument, that Romney shouldn't have done it [criticized Obama] – I don't agree with that – it still would not explain the obsession with Romney's statement over these horrific events that are unfolding in front of us."
Later in the discussion, host Megyn Kelly asked Powers: "You always have to look back at, you know, when detecting media – you know, potential media bias, you look back at what would the media have done if this had happened on George Bush's watch?"
Powers denounced the double standard:
Yeah. It would have been completely radically different. Look, like I said, even if you agree that Mitt Romney did something wrong, okay, look at that, but let's also look at the Obama administration. It was just radio silence....why didn't they know that these attacks were coming? Was Obama getting his intelligence briefings? I mean these are the issues that should be being asked and would be being asked if this had happened on George Bush's watch.
Here are portions of the September 13 discussion:
2:36PM ET
(...)
MEGYN KELLY: And just so our viewers know, what happened was the U.S. embassy, just to refresh you, in Cairo, came out with a statement condemning "the misguided individuals who tried to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims." Then they got attacked and they doubled down on that statement. Mitt Romney came out and criticized the statement, saying, "that's disgraceful that the administration's first response was not to condemn the attacks on the diplomatic mission, but to sympathize with those waging them." Later, Washington pulled back the embassy statement and said we didn't authorize it either. So Kirsten, you wound up having the Obama administration and Mitt Romney agreeing that the embassy statement was not appropriate. And yet, the whole media narrative yesterday was how awful Governor Romney was for pointing it out.
(...)
KELLY: And Kirsten, you always have to look back at, you know, when detecting media – you know, potential media bias, you look back at what would the media have done if this had happened on George Bush's watch?
POWERS: Oh, yeah.
KELLY: If we had had these attacks on the embassies and the consulates.
POWERS: Yeah. It would have been completely radically different. Look, like I said, even if you agree that Mitt Romney did something wrong, okay, look at that, but let's also look at the Obama administration. It was just radio silence. You know, they allowed that statement to stay up on an embassy web site, which is taken as the official position of the U.S. government. This person was, someone was tweeting from the official account and they didn't – they didn't come out and say a word. So what's that about? And did they know – why didn't they know that these attacks were coming? Was Obama getting his intelligence briefings? I mean these are the issues that should be being asked and would be being asked if this had happened on George Bush's watch.
(...)
POWERS: One of the things that a lot of liberals are complaining about is they're saying that Mitt Romney attacked Obama, basically saying this was his statement, which of course, we all thought it was the Obama administration's statement because it was on the embassy web site. But even if it wasn't, what has he said that's any different than that? You know, I mean he hasn't used that exact phrasing, but we could not have had a weaker response to this if we just sat around and tried to think of like, what's the weakest thing we could do? And that initial statement was weak, and now we have a continued – the administration coming out and condemning this movie as if the movie caused this attack. The fanatics attacked the embassy. They're going to attack us whether there's a movie or there's not a movie. And they are continuing to do – the sentiment in that original statement continues to be the sentiment of the Obama administration.
