Piers Morgan, the liberal host of an eponymous hour-long weeknight program on the Cable News Network, said during an interview posted on Newsmax.com on Tuesday that the American news media have been “probably quite soft and could have gone harder” when covering President Barack Obama.
But while promoting his new book -- “Shooting Straight: Guns, Gays, God and George Clooney” -- the former British tabloid editor still claimed that “the financial crisis was inherited by the president” from his Republican predecessor, former White House occupant George W. Bush.
Nevertheless, the host of Piers Morgan Live stated that Obama has been in office long enough to have fixed the sad state of the economy himself.
“Unemployment's still comfortably over 7 percent -- really completely unacceptable," he noted.
Morgan then turned his attention to Obama's handling of foreign policy. He was especially critical of the lack of response to the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four people on the 11th anniversary of the terrorist strikes on September 11, 2001.
He stated:
Issues like Benghazi have exposed some of the limitations of his leading from behind on foreign policy and a lack of attention to detail in protecting the American ambassadors and servicemen around the world.
“There needs to be more clarity from the president about what he really stands for, what he really wants to achieve,” Morgan asserted.
Of course, no interview with Morgan would be complete without a thorough discussion of his anti-gun stance that began after the mass shooting in a theater in Aurora, Colorado, on July 20, 2012, when James Eagan Holmes killed 12 people and injured 70 others.
Surprisingly, the liberal CNN host said he's not opposed to “law-abiding Americans who want to have a handgun at home to protect themselves. There are already numerous restrictions on the kind of guns that Americans can have."
Instead, he stated:
My main issue has been with the proliferation of mass shootings in America in the last six, seven years. There are many more than there used to be, the scale of them is much higher than it used to be, the ferocity is much worse.
He also referred to the mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed 20 children and six adults before committing suicide.
"Sandy Hook and Aurora were two of the worst mass shootings in American history and came within a few months” of each other, the broadcaster said before adding:
“To me, it's unconscionable the way that America, this great superpower, a country that I love, full of people that I love, just turns a blind eye to this kind of atrocity, and the politicians in Washington simply do nothing about it to try to stop it from happening again.”
"You have such incendiary, extreme positions on both sides, but nothing ever gets resolved, and what you need is consensus," he stated. “You need old-fashioned politicians that can get in a room and start pump-thumping each other and get stuff done that actually suits the American national interest."
He summed up his advice to lawmakers by telling them to "stop the squabbling, come together and sort it out."
That was also his stance regarding the rest of the federal government: “You've got to have a better-functioning political system. You can't have this dysfunction in Washington that means nothing ever gets done.”
Morgan also stated:
Ever since I've been on air at CNN in three years, it's been one catastrophe and crisis after another down in D.C., and nothing ever seems to get resolved. Meanwhile, the national debt is $17 trillion, a third of which is owned by the Chinese.
However, he indicated that “I would never bet against America. America has been a great superpower and will continue to be a great superpower and one of the key players in the world” despite the “emerging powers” of China, India and Brazil.
In addition, the liberal host said that he wrote the book "to put people into my shoes, really, of anchoring a cable news show in America, and indeed around the world,” and to serve as a memoir about his career as a newsman and interviewer of some of the world's most powerful leaders.
So if Piers Morgan really feels the press has been “too soft” on the president, can we now expect he'll interview Barack Obama and hit him with some tough questions? And will he take his own claim to heart and begin doing something other than flacking for the White House?
Our bet is that it was just a ploy to get some gullible Republicans to try to buy his book.
