On Thursday, CNN's Michelle Kosinski delivered the latest pity-party installment of "Darn Those Terrorists Getting in Obama's Way."
Moaning about "distractions" and the like has been a staple of media reporting since Barack Obama first took office in 2009. In recent years, as the number and severity of terrorist attacks has grown, largely as a result of feckless U.S. foreign policy, the press has taken to complaining on the White House's behalf that those attacks are overshadowing its agenda and distracting the President and his minions from talking about allegedly more important things, like ... climate change.
As Kyle Brennan at NewsBusters noted on Wednesday, CBS's Margaret Brennan complained that the Istanbul, Turkey terrorist attack earlier that day was "the third time in the past year that a major summit is being overshadowed by terrorism." On Thursday, reporting from Ottawa, it was Kosinski's turn to whine:
Transcript (bolds are mine):
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN: Michelle Kosinski is in Ottawa, Canada, where the President is spending the day. What did they talk about — we know what they talked about, but what did they say?
MICHELLE KOSINSKI, CNN: Right, Carol. Well, the President, uh, you know that he offered condolences. And it's interesting to think that just two weeks ago it was the Turkish president calling President Obama offering his condolences over the terrorist attack in Orlando.
So the White House today is emphasizing prioritizing that relationship with Turkey in the fight against ISIS, trying still to seal that border. And they said that while some progress has been made, we've heard recently from the White House that ISIS controls only about 60 miles of the border between Turkey and Syria. Still, that is 60 miles where foreign fighters can go back and forth, and the White House acknowledged today that there is still some work to be done.
The White House isn't definitively saying that this was the work of ISIS, but we all know that the hallmarks are there, and so the White House is saying that they are concerned about ISIS's continued ability to launch these kinds of attacks.
It’s also interesting to think that virtually every time we go on one of these foreign trips, where the White House wants to emphasize something else — I mean here, they want to be focusing on North America, and climate change — again, terrorism has overshadowed some of those subjects, and we know that the President's going to be getting more questions about this, and the abilities of ISIS to launch these attacks throughout the day. Carol.
It's bad enough that the media continues to complain about how Dear Leader is being "overshadowed." It's even worse when the White House's media acolytes complain about the existence of deadly events the Obama administration's foreign policy has caused.
In August 2014, almost two years ago, Ira Straus at National Review demonstrated that "The Syria policy of the Obama administration is the main reason for the growth of the Islamic State (or ISIS) – and with it, for the current crisis in Iraq, and for a greatly increased danger of terrorism in Europe and America." The list of terrorist attacks in Europe and elsewhere which have happened since then is too long to detail here. Just this week, we've seen serious attacks in Istanbul and Bangladesh.
The Istanbul attack in particular can be laid at the feet of Obama-led foreign policy. As noted in the video, "the hallmarks (of ISIS) are there." Late Wednesday evening, CNN itself reported that, according to "Turkish sources," "ISIS leadership (was) involved in Istanbul attack planning." ISIS has also "claimed responsibility for an attack by up to nine gunmen on a Bangladesh café this evening where foreigners were reportedly taken hostage and police were shot dead."
It takes an exceptional amount of gall and chutzpah to complain about being distracted by murder and mayhem the Obama administration's own foreign policy has, in Straus's words, "caused or exacerbated."
It's very hard to believe that the CNN and other media reporters involved in covering terrorism, the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy fail to understand the connection. They probably do, but they just want to keep the blinders on their audiences.
Let's also address that "only 60 miles of the border between Turkey and Syria ... where foreign fighters can go back and forth." 60 miles is greater than the distance between Cincinnati and Dayton in Ohio, Detroit and Ann Arbor in Michigan, and Los Angeles and Anaheim in California.
Though the 60 miles involved is all in one stretch known as the Manbij Pocket, why the White House would characterize this huge hole as "only 60 miles," as if its size is supposedly comforting, is a mystery. It's only a tiny consolation that at least Kosinski saw through that attempt at minimizing the dire straits in which that region of the world now finds itself thanks largely to the disastrous U.S. foreign policy failure in Syria. According to human-right groups, the death toll in that country's civil war has now topped 400,000. That's a number — an horrific "grim milestone," to use the popular mediaspeak seen last decade during the Iraq War — I daresay has never been reported on a U.S. establishment press broadcast network.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
