On Tuesday's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC, during a segment about foreign policy challenges involving Russia and the turmoil in the Middle East, MSNBC.com Executive Editor Richard Wolffe oddly suggested that President Obama finds it to be a "satisfying challenge" because it is "intellectually rigorous" to deal with such substantial foreign policy problems.
He also not surprisingly took a jab at former President Bush, blaming him for the chaos in the Middle East, and asserted that "there's a lot of cleanup there."
Host O'Donnell wondered about what things are like inside the White House as he posed:
Richard, you have studied this White House and staff in both, and the way the President operates in this White House. How do you imagine it's working when they have all of these different hot spots that they've got to keep an eye on and they've got to have meetings on every day? It seems splitting that attention is a very difficult exercise.
Well, there's no question that it's a challenge, but remember you've got a president who always loved international relations, the three dimensional chess game that you're playing here, and I know that's a sort of trivial way to look at a situation where people are dying in really quite brutal fashion in Iraq and in Syria.
He added:
But you're a second-term president, your domestic agenda is extremely frustrating. And here's a situation where the biggest issue of all for the President -- which actually has always come down to nuclear proliferation -- is also at the heart of these problems because he's got to deal with Russia when it comes to Iran's nuclear program.
Wolffe got to blaming former President Bush as he continued:
These are all interlocking puzzles that were all split apart by the Bush years and by the Arab Spring that followed from there, so there's a lot of cleanup there. It's a huge challenge. Can you build a coalition and find a solution?
His strange suggestion that President Obama is enjoying having to work on such problems came as he concluded:
I bet as demanding and draining as this is to look at so many different fronts in such a complex part of the world that we barely understand, this president in some way finds it a satisfying challenge because it's intellectually rigorous.
