'60 Minutes’ Interview Causes Headache For White House

AP

’60 Minutes’ interview causes headache for White House

President Obama, in agreeing to a lengthy interview with "60 Minutes," may have created his own "bump in the road."

The president was facing heavy criticism from Republicans Monday for, in the course of that interview, referring to Middle East unrest as "bumps in the road," conceding "mistakes" in campaign ads and appearing to dismiss concern about Iran's nuclear program as "noise."

Romney's campaign seized on all three of those comments, and by Monday afternoon was hammering the president for the Middle East remark -- perhaps in a bid to return the favor after Democrats kept Romney against the wall last week defending his hidden-camera remarks on the "47 percent" of Americans who don't pay taxes. In the CBS interview, Obama said supporting the Arab Spring was the "right thing" to do but acknowledged there would be "bumps in the road" in the process.

"These are no bumps in the road. These are human lives," Romney retorted at a campaign stop in Colorado. On ABC News, Romney also said: "I can't imagine saying something like the assassination of ambassadors is a bump in the road."

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was hit with a string of questions at Monday's briefing about the "60 Minutes" interview. The most aggressive accusation by the Romney campaign merited the most aggressive response from Carney.

The accusation about Obama's Middle East comments, Carney said Monday, is "both desperate and offensive."

He rejected the idea that the president was minimizing the recent violence -- in which four Americans were killed in the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi and others have been killed in the course of raging protests across a number of countries.

"The president was referring to the transformations in the region," Carney said. "There is a certain rather desperate attempt to grasp at words and phrases here to find political advantage and, in this case, that's profoundly offensive."

That wasn't the only line Carney had to carefully explain Monday.

Romney's campaign had also criticized the president for his comments on Israel.

Via: Fox News

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A Failed Presidency of Global Proportions

"These are the times that try men's souls."  So wrote Thomas Paine in the midst of the darkest days of the American Revolution, when the fate of what would become the grandest experiment in human liberty hung in the balance.  In recent weeks, those words have found renewed relevance as it becomes clear to this generation that the fate of our nation hangs in the balance again.

This much is now clear: on every count, domestic and foreign, the presidency of Barack Obama has failed.

Though pride or egotism may prevent many from acknowledging it, there is simply no rational argument left to plausibly deny this unfortunate reality.  Whether it is the crumbling value of the dollar, the demise of an economy once in recovery into one now slouching towards another recession, the crushing debt that is spinning us dangerously close to the point of no return, a persistent unemployment crisis that has not been remotely remedied by the continued spending or quantitative easing of all our brilliant government central planners, or the skyrocketing energy costs that break the collective banks of American family budgets both at the gas tank and with the monthly heating bill, President Obama has been a domestic policy disaster.  One of the worst ever.

On the foreign front, a similar conclusion was perhaps more difficult to discern until last week.  To any informed observer, there was certainly always reason for concern as the terror obsessed Muslim Brotherhood stretched its influence and consolidated its power throughout the Middle East under the protective cloak of the Obama-approved label "Arab Spring."  Prudent minds questioned how such a development could possibly end well for those who desire peace, and why despite being reassured by their president that "[t]he day I'm inaugurated, Muslim hostility will ease," America's approval rating in the Muslim world continued to plummet to new lows. 

Via: American Thinker

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