February 18, 2015

Fox News charlatan Dr. Keith Ablow never seems to have a problem framing whatever Obama does as something an "other" would do. You know what "others" are. They're those dark-skinned people who aren't "real Americans.

Fox News' resident medical expert Dr. Keith Ablow on Tuesday thought he'd diagnosed the problem behind the Obama administration's failing to identify Egyptians beheaded by the Islamic State in Libya as "Christians."

From his perch as the one lucky guy on the "Outnumbered" couch, Ablow acknowledged that he's previously taken heat for arguing that Obama "can't embrace America as a force for good in the world" and has trouble "identifying real threats for what they are."

In light of the latest Islamic State attack, Ablow said that analysis was "coming home to roost."

"He's balancing threats. To the President of the U.S., I believe that the United States of America is the bigger threat," he said. "That he sees that our focus on autonomy, our desire to spread our ideas around the world has been a great plague. He's really not up for the idea of saying 'I'm with these guys against them.' Because he sees 'them' as people who have been put upon."

"That's where this whole notion comes from -- 'build their economies, get them jobs and then they'll like us again.' No, they won't like us again," Ablow continued. "They're fundamentally, in a fundamentalist way, opposed to our very existence."

That reference to jobs was a veiled reference to Marie Harf's remarks on Hardball, where she tried to put forward the idea that if you can get at the root cause of what attracts people to ISIS -- poverty, lack of governance, crime -- then you move toward making them irrelevant. Harf, by the way, did not back down from that in the face of ridiculous right-wing criticism, suggesting that those who didn't grasp her nuance might want to revisit their remarks.

It's not all that nuanced. People who have prospects for hope and a future tend to be too busy to consider turning towards hanging out with extremist groups and beheading people. But with no government, no security, no safety, and no food, the calculus changes.

But back to Ablow. The comments he makes on Fox News under the guise of being a psychiantrist should earn him a fast trip to the medical board where his license should be stripped. If he wants to opine as Keith Ablow, wingnut citizen, that's fine. But to comment this way with the imprimatur of "Dr." in front of his name does an injustice to the medical profession and legitimate psychiatry.

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