Former Bushie and Romney spokesman, and Fox regular Richard Grenell used the news of the recent US-led coalition airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria as an excuse to attack President Obama for not wanting to send U.S. ground troops back into Iraq, and to accuse Democrats of "attacking intelligence gathering."
I assume this is an attempt to go after the Democrats and Dianne Feinstein for the recent release of the Senate torture report although he never mentions her by name, or possibly Mark Udall's remarks about the CIA following the report's release. Regardless of who he had in mind, according to Grenell, if the Democrats don't want to pour more American blood and treasure into Syria's bloody civil war and if President Obama doesn't want ground troops back in Iraq, they're soft on terrorism.
Right wingers can never seem to decide whether they want to call President Obama a tyrant and a dictator who is running roughshod over the poor Republicans, or if he's weak and feckless and wants to coddle the terrorists and appease them. Apparently this weekend, it's the latter.
Rough transcript:
GRENELL: The only way airstrikes are really going to work is if we have specific intelligence. It seems like lately what we've had is airstrikes without the intelligence and so we're hitting ISIS but like a balloon, they're going to pop up in another area. We've seen this lack of intelligence be a major problem for the United States. You remember just last month, U.S. special operations forces tried to rescue hostages in Yemin and when the U.S. special forces got there we found out that the hostage takers, the terrorists had picked up and moved on and we didn't even know it.
The same thing happened in Syria in August, so we're working on a deficit. We are having problems with specific intelligence and yet we have the Democrats who keep attacking intelligence gathering. This is a real serious problem for the Obama administration.
SHAWN: Well, how do we fix this? We don't have forces on the ground. We don't have the rebel trained forces. Five thousand a year, it's still going to take a year to get like five thousand deployed out there, so how can we fix this?
GRENELL: Well, again, we're working on a deficit because we just really ignored the ISIS problem and this growing radical Islamist problem. That's I think the story of 2014 is this growing problem that we've ignored. We can fix it. We are the best at this and what we have to do is first have the will to do it. We have to have an administration that says we're going to take the hit from the public who don't want to see us gather intelligence and do those difficult things to try to find the terrorists. (crosstalk)
SHAWN: I'm sorry to interrupt, but I think the public does want the intelligence. The American public does want something done about the radical Islamic terrorists to stop them, but you know the question is, I mean, how? Are we talking about American troops on the ground?
GRENELL: Well I think that you're right that they do want that to be done, but they also keep telling the president, at least the polls are showing it that they want the troops home and the president keeps playing politics with this. He's trying to keep his 2008 campaign promise to bring all the troops home and by doing that, by having this campaign promise really overshadow a national security criteria, you're really making Americans unsafe, so what we need to do is a better job of communicating to the American public that yes we all want the troops home, but there are things that we have to do like intelligence gathering which require U.S. troops on the ground. That is what it is going to take to defeat ISIS and the growing radical Islamic terrorists problem.
