From Tuesday night’s Fox News All-Stars.
On President Obama stating in an interview with BET that, “In the first year or so, we spent a lot of time just doing the right thing and not worrying about selling what we were doing”:
That’s amazing. I mean, I would call it delusional if I thought he believed it. He’s telling us that he didn’t spend enough time selling “doing the right thing” — [by] which he meant Obamacare.
That’s what he spent a year and a half on! He gave what, 38 speeches? I lost count as he approached 40. He was out there all the time selling it. He sold it on television, he sold it to a joint session of Congress, he tried to sell it everywhere. The dogs didn’t like the dog food. That’s simply a fact.
The idea that somehow he has not been arguing enough, speaking enough, showing up on television enough, but instead intent on doing the right thing, is hilarious. I mean, right now he’s proposed a bill that’s ostensibly about jobs, that he knows he’s not going to pass. And even a Keynesian would object to because it’s only half the size of Stimulus I, which didn’t work itself.
And then secondly he’s got a bill which he says is about debt, that doesn’t do anything on debt. Half of his cuts are not extending the surge in Afghanistan and Iraq for another 10 years. We are out of Iraq in three months.
These are farcical attempts at legislation. And he’s pretending that he’s so intent on doing the right thing passing these bills that he hasn’t been selling enough. All he’s doing is selling! Even the joint address to Congress ostensibly about jobs was a selling job. It wasn’t … about getting a bill passed.
On whether there’s enough time for Obama to fire up his base and then come back to the center before the general election:
Yeah, I think there’ll be enough time, but is he going to have any substance — about essentially his supposed centrism?
Mara [Liasson] spoke about appearing to be conciliatory. That’s all these negotiations with Boehner were about (on the debt ceiling): He wanted to appear — he said: I want to, I’m ready to discuss cuts in entitlements. Always he’s ready to discuss. But has he ever once put a cut in entitlements on the table, offered it in a speech, in a budget? No. It’s always appearance.
He tried appearing as a centrist. Clinton did it in ‘96 because he was intrinsically a center-left Democrat. Obama is not. He’s not center-left, he’s left. And that’s why it’s all show. It’s not reality with him.
On Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen’s testimony that the Haqqani network “acts as a veritable arm” of the ISI, which supported Haqqani’s June truck bombing of the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul and attack this month on the U.S. Embassy:
There’s sort of a complete shift in conceptual thinking here. We went into the war in Afghanistan with Pakistan as our ally against the terrorists — al-Qaeda and the Taliban. And under Musharraf — especially in the early years when we said to the Pakistanis, you either are going to be our ally (it was an ultimatum by the Bush Administration) or we’re going to bomb you back into the Stone Age — they were our allies.
Over the decade, those who were pro-American have been weakened within Pakistan. And now the paradox is that Afghanistan is our base for keeping an eye on and attacking our enemies in Pakistan, namely Haqqani and the other terrorists who are in the northwest frontier regions.
So, rather than thinking of Pakistan as an ally against Afghanistan, Afghanistan, for all of [its] instability and the hostility that America has to face there, is the base of operations from which we keep eye on the bad guys in the region. It’s an interesting and almost a paradoxical reason for continuing our presence in Afghanistan.
On how to pressure Pakistan:
Well, there’s one other step that we can do, and it would be a parallel to the Pakistanis ostentatiously asking the Chinese to make a visit. I would … [involve] the Indians. I think we ought to be sending a high-level delegation to India to discuss regional issues. That will scare the Pakistanis. That’s the one enemy they worry about above all. Showing the beginning of a new kind of alliance between America and India, I think would probably make the Pakistanis think twice about opposing us, and [pursuing] a tight alliance with China.