White House Rebukes John McCain, Stands By ‘Hair On Fire’ Comment
The fall of Ramadi, capital of Iraq’s Anbar province, to ISIS militants has caused a wave of demands from the press to chuck the current U.S. strategy in Iraq and start over. One subplot to that story has been an outrage-gasm over a remark that White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest made during Tuesday’s White House briefing, while attempting to cast Ramadi as a setback among a string of successes:
Bill Plante (CBS News): You talked about Ramadi today several times. You seem to be saying, well, you win some, you lose some, and it goes on. And at this stage of the game, isn’t that a little silly when Iraqi troops have cut and run, and there are a minimum of U.S. troops advising and there’s no real prospect for improvement?
Josh Earnest: Bill, what I think is a little silly is for us to spend a whole lot of time agonizing over the fall of Kobani, and then after Kurdish security forces, with the backing of American coalition fighters, retake that village, drive ISIL forces out, and everybody decides that that’s not really a big deal either.
I guess the thing is we have to sort of decide what our approach to these issues is going to be. Are we going to light our hair on fire every time that there is a setback in the campaign against ISIL? Or are we going to take very seriously our responsibility to evaluate those areas where we succeed and evaluate where steps are necessary for us to change our strategy when we’ve sustained setbacks.
That “hair on fire” comment caused several fits of apoplexy from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who took to the Senate floor to attempt some spox-shaming by noting that “there are burning bodies in the streets of Ramadi,” and then went on Fox News to call, then un-call, Earnest an “idiot,” while also calling him “Ernst”:
“Then, of course, my most unfavorite is this idiot Earnest saying ‘Well, we’re not going to set our hair on fire every time there’s a setback…'”
At Friday’s White House daily briefing, Fox News White House Correspondent Kevin Corke shopped McCain’s reaction to Press Secretary Josh Earnest, and asked if he wanted to soften his remarks at all. Earnest was, apparently, not interested…READ MORE
Copyright 2015 Liberaland
By: Tommy Christopher
Tommy Christopher is The Daily Banter's White House Correspondent and Political Analyst. He's been a political reporter and liberal commentator since 2007, and has covered the White House since the beginning of the Obama administration, first for PoliticsDaily, and then for Mediaite. Christopher is a frequent guest on a variety of television, radio, and online programs, and was the villain in the documentaries The Audacity of Democracy and Hating Breitbart. He's also That Guy Who Live-Tweeted His Own Heart Attack, and the only person to have ever received public apologies from both Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
6 responses to White House Rebukes John McCain, Stands By ‘Hair On Fire’ Comment
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
tracey marie May 23rd, 2015 at 16:05
sit down and shut up McCain.
F_cons May 23rd, 2015 at 16:06
F off and die McSongbird
robert May 23rd, 2015 at 16:07
Always brought to you by Fox news
We can depend on this network for up to date non military body count because every life counts from now on.
over here ? not so much
Budda May 23rd, 2015 at 17:18
So concerned with a skirmish over there and people (Americans) are starving here. Idiots!
majii May 23rd, 2015 at 19:06
I recall now former GOP/TP Rep. Tom Price (GA) saying last year that GOP/TPers in Congress had decided to do nothing about ISIS, hoping that by leaving decisions up to the president, he’d stumble, and they could whine and complain from the sidelines. More and more I’ve noticed that this is what they’re doing. It’s been almost two months since the president sent the GOP/TPers the request for military authorization against ISIS, and the issue has still not been addressed by them. When Boehner was asked about it earlier this week, he said he wanted the president to write another bill, one they would accept. It has not been the president who has been afraid to deal with ISIS, it’s the GOP/TPers in Congress. They’re the cowards because all they want to do is critique the president’s every move, jump in front of a bank of cameras and trash his decisions, all while hiding out in Congress and refusing to address the issue, after they demanded that something more than air raids be done. I can’t help but recall that this is the same thing they did about Syria—demand a role, then refuse to do anything. I hope they’re capable of linking their cowardice with the GOP/TP Congress’s poor approval rating, but then, they’re experts when it comes to denying reality.
anothertoothpick May 24th, 2015 at 11:35
Let’s go to the leaderboard and check Obama’s terrorist kills….shall we?
There’s Osama bin Laden, of course, killed in May.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) leader Anwar al-Awlaki…now in paradise.
Abu Hafs al-Shahri, was killed in Waziristan, Pakistan.
September 2011 – Younis al Mauritani captured (senior al Qaeda leader in Pakistan)
September 2011 – Abu Hafs al-Shahri killed (al Qaeda’s chief of Pakistan operations)
August 2011 – Atiyah Abd al-Rahman killed (Al Qaeda No. 2 in Pakistan)
May 2011 – Osama bin Laden killed (Number 1 Al Qaeda, and worlds most wanted)
June 2011 – Fazul Abdullah Mohammed killed (top al-Qaeda operative in Somalia)
June 2011 – Ilyas Kashmiri killed (top al- Qaeda commander in Pakistan)
June 2010 – Hawza al Jawfi killed along with 6 other terrorist (leader in Pakistan)
May 2010 – Mustafa Ahmed Muhammad Uthman Abu al-Yazid killed [aliases Shaikh Sa’id al-Masri and Mustafa Abu al-Yazid] (al Qaeda’s No. 3)
April 2010 – Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Umar al-Baghdadi (Top two Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq)
March 2010 – Qari Mohammad Zafar killed (terrorist leader in Pakistan). And many many more are spending time with their virgins in paradise.
By the way Grampy…it was you and dubya policy that started all this bullshit in the first place.