In response to Chris Wallace claiming that the people should have no voice in the Syria decision, Sec. of State John Kerry ripped Fox News for arguing against democracy in America.
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Transcript via Fox News Sunday:
WALLACE: They lose the possibility that they’re going to get killed in the meantime.
Let me just, if I may, follow up. Ronald Reagan did not think he needed congressional approval to go after Gadhafi in Libya. Bill Clinton did not think he needed approval to go after Kosovo or to go after Al Qaeda. This president seems to think —
KERRY: Actually —
WALLACE: — he needs political cover.
KERRY: Actually, Chris, at the very instant the planes were in the air on Kosovo, there was a vote in the House of Representatives, and the vote did not carry. So the truth is the president would have loved to have had the support from Congress. The fact is that our country is much stronger when we act together.
I am amazed that you would argue against the Congress of the United States weighing in, when in fact, already Assad is on the defensive, he’s moving assets around, he’s hunkering down, he’s taking a response to the potential of a strike. And the fact is that this strike can have impact when it needs to, with the support of the Congress of the United States.
Now, if the Assad regime — let me just finish. If the Assad regime were to be foolish enough to attack yet again and to do something in the meantime, of course the president of the United States knows he has the power to do this, and I assume the president would move very, very rapidly. But he feels we are stronger in getting the United States as a whole to gel around this policy, to understand it better, and to know what the strategy is, and why the United States needs to do this.
Kerry highlighted the box that President Obama has put his opposition into. Republicans and their media outlets are now forced to argue against representative democracy. The argument that Wallace was making was that the people should have no voice in the decision making process concerning military action. Chris Wallace’s basic argument was that Republicans can’t be trusted to do the right thing for the country, so it would be best if Obama did whatever he was going to do without their input.
Fox News is so desperate to oppose Obama that they are not only pushing propaganda from a dictator, but they are arguing that the United States should be more of a dictatorship. As Sec. of State Kerry’s comments revealed, there is no way that Republicans can argue against seeking congressional authorization without looking like they are attacking our system of government.
Some on the right are yearning for the “good old days” of the Bush years when the nation could count on the president to unilaterally invade nations based on manipulated intelligence and cooked up evidence. If anyone bothered to challenge that evidence, they got their CIA agent spouse outted.
Fox News desperately wants to go back to the good old days when the red, white, and blue was a whole lot less free, and it is killing them that Barack Obama is showing such great respect for the constitution.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
