This morning, Fox & Friends showed a clip of Senator Diane Feinstein advising Vladimir Putin to “man up” and take responsibility for the attack on Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 that killed all 298 people aboard. “[T]he nexus between Russia and the separatists has been established very clearly,” Feinstein said. “So the issue is, where is Putin?”
But Steve Doocy says she’s looking for the wrong guy. “She’s asking, Where’s Putin?” he said. “We’re asking, Where is the president?”
And that pretty much sums up the right-wing media spin on the Ukrainian disaster: forget Putin, Obama’s the guy we’ve gotta get under control. They’ve been bashing the president for attending fundraisers since the crash, for using the wrong words, for not being Ronald Reagan, for not being Samantha Power, and for somehow engineering the entire tragedy in order to distract us from Benghazi the IRS the crisis at the Mexican border.
According to Fox, the smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud is that Obama stuck to his schedule instead of immediately returning to the White House after the plane was downed Thursday morning. That day, Obama made his first statement about the “terrible tragedy.” It lasted about forty seconds and came at the beginning of a prearranged speech about infrastructure he gave in Delaware, where he also did a photo op, before flying to New York for two fundraisers that night.
“We have 300 people shot out of the sky, likely by one of our biggest enemies. And the president’s raising money,” Sean Hannity said Thursday night. “What’s next? He’s going to put golf flags—since he plays golf 180 times—at half-mast? I mean, where is presidential action here?”
“Missing in action,” replied K.T. McFarland, a Fox national security analyst, who worked for the Nixon and Reagan administrations.
McFarland appeared on another Fox show earlier that day to say that when the Soviet military shot down a Korean passenger plane that had accidentally veered into Russian airspace in 1983, President Reagan handled it like an action hero. Reagan, she said, “was on vacation at his ranch in California. He immediately came back to Washington [and] canceled his vacation.”
She also lashed out at Obama for talking about the crash as “being a ‘tragedy.’ That’s compared to Reagan who talked about it being a ‘crime against humanity.’”
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Reagan’s supposedly superior response to Obama’s in similar circumstances has been the conservatives’ number-one talking point. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough repeated it today, saying, “[Reagan] immediately canceled his vacation”—only to eat crow moments later when Mika Brzezinski insisted, “No, he didn’t, actually.”
Mika was right. Reagan did not rush home “immediately.” He returned to Washington only under pressure.
Rachel Maddow did a rundown last week of all the attacks on commercial airliners by military forces across the world (including our own, on an Iranian passenger plane in 1988, while Reagan was president). She included footage of then-NBC correspondent Chris Wallace, who reported that first day that Reagan press secretary Larry Speakes, “says the president has no plans to cut his vacation short, that he has the same ability to get information and issue orders at his ranch that he has at the White House.”
(Speakes went on to announce Reagan’s schedule for the day, saying, as recorded by The Washington Post, “The president, as usual, is planning a horseback ride this morning and will generally work around the ranch in the afternoon. The weather there is as it is here, sunny and warm.”)
Meanwhile, it’s been largely up to Wallace to correct his Fox colleagues’ rewrite of history. As he told the nonplussed crew at Fox & Friends last week:
He was in Santa Barbara at his ranch when that happened, and quite frankly he didn’t want to leave. And his advisers realized how terrible this looked, and eventually persuaded him he had to fly back to Washington and had to give this speech to the nation, but it did take him four days.
At Obama’s press conference on Friday (which took place one day, not four, after the Malaysian Airlines crash), he called it (using Reagan-strength language) “an outrage of unspeakable proportions.”
Blunted by history, the Fox talking point swerved after Obama’s presser. The idea now was to mention UN Ambassador Samantha Power as often as possible for sounding tougher on Russia than Obama. Brett Baier praised her for saying “Russia can and must end this war,” while Obama, Baier complained, merely said that “Russia and the Ukranians have the capacity to end the war.” In Foxland, small differences loom large.
Fred Thompson, playing the surrounded male guest on Fox’s Outnumbered, tried to make it clear that even girls have more balls than Barack. The country did get a presidential-level speech, he said, “but it came from Samantha Power,” adding, “Most people think [Hillary] is tougher than the president.”
The emasculation began at the start of the Ukrainian conflict, when right-thinking pundits fell hard for manly man Vladimir Putin, and Sarah Palin ridiculed Obama for wearing “mom jeans.” But their crush on the shirtless tiger-fondler has spiraled to Cliven Bundy levels of embarrassment as Putin is fingered for giving sophisticated anti-aircraft weapons to drunken separatists who shoot down civilian planes and then deny international crash experts access to the crime scene.
And so this morning, after Obama gave a short statement on Ukraine, Brit Hume griped that Obama used “weak and gentle” language, and Fox commentators continued to mention Power as the apple of their eye.
Of course, according to the right, whatever the crisis, Obama is always using it to distract from something that would otherwise sink his presidency.
“I don’t want appear to be callous here, folks,” Rush Limbaugh said Thursday, “but you talk about an opportunity to abandon the Obama news at the border? And, no, I’m not suggesting anything other than how the media operates. Anyway, it’s eerie. It is really eerie.”
On his radio show last week, Michael Savage segued from skewering the “illiterate peasants” that Obama is letting “invade” our country to saying, Isn’t it convenient that just as the border crisis is heating up, this plane is shot down?
But it was Fox News contributor and former congressman Allen West who got to the Grand Guignol, writing on his website: “The blood on Vladimir Putin’s hands was poured by Barack Obama who is indirectly responsible, accountable accountable [sic] and no different than Neville Chamberlain’s weakness in the face of the 20th Century maniacal dictator Adolf Hitler.”
“So much for no drama Obama,” he concludes. “He is purposefully creating drama globally.”
As Media Matters dryly notes, “West did not expand on” how “he thinks Obama is ‘purposely creating’ ‘drama’ like the Malaysia crash.”
Sometimes the right-wing crazies over here sound like right-wing crazies everywhere. Top pro-Russia rebel commander Igor Girkin, for example, says the Malaysian plane flew into eastern Ukraine full of dead passengers, whose corpses were merely strewn across the countryside by the missile. So whose fault was that?
It won’t take them long to find it was Obama’s. Especially if they watch Fox.
