If you were in a coma for the last six years, then suddenly awakened this past weekend to observe both John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight on HBO and Bill O’Reilly’s appearance on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, you might assume they were talking about the military actions of two very separate and distinct presidents.
On one hand, there was Bill O’Reilly who continued to push for a stronger response to Islamic jihad. Not only should the president seek to hire a mercenary army of 25,000 privateers, but we should also somehow recruit Zombie Patton to roll into Syria with the Third Army from 1944 and annihilate everyone in sight. The takeaway is the usual one: the president is a weak-willed, lead-from-behind appeaser with obvious terrorist sympathies. Indeed, some factions of O’Reilly’s side of the debate even believe Obama is offering up a swath of land in New Mexico as an ISIS safe-haven. I’m not making that up.
On the other hand, there’s the former correspondent for The Daily Show, John Oliver, who hosted a 13-minute segment Sunday night in which he deliberately scared the shit out of his audience regarding Obama’s unprecedented use of predator drones against terror targets overseas. Not only did Oliver point out that Obama has ordered exponentially more drone strikes than George W. Bush (Oliver failed to note Bush’s use of other weapons to achieve the same results), but he also repeatedly emphasized that Obama has literally ruined clear, blue skies — terrorizing grandmothers and children in the process, and making them look forward to cloudy days when drones are grounded…. CONTINUE READING
(ht Steve Duckett)