A State Department spokeswoman attacked Bill O’Reilly Thursday for saying another State Department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, looks “way out of her depth,” following days of mixed messages and incoherent statements from the State Department.
Marie Harf, deputy spokeswoman for the State Department, said in a tweet Thursday that O’Reilly’s coverage of the State Department’s failure to coherently talk about the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria lacks intelligence and class.
.@statedeptspox explains foreign policy w/ intelligence & class. Too bad we can’t say the same about @oreillyfactor: http://t.co/n1I5B6kheF
— Marie Harf (@marieharf) September 4, 2014
The tweet links to a Wednesday O’Reilly Factor segment on Fox News, in which O’Reilly criticized the Obama administration’s inconsistent messaging and lack of strategy for dealing with ISIS.
In a clip shown on the segment, Fox News Washington correspondent James Rosen asks State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki why the president does not recognize that we are at war with ISIS.
“Our actions speak for our commitment to this,” Psaki responds. “The president has authorized more than a hundred strikes in Iraq …”
Rosen told O’Reilly he concluded from their back and forth that the administration does not view the beheadings of journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff as acts of war. When he asked Psaki about the president’s contradictory language regarding ISIS, he said she accused him of playing word games.
“With due respect, that woman looks way out of her depth over there,” O’Reilly said about the exchange. “Just the way she delivers, it just doesn’t look like she has the gravitas for that job, and that brings us to John Kerry, the secretary of state.”
Rosen and O’Reilly then discuss the mixed messages and lack of clarity coming from the vice president, the president and the secretary of state. “From this miasma of verbiage, one sentence comes through strong and clear to the American people and will echo down through the ages,” Rosen said, “and that was the presidents true confession last week that ‘we don’t yet have a strategy.'”
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