Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer ripped Hillary Clinton’s continued dodging of the media as the Democratic presidential candidate has now gone 27 days without taking a question from the press.
In a Monday appearance on “The O’Reilly Factory,” Krauthammer told host Bill O’Reilly that Clinton needs to answer questions Republicans are getting at every turn about the Iraq War, adding that the former secretary of state “has to come out of her bunker sometime.”
“The question for Hillary is, when you were in the Senate, you opposed the surge. You said it wasn’t working, and you implied in your questioning of David Petraeus during the surge that he was lying. Do you think that was a mistake?” Krauthammer said. “How about asking that.”
“And the second question is, when we decided to withdraw entirely from Iraq in 2011, as you indicated Bill [O’Reilly], against the advice of the military, it was obvious what would be the result. You Secretary Clinton were the secretary of state in charge of our diplomacy. Did you oppose that?” Krauthammer asked hypothetically. “Was it a mistake, and would you now say so? She’s got to answer those. The press has to ask those questions and not just hector Republicans with questions about Iraq.”
“Absolutely,” O’Reilly told Krauthammer. “But remember Hillary Clinton is not answering any questions, and I don’t expect her to anytime soon.”
“But she needs to be embarrassed and the Stephanopouloses of the world ought to be embarrassed of asking those questions of her, and not just people like Peter Schweizer,” Krauthammer said.
“I don’t think anybody will get a chance to ask her anything because her strategy is ‘I’m going to go around the media,'” O’Reilly said.
“But she has to come out of her bunker sometime,” Krauthammer said. “You can’t run and hide forever. You’re a candidate. At some point, you’re going to be asked — I want the press to be asking the hard questions.”
However, O’Reilly continued to disagree with the conservative commentator, telling him that Clinton’s strategy is to “go around” the media en route to the White House.
“Here’s the Clinton’s strategy: We’re going to raise a billion and a half dollars. We’re going to go around the media, we’re not going to engage the media ever,” O’Reilly said. “We may have a few friendly interviews that are going to be scripted tightly, but we’ll go around — put together our coalition of the willing, all right, groups that are going to benefit from a Democratic presidency. and we’re going to hope for the best.”