A Mark Halperin misstep this is not, but Newsweek magazine columnist Evan Thomas had some pretty strong words for President Barack Obama Friday.
(Mark Halperin Calls Obama a ‘Dick’ on ‘Morning Joe’)
On “Inside Washington,” host Gordon Peterson asked his panel to suggest a way to overcome the current impasse and get Congress and the White House moving on a budget deal. Thomas offered up a solution, but also expressed his frustration with Obama.
“Yeah, because it’s happened before – Obama has got to be President of the United States,” Thomas said. “He has to be two things. He has to make a public case of how bad is this, because he is not doing that. He’s not being honest about just how bad this is going to be — no, he was partisan. He was God [bleep] Democrat! He was just, you know – being a party guy. I applaud the energy but it wasn’t getting me anywhere. He has got to rise above that and then in private, in private – he’s got to make a deal.”
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer’s sentiments fell in line with Thomas’s.
“Instead of saying, as a president ought to say, is that we have a problem — it is a serious problem, it’s a growing problem, it’s a structural problem and we have to do something, he says, as in the sound bite you showed, it is a choice between helping the elderly on Medicare and corporate jets and oil tax breaks,” Krauthammer added. “That is pure demagoguery and that is not leadership.”
Earlier in the program, Krauthammer pointed out that if you were to collect the tax on corporate jets for the next 7,000 years, it would not cover one year of an Obama administration deficit.
