George Will thinks he has nailed down the issue that caused Tuesday’s headache for the White House, specifically press secretary Josh Earnest, after President Obama called the attack on a kosher deli in Paris last month “random.”
He believes the teleprompter is the cause of his ills.
Appearing on “Special Report” Tuesday night, the syndicated columnist said that Obama’s “affection for the teleprompter” is to blame for his “tiptoeing through what he considers a semantic minefield.”
Will made the comments to Fox News anchor Bret Baier.
“Terrorism is random violence, so in a sense, the attack on the cartoonists was not terrorism. That was an assassination,” Will said. “They went after specific people who they knew would be at a specific place at a specific time. That’s not random violence, that’s an attack.”
“The president, we can now appreciate his affection for the teleprompter, because he gets in trouble partly because he is constantly tiptoeing through what he considers a semantic minefield,” Will told Baier. “He doesn’t want to say Islamic extremists and all kinds of things he doesn’t want to say that common sense would have you say. So when you’re avoiding the obvious, it gets pretty nerve-wracking to speak.”