Reaction continued to pour in Wednesday after White House press secretary Josh Earnest was grilled by the W.H. press corps following President Barack Obama’s comment that the the kosher deli shooting in Paris was “random.”
This time though, the critic was someone who sat in Earnest’s seat once upon a time.
In an interview with NewsmaxTV’s Steve Malzberg, former W.H. press secretary Ari Fleischer, who served under George W. Bush, slammed Obama’s comments, calling them “reprehensible.” Fleischer added that while Obama’s remark “makes no sense,” the president feels a need to “minimize terrorism and to come up with excuses for terrorists.”
“This is reprehensible, and I don’t understand the point the president was making other than to, once again, minimize terrorism,” Fleischer continued, “and to come up with excuses for the terrorists who do these things to make it not so bad. This was of course a targeting of people because they were Jewish. What else was it? They acknowledged it.”
“It makes no sense. The only reason I can think he’s doing it is because he doesn’t want to do what George Bush did, which is ring a clarion bell against terrorism and say this has to be the fight of our day,” Fleischer said. “He wants to always come up with a way to minimize and explain and rationalize, that way he can go on to do other things.”
“Do you feel sorry for Earnest in that position because he has to toe the company line, so to speak,” Malzberg asked the former White House flack.
“Well, yea,” Fleischer said. “Josh has to do that when the president comes out and says something clumsy or wrong and the press secretary’s job is to make it un-clumsy or un-wrong. Josh has no choice.”
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