Dear Friends,
As you undoubtedly know, President Obama was interviewed by Bill O'Reilly as part of the Super Bowl pre-game show on FOX. It was the perfect opportunity to try to educate the FOX news audience. In today's divided political climate, people tend to watch the news show that supports their view. Consequently, it is very hard to change people's minds since they never see the other side. FOX News vilifies President Obama and has a completely distorted view of the facts. The people that only watch FOX News have their distorted views confirmed by watching only FOX News.
So the fact that President Obama was going to be interviewed on FOX gave him an incredible opportunity to at least try to get real facts to the FOX News viewers. Unfortunately for the FOX News viewers and for all the rest of us, President Obama wasted this wonderful opportunity. I watched the interview tonight here. President Obama had at least two really good teaching moments, and he failed to take advantage of either one.
Bill O'Reilly brought up the issue of the Muslim Brotherhood participating in the post-Mubarak Egyptian government. O'Reilly's questions presumed that the Muslim Brotherhood is all bad and is equal to extreme terrorists. Instead of rebutting the presumption that any Muslim group is equal to terrorists, President Obama said that the Muslim Brotherhood is not a majority and that there are secular parts of the public to offset them. President Obama let stand the FOX News narrative that all Muslims are terrorist and will demand an Islamic state. President Obama failed to call the FOX News narrative a lie which is it. What a lost opportunity.
Bill O'Reilly also quoted from a Wall Street Journal editorial saying that President Obama wanted to redistribute the wealth in this country. President Obama simply denied that he wanted to do that. He missed the opportunity to talk about how the United States government for decades under both Republican and Democratic Presidents and Congresses have adopted policies that have caused the very rich to get richer and all the rest of Americans to fall further behind. The income and wealth gap between the richest and the rest of Americans is at an all time high and is destroying the country. It is not sustainable and must be reversed. If you have not yet read it, you need to read Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned its Back on the Middle Class by Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker.
President Obama had a wonderful opportunity to lay out the facts to the FOX New viewers that the government has been pushing the wealth toward the super rich for decades and that it was time for the government to reverse those policies. President Obama missed the opportunity to explain how the number of people living below the poverty line is increasing and how the middle class income and wealth has been declining while the rich have been getting richer. That trend has never been clearer than today when the stock market is soaring and Wall Street profits and compensation are hitting new highs yet we have official unemployment over 9% and real unemployment in the high teens.
We need President Obama to take every opportunity he can to present the truth to the huge number of Americans who do not get the truth from the new outlets that they exclusively watch. Unfortunately, President Obama, event though he is thought of a professorial is unwilling to be honest with his constituents.
Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal
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