Wash. Post's Krauthammer Pushes Anti-Obama Myth Debunked By The Post Itself

ADAM SHAH/Media Matters for America

This morning, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer pushed the myth that "Obama's entire Middle East policy" consists of "apology and accommodation." This claim, however, has been repeatedly debunkedby Washington Post own fact-checker, Glenn Kessler.  

Kessler has noted that the speeches conservatives cite to push the myth that Obama regularly apologizes for the United States do not contain apologies and have often been "selectively trimmed for political purposes":

The claim that Obama repeatedly has apologized for the United States is not borne out by the facts, especially if his full quotes are viewed in context.

Obama often was trying to draw a rhetorical distinction between his policies and that of President Bush, a common practice when the presidency changes parties. The shift in policies, in fact, might have been more dramatic from Clinton to Bush than from Bush to Obama, given how Obama has largely maintained Bush's approach to fighting terrorism.

In other cases, Obama's quotes have been selectively trimmed for political purposes. Or they were not much different than sentiments expressed by Bush or his secretary of state.

In his column, Krauthammer went on to say that Obama has ignored the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya and referred to the attack as mere "bumps in the road." In fact, Obama has repeatedlycondemned the Benghazi attack, and when Obama said "bumps in the road," he was referring to his support for Arab countries' transition from autocracy to democracy during the Arab Spring, even though he knew the transition would not be perfect.

This is the second time in a week that a conservative Washington Post columnist has push a falsehood debunked by Kessler. Post columnist Marc Thiessen claimed that President Obama had often skipped his intelligence briefings and Kessler responded with a thorough debunking. Thiessen then criticized Kessler's debunking, and Kessler updated his original post, stating that Thiessen's answer was an "interesting if not very factual argument."

GOP Congressman Blows Up At CNN Host: ‘I Don’t Care What Fact Check Says,’ Obama Apologizes For America!

By Igor Volsky/Think Progress

During an appearance on CNN’s Starting Point on Monday, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) could not explain when President Obama “apologized” for the United States, despite repeatedly claiming that he went on an “apology tour” across the Middle East shortly after becoming president.

Since violence broke out across the region, Republicans have charged that Obama’s “defeatist” policies have caused the unrest and contributed to the death of Libyan ambassador Christopher Stevens. But pressed to detail where Obama has apologized for America by CNN host Soledad O’Brien, King came up short:

O’BRIEN: Never once in that speech, as you know, which I have the speech right here. that was — he never once used the word “apology.” He never once said “I’m sorry.”

KING: Didn’t have to. The logical — any logical reading of that speech or the speech he gave in France where he basically said that the United States can be too aggressive. [...]

O’BRIEN: Everybody keeps talking about this apology tour and apologies from the President. I’m trying to find the words ‘I’m sorry, I apologize’ in any of those speeches. Which I have the text of all those speeches in front of me. None of those speeches at all, if you go to factcheck.org which we check in a lot, they all say the same thing. They fact check this and they say this whole theory of apologies…

KING: I don’t care what fact check says.

O’BRIEN: There are fact checks. You may not care, but they’re a fact checker.

KING: No. Soledad. Any commonsense interpretation of those speeches, the president’s apologizing for the American position. That’s the apology tour. That’s the way it’s interpreted in the Middle East. If I go over and say that the U.S. has violated its principles, that the United States has not shown respect for islam, that’s an apology. How else can it be interpreted?

O’BRIEN: I think plenty of people are interpreting it as a nuanced approach to diplomacy is how some people are interpreting it. So I don’t think that everybody agrees it’s apology.

Watch it:

As the Washington Post put it, “the apology tour never happened.” Rather, shortly after becoming president, Obama traveled to the world introducing himself and differentiating his foreign policy from that of President Bush. “This is typical of many new presidents,” including Bush himself, who “quickly broke with Clinton administration policy on dealings with North Korea, the Kyoto climate change treaty and the international criminal court.”

The manufactured attack, which Republicans kicked off in 2009, “feeds into a subterranean narrative that Obama, with his exotic, mixed-race background, is not really American in the first place.”