I'm sure you heard about the heat Savannah Guthrie took, and rightly so, for the softball questions she tossed at President Obama during NBC's live pre-Super Bowl interview with him on Sunday. But apparently there was more to the interview than the live segment NBC showed before the game.
In another segment, recorded earlier and aired on Monday, Guthrie took an entirely different tone, and Obama didn't like it one bit. Enjoy, via the Media Research Center:
I will say this: I'm not a big fan of "critics say" questions. By making the critics the issue, Guthrie gives the hyper-partisan Obama the opportunity to respond by attacking the critics, and of course he does exactly that. But at least she's holding his feet to the fire. To claim that ISIS is being beaten back, or that Islamic terrorism is on the decline overall, is comletely delusional and anyone who's paying attention knows it.
And does push back against his strawman claim that his critics would look to put tens of thousands of U.S. ground troops back in Iraq or wherever else. Then again, how can he claim "anything we can do, we are doing" when he just named an option that he refuses to even consider? What he really means is, "Anything I want to do, I'm doing."
Of course, that pretty much describes his entire presidency.
Obama clearly gets irritated when he had to deal with any unfriendly questions from the press, but all the more so when it's from a network like NBC that usually licks his boots. It's nice that Guthrie actually challenged him here. It would have been even nicer if she had saved these questions for the live part of the interview, which makes you wonder if NBC didn't agree to conditions insisted on by the White House to get the live interview at all.
