The White House agreed to an interview with FOX News host Bill O’Reilly prior to the Super Bowl. Bill O’Reilly talked about the interview all week. It’s just too bad ‘President Thinski’n couldn’t answer the questions without getting testy. Obama attacked both Bill O’Reilly and FOX News during the interview blaming FOX for his failures as president.
O’Reilly ate his lunch.
Obama also downplayed the corruption in his administration.
“Not even a smidgen of corruption.”
Business Insider had more on the interview:
“Why didn’t you fire Sebelius?” O’Reilly said.
He avoided a direct answer, but Obama said that people were being “held accountable.” O’Reilly subsequently questioned Obama on whether his promise that, “If you like your plan, you can keep it” was his biggest “mistake” as president. Obama used a football analogy at the end of this line of questioning, saying he was trying to not dwell on the “fumbles” and move on to the next play.
O’Reilly also asked Obama if he was told in the initial aftermath of the 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, that it had been a “terrorist attack.”
“When someone is attacking our compound, that’s an act of terror,” Obama said, adding that he had used that phrase in a Rose Garden statement the day after the attack.
“Your detractors believe that you did not tell the world it was a terror attack because your campaign didn’t want that out,” O’Reilly said. “That’s what they believe.”
“And they believe it because folks like you are telling them that,” Obama shot back.
After some intense questioning about last year’s revelation that the IRS targeted certain groups, including conservative groups, for extra scrutiny, Obama took another jab at Fox News.
“These kinds of things keep on surfacing in part because you and your TV station will promote them,” he said.
Here’s the full transcript from the O’Reilly-Obama interview.