President Lyndon B. Johnson once said: “If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: ‘President Can't Swim.’” That’s how it’s been with President Joe Biden and his detractors on Fox News. These hatemongers will find any reason to criticize or insult Biden, regardless of the validity.
Maria Bartiromo has embarrassed herself time and time again as a host on Fox News and Fox Business. On Nov, 8, 2020, a day after major news outlets had declared Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election, Bartiromo aired a softball interview with lawyer Sidney Powell, who expressed baseless and outlandish claims of election fraud. Bartiromo figured prominently in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit that resulted in Fox agreeing to a $787.5 settlement to avoid going to trial.
But Bartiromo, who was largely nonpolitical when she earned the nickname the “Money Honey” as a host on CNBC, apparently did not learn any lesson from the Dominion lawsuit. On Monday, she insinuated that Biden was somehow to blame for last Friday’s helicopter crash in the eastern Mediterranean that killed five members of the U.S. Army Special Operations forces.
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Bartiromo told her guest, Republican Rep. Brian Mast of Florida, a U.S. Army veteran who was wounded by an I.E.D. in Afghanistan and who thought it tasteful to wear his IDF uniform to a House Republican meeting, that she found the Black Hawk helicopter crash quite “disturbing.”
She then posed the following loaded question to Mast:
“The military says that this tragedy was caused by a mishap during a training exercise and landed into the eastern Mediterranean Sea, Congressman. Do you know about this mishap that killed our servicemen over the weekend? And how much of these issues in terms of the aggression that we’re seeing from all of these adversaries have to do with Joe Biden’s failed foreign policy? The fact that he botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan and triggered our adversaries to get on the march.”
Mast then replied: “All of it has to do with Joe Biden’s failed foreign policy and his domestic policy.”
U.S. European Command said Friday’s accident occurred during a routine air refueling mission and is currently under investigation, CNN reported:
The special operations forces were in the region as part of the military’s broader contingency planning around the war between Israel and Hamas, should an evacuation of US citizens from the region be ordered, for example, according to two US officials.
The regiment’s commander, Col. Roger P. Waleski Jr., said the five soldiers were “truly SOF professionals and are among the nation’s finest soldiers. Their loss has left an indelible void within this Regiment that will never be filled.”
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, in a statement issued Sunday, said the crash was “another stark reminder that the brave men and women who defend our great nation put their lives on the line each and every day to keep our country safe. They represent the best of America,” Austin said.
The New York Times reported that the SOF troops were flying on an MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter that crashed off the coast of Cyprus, citing three U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss operational details. The newspaper added that the Pentagon has quietly dispatched commando teams from the Joint Special Operations Command, including the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, in case they are needed to help evacuate American citizens from the region. The Times added:
The commandos are also trained in hostage rescue operations. About a dozen or so American hostages were seized when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, but Biden administration officials have indicated they have no plans to put American boots on the ground in the densely populated Gaza Strip, where the Israel military is now conducting major ground operations.
The helicopter crew members who died were members of the Army’s elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers, and are among the aviators assigned to ferry the commandos on clandestine missions. …
An American aircraft carrier, the Gerald R. Ford, is also operating in the eastern Mediterranean off the coast of Israel, in what the Biden administration has said is a deterrent to Iran and its proxies in the region to widen the Gaza war.
So all that the Biden administration has done is to implement routine deployments to ensure that the U.S. has the forces in place to handle emergency evacuations and deter any escalation by Iranian proxies threatening U.S. forces in the region.
As for the botched 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, a review led by the National Security Council largely lays the blame on former President Donald Trump, saying Biden was “severely constrained” by the decisions of his predecessor, PBS reported. In an April 2023 story, PBS wrote:
“President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor,” the White House summary states, noting that when Biden entered office, “the Taliban were in the strongest military position that they had been in since 2001, controlling or contesting nearly half of the country.”
In February 2020, the Trump administration announced a peace agreement with the Taliban after negotiations in Doha, Qatar, that called for a U.S. withdraw from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, later extended by the Biden administration to September. The Doha agreement also provided for the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners, which helped hasten the collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government.
Imagine what Fox News would be saying if Biden had negotiated such an agreement.
There’s also the matter that accidents on military training missions tragically occur routinely no matter who is sitting in the White House. In a June 2019 story, CNN cited a congressional report that found that more U.S. service members are dying during training exercises than in combat operations.
Between 2006 and 2018, 31.9% of active-duty military deaths were the result of accidents, according to a congressional report updated last month. By comparison, 16.3% of service members who died during that time were killed in action.
And a large majority of those accidents occurred in circumstances unrelated to combat deployments.
“Since 2006 … a total of 16,652 active-duty personnel and mobilized reservists have died while serving in the US armed forces. Seventy-three percent of these casualties occurred under circumstances unrelated to war,” the report states. [...]
In 2017, nearly four times as many service members died in training accidents as were killed in combat, according to a House Armed Services Committee report related to the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2019 – a key point highlighted by many lawmakers and military officials who argued for additional defense spending to help offset readiness issues that have compounded for years.
In 2017, 21 service members died in combat, while 80 died as a result of noncombat training accidents, the report said. And in 2018, the military had a high rate of training-related deaths, including a spate of deadly noncombat military aircraft crashes. That led then-House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, a Republican from Texas, to comment that the “readiness of the military is at a crisis point.”
And who was president in 2017-2018, Ms. Bartiromo?
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