When President Obama spoke at West Point about sending more troops to Afghanistan, there were several instances where he mentioned success. However, Fox & Friends would have you believe he didn’t:

DOOCY: Interestingly enough, of the 4,581 words in his speech, one word was missing. That word was “win.”

Similarly, The Fox Nation web site states that there was no mention of “victory.” Here’s a screenshot:

Here are a few examples from Obama’s speech that prove Steve Doocy and The Fox Nation wrong:

OBAMA: Good evening. To the United States Corps of Cadets, to the men and women of our Armed Services, and to my fellow Americans: I want to speak to you tonight about our effort in Afghanistan — the nature of our commitment there, the scope of our interests, and the strategy that my administration will pursue to bring this war to a successful conclusion. It’s an extraordinary honor for me to do so here at West Point — where so many men and women have prepared to stand up for our security, and to represent what is finest about our country.

[...]

OBAMA: Because this is an international effort, I’ve asked that our commitment be joined by contributions from our allies. Some have already provided additional troops, and we’re confident that there will be further contributions in the days and weeks ahead. Our friends have fought and bled and died alongside us in Afghanistan. And now, we must come together to end this war successfully. For what’s at stake is not simply a test of NATO’s credibility — what’s at stake is the security of our allies, and the common security of the world.

[...]

OBAMA: Third, we will act with the full recognition that our success in Afghanistan is inextricably linked to our partnership with Pakistan.

Obviously Fox News is playing a petty game of semantics. In the future, perhaps, the President and his speech writers should try and figure out what word Fox News will try to use against him and then whip out the ol’ thesaurus (i.e. Win – v.: finish first, succeed, achieve, be first, be victorious, beat, carry the day, come in first, conquer, edge, finish in front, finish off, gain, gain victory, overcome, overwhelm, prevail, run circles around, shut out, sink, take the prize, triumph, upset, walk away with, walk off with).

Or not… A better idea would be to send a thesaurus to Fox News so they can look up synonyms for “win,” or “victory,” and not keep making the same idiotic mistakes, like they did with Obama’s stance on terrorism.

Original Story

The following screen capture shows the caption, “President’s Distorted Reality? Claims there is no more terrorism” while the subject of Barack Obama’s Cairo speech was being discussed on Fox & Friends. Of course, this is hardly honest, or factual.

Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy stated, “War on terror must be over. In fact, terrorism no longer a problem because the president never, not once, mentioned war on terror.” Semantics aside, President Obama did address, at length, the topic of violent extremism in his speech at Cairo University. Just because he didn’t repeat the terror, terrorist, terrorism mantra like Bush did, ad naseum, doesn’t mean the topic wasn’t addressed, or that “there is no more terrorism. ”

Original Story

While the rest of the world is reporting that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times, Fox News plays another game of semantics and claims that that number is misleading. Here’s how it plays out… Fox News obviously supports the use of torture, so they find a source that tells them that a waterboarding “session” can include numerous “pours,” so Fox News can then say that there was only a small number of waterboarding “sessions” and everyone else is wrong. Tricky isn’t it?

The problem with their reasoning, if you can call it that, is that Waterboarding is defined as a torture method where water is poured into breathing passages, or on a rag covering the breating passages, thus suffocating the victim. They did that 183 times. Fox News admits that there were breaks between pours where the victim can catch their breath. To use their terminology, that break would constitute the end of one “session” and the beginning of another. Nowhere in the definition of waterboarding is there a mention of “sessions.”

On the Fox News web site is a story about Obama’s statement regarding 90% of the guns recovered in Mexico being from the United States. Fox News argues, not the real issue, but the fact that Obama used the word “recovered” rather than “traceable.”

“By recovered he means traceable, guns traced back to the United States,” McDonough said. “These are ATF (Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms) numbers. These are the guns submitted to the ATF for tracing. That’s what we mean by recovered.”

I would call that recovered… In what world does “submitted to the ATF” not mean “recovered?” There’s a reason Obama didn’t say “confiscated from the cartels.” Really, it could go either way, but such a argument about semantics is rather petty on the part of Fox News.