In Morning Joe Interview, Obama Talks Libya And Ideas ‘I Stole From A Massachusetts Governor’
From Mediaite:
As mentioned earlier, Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski spoke with President Barack Obama during a New Hampshire campaign stop in a segment aired early Monday morning.
Brzezinski kicked things off by asking the President why it’s been so easy for critics to go after his administration’s response to the attack in Benghazi.
“Well,” the President responded, “the fact of the matter is that this is a tragedy. There’s all kinds of legitimate questions to ask, because any time a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans who are serving our country get killed, we’ve got to figure out what happened and fix it. And, most importantly, we’ve got to bring those folks who carried that out to justice. That’s exactly what we’re going to do. But I do take offense, as I’ve said during one of the debates, with some suggestion that, you know, in any way we haven’t tried to make sure that the American people knew, as information was coming in, what we believed happened. ”
“Was it the intel community giving you bad information early on?” asked Scarborough.
“That’s what we’re going to find out from the investigation,” said the President. “The truth is, is that across the board, when this happened, my number one priority was secure Americans, figure out what happened, bring those folks to justice. We are in the process of doing that right now. Congress has been getting the flow of information continuously from day one. And what my attitude on this is, is if we find out that there has a big breakdown and somebody didn’t do their job, they’ll be held accountable. Ultimately, as commander in chief, I’m responsible, and I don’t shy away from that responsibility. My number one responsibility is to go after folks who did this and we’re going to make sure that we get them. I’ve got a pretty good track record doing that.”
After admitting to feeling a bit “nostalgic” as he prepares to wrap up his final election campaign, Obama shared some of his plans for the next four years, if elected.
“Well, there’s no doubt that our first order of business is going to be to get our deficits and debt under control,” he told the hosts. “And the good thing is, is that there’s a forcing mechanism. The Bush tax cuts end at the end of the year. We know that we’ve got the sequester looming — that wouldn’t be the right way to do things is taking a machete to something as opposed to a scalpel. And after the election, I think that both Democrats and Republicans have to step back and say, you know what? This is something that the country wants to solve. If I’ve won, then I believe that’s a mandate for doing it in a balanced way. We’ve already made a trilion dollars’ worth of cuts. We can do some more cuts. We can look at how to deal with health care costs under Medicare and Medicaid in a serious way, but we’re going to also need revenue. If we get that piece done, and we kind of settle on the big question, how much government are we going to have, and how are we going to pay for it, then a lot of the other stuff falls into place.”
more, video also at link: http://www.mediaite.com/tv/in-morning-joe-interview-obama-talks-libya-debt-and-ideas-i-stole-from-a-massachusetts-governor/
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