Last night President Obama sat down for an interview on 60 Minutes where he discussed everything from ISIS to the economy.
On ISIS:
President Obama shifted blame for the failure to combat ISIS sooner to the intelligence community, saying agencies tasked with threat assessment dropped the ball. Blaming the broad "intelligence community" is one of President Obama's go-to tactics for evading responsibility on foreign policy disasters. He took no responsibility for the rise of ISIS as a result of his own decisions solely based on the political promises he made to pull all U.S. troops from Iraq and blamed former Prime Minister Nouri-Al Maliki for the failure to uphold the new democracy. Further, President Obama stressed that the current war against ISIS isn't about the United States, but the international community as a whole.
"This is not America against ISIL. This is America leading the international community to assist a country with whom we have a security partnership," Obama said.
On the economy:
President Obama argued that the country is much better off economically, but people just don't realize it because wages "aren't going up."
"We've had the longest run of uninterrupted private sector job growth in our history. We have seen deficits cut by more than half," Obama said, adding the question "Ronald Reagan used to ask the question 'Are you better off than you were four years ago?' In this case, are you better off than you were six and the answer is the country is definitely better off than we were when I came into office."
"Do you think people feel it?" Steve Kroft asked.
"They don't feel it and the reason they don't feel it is because incomes and wages are not going up. There's solutions to that. If we raise the minimum wage, if we make sure women are getting paid the same as men for doing the same work, if we are rebuilding our infrastructure, if we're doing more to invest in job training so people are able to get the jobs that are out there right now."
Yes, raising the minimum wage will solve all of our problems and by the way, the White House is still paying women less than men. Further, Obama somehow hasn't realized yet that job training programs are worthless if there aren't jobs available to people being trained. Obama's statement about private sector job growth just isn't true. Job growth isn't keeping up with population growth and millions of people have completely dropped out of the labor force.
Thanks to the Washington Free Beacon for the video.