WASHINGTON — President Obama sounded like a kid ready to grab his marbles and call it quits yesterday when he was asked about his failure to get the Senate to back him and approve gun control.
On the 100th day of his second term, Obama didn’t cotton to a question by ABC’s Jonathan Karl about whether he still has the “juice” needed to get his agenda through Congress.
“If you put it that way, Jonathan, maybe I should just pack up and go home — golly,” Obama said at a White House press conference, adding that rumors of his demise “may be a little exaggerated.”
Obama then blasted the “dysfunctional” Congress, which is out on vacation this week. “You seem to suggest that somehow these folks over there have no responsibilities and that my job is to somehow get them to behave. That’s their job,” he insisted.
On Syria, Obama’s “red line” turned fuzzy, as he called for further review of reports on the use of chemical weapons against rebels in the war-torn country.
“We don’t know how they were used, when they were used, who used them, we don’t have a chain of custody that establishes what exactly happened,” Obama said.
Obama refrained from saber rattling and effectively walked back some of his most emphatic rhetoric — even as he repeated his line that the use of chemical weapons by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime would be a “game changer.”
“Obviously, there are options that are available to me that are on the shelf right now that we have not deployed,” Obama said.
The president’s comments came just days after new video surfaced of Syrian victims foaming at the mouth — a possible effect of sarin gas. But Obama is wary of getting the US drawn into another war.
His most impassioned plea came on the subject of one of his biggest unmet campaign promises: the failure to close the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where prisoners are engaged in a mass hunger strike.
“I’m going to go back at this,” Obama said, pledging to “reengage with Congress.”
Obama also defended the feds’ efforts to look into the background of the late Tamerlan Tsarnaev before the alleged Boston bomber committed his horrendous act.
“Based on what I’ve seen so far, the FBI performed its duties, the Department of Homeland Security did what it was supposed to be doing.”