Ari Fleischer Blames Democrats for Trump Siding With Kim Jong Un’s Attacks on Biden

Ari Fleischer Blames Democrats for Trump Siding With Kim Jong Un’s Attacks on Biden

Ari Fleischer just can’t help himself.

The former press secretary for George W. Bush used Donald Trump’s bashing of Joe Biden while on an overseas trip to Japan this weekend as an opportunity to reprimand Democrats for having attacked Bush while the former president was overseas in, uh, 2001, 2004, 2006 and 2008.

Someone really likes to hold onto grudges.

Fleischer made the comments during an appearance Tuesday on Fox News’ Outnumbered. Co-hosts Melissa Francis and Harris Faulkner had just questioned Trump’s decision to take shots at Biden while overseas, and siding with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un while doing so. This gave Fleischer the change to misstate what was going on in order to attack Democrats.

“I find this whole topic of presidents abroad to be naively cute in 2019,” Fleischer said. “In 2001 in George Bush’s first trip out of the country he was attacked by Senate Democratic leader George Mitchell. The notion here that…you can’t say something critical about somebody who has left the United States on foreign soil, it’s not practiced anymore.”

Note that the discussion up to this point was not about the propriety of attacking a president while he is out of the country. It was about the propriety of a president attacking his domestic opponents while he is out of the country. And using a bloodthirsty dictator’s alleged comments as a jumping-off point to do so. Fleischer couldn’t even characterize the disagreement properly.

Jessica Tarlov pushed back on Fleischer, who agreed that Trump should not be using Kim Jong Un as support for attacking Biden. Then he asked if Tarlov would apologize for Democrats attacking George W. Bush before adding triumphantly, “Of course you won’t!”

Apparently Ari Fleischer needs Democrats to apologize for something George Mitchell said 18 years ago before he will agree that Trump’s bromancie with Kim Jong Un is bad.

With high-level officials such as Fleischer being such stringent partisans that they can’t even condemn a Republican president taking the side of a North Korean dictator over that of a former Democratic vice president, is it any wonder George W. Bush’s administration was such a lumbering, incompetent mess?

Watch the video up top, via Fox News.

 

Gary Legum

Gary Legum has written about politics and culture for Independent Journal Review, Salon, The Daily Beast, Wonkette, AlterNet and McSweeney's, among others. He currently lives in his native state of Virginia.

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