GOP lawmaker responds to Ukraine crash by accusing president of not caring about U.S.
Just hours after Malaysian Air Flight 17 was shot down by a surface-to-air missile over Ukraine, state House Rep. Glenn Cordelli (R-Tuftonboro) was on Facebook mocking the President’s response:
“What a marked difference between Obama’s reaction to the Malaysia jet being shot down (brief statement then jokes) and the 1983 Reagan handling of the Korean airliner shot down by the Russians,” he wrote. “We need a leader who believes in and cares about this country.”
Cordelli, a GOPAC 2014 Emerging Leader, linked to a FoxNews video in which host Megyn Kelly praised Reagan’s 1983 speech (delivered four days after the Korean airliner was shot down) and described the President’s response as, “Wow, what a tragedy. I’m outta here.”
Writing in the Washington Post, Andrew Rudalevige provides the historical context. “[I]t is worth recalling that Reagan’s own response in 1983 did not get good reviews from the Fox News of the day,” he wrote:
True, the president’s nationally televised address on Sept. 5 was full of strong rhetorical condemnation: Reagan called the Soviet action “monstrous,” “murderous,” and “born of a society which wantonly disregards individual rights and the value of human life.”
But little action followed. Reagan demanded an apology to the world and continued a number of sanctions — but he decided not to end grain sales to the USSR or to suspend arms control talks. … The Manchester Union-Leader editorialized that “if someone had told us three years ago that the Russians could blow a civilian airliner out of the skies – and not face one whit of retaliation from a Ronald Reagan administration, we would have called that crazy. It is crazy. It is insane. It is exactly what happened.”