Durbin Knocks Krauthammer Over Obama’s ‘Accommodationism’: He ‘Has a Short Memory’

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) pushed back against a Charles Krauthammer column tying Russia’s aggression to President Barack Obama’s “accommodationism” that supposedly emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade the Crimean peninsula.

“Conservative Charles Krauthammer call[ed] it Obama’s fruitless accommodationism,” MTP’s David Gregory said. “Does it invite Russia’s Putin to take the action he’s taken, or Assad to feel like he’s got more staying power?”

“Mr. Krauthammer it has a short memory,” Durbin said. “Do you realize what happened in the Georgia Republic against President Bush? Virtually the same thing that’s happening in Crimea. Putin went in there and seized territory and held it. What does Mr. Krauthammer say of the Bush administration in those days?”

“As far as our policy in responding to Putin’s aggression, there’s a basic question here,” Durbin continued. “What will the bipartisan Congress do to support the president’s actions? When the president asked for just the authority for military action to stop chemical weapons in Syria, it was hard to get. In fact, we couldn’t achieve it on the floor of the House or Senate. We couldn’t get a bipartisan consensus us behind our foreign policy.”

“I voted to give the president that,” Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) added. “I’ve been critical of the president in the past, but I don’t thinking anything the president did or said lended itself to what Putin did here.”

Watch the clip below, via NBC News:

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