State Dept Manages to Come Up With More of a Howler than Obama's 'Manageable Problem' Line

Earlier today, President Barack Obama said that America’s goal should be to “shrink” the Islamic State until it is a “manageable problem.”

His own vice president, Joe Biden, later contradicted him, saying that we will “follow ISIS to the gates of Hell, because Hell is where they will reside.”

This afternoon, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki did a “what he really meant to say” routine.

Fox’s James Rosen noted the president’s own contradictory comments, which went from wanting to destroy ISIS, to wanting to roll it back, to wanting to leave it as a “manageable problem.” All of those iterations came in the president’s statement in Estonia today.

Psaki took a little dig at Fox before answering that “It’s important to look at the context of the remarks that the president made.”

The administration’s juvenile digs at a single network have no place in a serious foreign policy discussion about a threat to the whole nation, by the way. They’re petty.

“Certainly our objective here is to degrade and destroy ISIL,” Psaki said.

Rosen countered that “How can reducing something so that it is a manageable problem be consistent with ‘destroying it?'”

Psaki replied “Well I would have to look at the full context, James, but I think it’s understandable that the White House press corps and others are asking questions asked in many different ways. There are many questions to be answered and discussed on this particular issue.”

Then she touted the “effort to build an international coalition” against IS, which the president only mentioned as a possibility, not an actual effort.

From the looks of things today, Barack Obama cannot even manage to keep a consistent message coming from his own mouth over the course of one day. How can he turn IS into a “manageable problem?”