Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume on Sunday praised Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for using the death of the top U.S. diplomat in Libya for political gain by claiming President Barack Obama was "sympathizing" with America's enemies.
"I think what he said was correct, but it was clumsy," Hume told Fox News host Chris Wallace. "And it opened him up to charges that he made a terrible mistake. We had an almost ludicrous overreaction in a lot of the media about it, in which what he did became the big story rather than what was happening over there, which was not a great moment for our national media, I'm sad to say."
"My sense is that he was on the mark," Hume added. "He might have timed it better or said it better."
On Tuesday, U.S. ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and at least three members of his staff had been killed during protests over a film that mocked that the Prophet Muhammad and was promoted by Terry Jones, a U.S. pastor who had previously sparked deadly riots threatening to burn Qurans.
Romney on Wednesday had used the death of Stevens to score political points by accusing Obama of “sympathizing” with the enemy after the U.S. embassy in Cairo released a statement condemning the anti-Muslim film.
“It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks,” Romney said.
That initial statement from the former Massachusetts governor and his press conference later in the day were both panned as “irresponsible” and “craven.”
