Keith Ablow's Armchair Analysis of Obama Revives Discredited Right-Wing Tropes

Fox News' Dr. Keith Ablow once again attacked President Obama by using his trademark armchair analysis, this time relying on discredited right-wing tropes to back up his outrageous claims.

Serving as the designated #OneLuckyGuy on the May 29 edition of Fox's Outnumbered, Ablow leveled a series of attacks on the president while discussing Obama's recent commencement speech at West Point. Ablow claimed that Obama “has it in for the American public” because people “abandoned him in his life again and again”:

ABLOW: Well, when a president takes office and immediately apologizes for the country he's leading and goes on an apology tour, when he says “You didn't build that business” so if you thought you were using capitalism and your own smarts to build something, you didn't. He's a dispiriting president who has it in for the American public, and he masterfully -- why? Um, well, because I think he -- well, it's a long story, but I think he distrusts autonomy. I think people abandoned him in his life again and again and again, and individual decision-making is anathema to him. He hates it.

Such dubious armchair analysis is nothing new for the discredited psychiatrist, but Ablow is invoking debunked right-wing tropes to smear Obama.

In reality, Obama's 2009 overseas tour -- which was repeatedly maligned by Fox News as an “apology tour” despite fact-checkers pointing out that Obama never once apologized for America -- was Obama's effort to make good on previous promises to repair strained relationships with allies.

Similarly, Obama's “you didn't build that” statement, made in a July 2012 speech, was not an assertion that Americans did not accomplish anything on their own, as Ablow claimed. The full context of his statement shows that he was commenting on the role that infrastructure and education, as well as individual drive, play in a business's success. Fox played a leading role in promoting that distortion as well.