Fox News Legal Analyst Asks If San Bernardino Attack Was ‘A Literal War On Christmas?’ (Video)

This may be the most masterful execution of Fox News talking points ever. 

One Fox News legal analyst has done the impossible: meld the war on terror with the war on Christmas.

Speaking about Wednesday’s attack in San Bernardino that left 14 dead and another 21 injured, Peter Johnson Jr. Thursday morning made sure to tell his colleague, “Fox & Friends” co-host Steve Doocey, that he didn’t “want to come to any hasty conclusions at this point” – and then dove in head first.

The case has “cardinal characteristics, cardinal fingerprints of terrorism,” Johnson shared. “Is this a typical workplace violence attack, or is this a Jihadi Jane and Joe?,” he posited.

Johnson then ginned up his audience, tossing out all sorts of details, some true, some false, in an attempt to create fear.

“The potential for online radicalization, a man who may have been love-lorn, going to Saudi Arabia and then bringing back a highly-trained pharmacist wife. Is this the beginnning of green card jihad in America? These are the questions that we’re asking but we don’t have answers for,” Johnson offered up.

“Is this a man who needs a wife, and then brings back someone and starts a terrorist cell, unbeknownst to his whole career and life as an American in the United States?,” Johnson posed.

No law enforcement official has called the husband and wife team suspected on Wednesday’s carnage a “terror cell.”

And then, Doocey mentioned that in an old dating profile of Farook, he had mentioned he liked “target practice,” so Johnson turned the operative word around, as if it were used as a code word: “Could he have been targeted?”

Johnson went on to claim that “politically, it’s a firebomb for the White House to admit that it was a terror attack, or that there was a homegrown ISIS terrorist with another foreign national who committed this. The political implications are disturbing for this president.”

Which, of course, is false, and law enforcement officials at every level – local, state, and federal – have insisted they will “go where the facts take us.”

“I don’t want to come to any hasty conclusions at this point,” Johnson claimed, “but if you look at the dots, if you start to connect them in a way that’s rational and reasonable — and not political — based on simple things we know about terrorism, simple things we know about criminal justice then it leads inescapably to that one horrible conclusion: terror.”

“Is it based on politics? Is it based on religion? Is it based on hate? Is it a literal war on Christmas?”

For his part, ironically, Doocey wondered if Wednesday’s attack would be “whitewashed” by the Obama administration as workplace violence, rather than as terrorism. Ironic in that most of Fox News did not want to classify Friday’s terror attack on a Planned Parenthood as terrorism.

Johnson suggested that if Wednesday’s attack were “whitewashed,” it could affect Americans’ safety, as if a label would change anything.

Watch:

 

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Image: Screenshot via Fox News
Hat tip: David Edwards at Raw Story