'I wasn't aware of that': Chuck Hagel tries, fails to clean up Obama's 'manageable' mess

Sarah D. | 4:15 PM on September 03, 2014

As Twitchy reported, President Obama revealed his super-strategic strategy for dealing with ISIS: Shrinking ISIS down “to the point where it is a manageable problem.” Because terrorists are people to be “managed.”

This afternoon, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel went on CNN, where he attempted to, uh, clarify the White House’s position:

https://twitter.com/NoahCRothman/status/507242885620568064

https://twitter.com/NoahCRothman/status/507243026410766336

https://twitter.com/NoahCRothman/status/507243305759805440

Hagel tells @jimsciutto that "degrade and destroy" is the goal with ISIS, not containing — as perhaps suggested by "manageable problem"

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) September 3, 2014

Let’s just go to the videotape, shall we?

Transcript:

Hagel: The president’s point being to degrade and destroy their capability, so that it doesn’t get to [the point where ISIS is a threat to the U.S. homeland]. We know they’re a threat, we know they’re brutal. We know that they are — as I’ve said, as others have said — something that we’ve never seen before. They’re better organized, they’re better funded, they have more capability, they’re better structured. There’s a dangerous, dangerous ideology of a brutality, a barbaric nature that we’ve not seen before, so my job as secretary of defense is not to second-guess what may be, or what’s going to be, but we’ve got to protect, do everything we can to protect our country, protect our interests at the command of our commander in chief.

For the record, he’s referring to the same commander in chief who thinks “brutal,” “barbaric” terrorists with a network unlike anything we’ve ever seen before can be made “manageable.”