Obama hits reset button on wobbly public response to Malaysia Airlines shootdownU.S. President Obama speaks about situation in Ukraine from the White House in Washington By Olivier Knox, Yahoo News http://ift.tt/1qse5WS Obama on Friday called the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 an “outrage of unspeakable proportions,” declared it a “wake-up call” for timid European leaders, and all but laid blame for the tragedy directly at the doorstep of Russian President Vladimir Putin.Obama’s blunt language, delivered in the White House briefing room from behind a lectern with the presidential seal, offered a stark contrast to his muddled public handling of the disaster a day earlier.As the news broke on Thursday, the White House signaled that the president had first learned about the world-shaking events from Putin at the tail end of a telephone call arranged at Moscow’s request. With grisly details coming in, Obama went ahead with a heavily partisan public schedule: A speech in Wilmington, Delaware, where he hit Republicans over infrastructure funding, followed by a brace of Democratic fundraisers in New York City.Obama had begun his speech in Delaware with just seven sentences on the attack, declaring that “it looks like it may be a terrible tragedy” — a jarring response to media reports that were already citing a death toll of nearly 300 people. He did not tie the catastrophe to Russia.And it was Vice President Joe Biden, not Obama, who first told Americans that the passenger jet had apparently been “shot down — not an accident, blown out of the sky.”Republicans have recently stepped up their regular criticisms of Obama’s handling of world affairs — a reflection of escalating chaos from Iraq to Libya, as well as Syria's widening civil war, China’s increasingly tense relations with its neighbors, and the collapse of the Middle East peace process.
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