When an unusually blunt question came from CNN’s senior White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, POTUS was like, dude. Basically, Jim asked Obama at the G-20 summit why the United States has not destroyed ISIS:

A lot of Americans have this frustration that they see the United States has the greatest military in the world, it has the backing of nearly every other country in the world when it comes to taking on ISIS. I guess the question is, and if you’ll forgive the language, but why can’t we take out these bastards?

After a fed-up kinda sigh, Obama responded that he had “just spent the last three questions answering that very question.”

Obama also said he respected the debate over what to do against the Islamic State, but…:

If folks want to pop off and have opinions about what they think they would do, present a specific plan.

If they think somehow their advisers are better than the Chairman of my Joint Chiefs of Staff and the folks who are actually on the ground, I want to meet them. And we can have that debate. But what I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning or whatever other slogans they come up with that has no relationship to what is actually going to work to protect the American people and to protect the people in the region who are getting killed and to protect our allies and people like France. I’m too busy for that.

So we are going to continue to pursue the strategy that has the best chance of working. Even though it does not offer the satisfaction, I guess, of a neat headline or an immediate resolution.

When Huffpost asked Acosta about the framing of his question, he replied in an email saying:

I just wanted to ask something that’s on all our minds. Plain and simple.

[source: huffingtonpost]