President Obama has made his first televised remarks on the violence in Libya, and it was basically what you would expect. He condemned the violence as “outrageous and unacceptable” and called for it to cease, and he insisted that the United States was looking at a “full range of options” for how to proceed. To that end, Obama announced that he was dispatching Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Geneva to coordinate a response with other countries, and added that sanctions against Libya were on the table. One thing Obama didn’t do: personally call out Colonel Qaddafi. The administration reportedly doesn’t want to risk Qaddafi taking retribution on American diplomats still stuck in Libya, something that he is clearly capable of doing. [AP, MSNBC, ABC News]
