On Fox News, fighting terrorism is all about semantics. And Fox is the word police, just itching to throw the book at the Obama administration, even if they have to trump up the charges.

Megyn Kelly turned a blind eye to President Obama’s words about the Ottawa shooting in order to suggest that because Secretary of State John Kerry didn’t use the word “terrorism,” the administration is to blame for an Islamic black man who attacked New York City police officers with a hatchet tonight. And because Benghazi, of course.

In the wake of the Ottawa shooting, President Obama referenced terror or terrorism, three times in his public remarks. Yet, as Media Matters reported, “Conservative media are invoking one of their favorite Benghazi hoaxes to accuse President Obama of reluctance to characterize the fatal shootings near Canadian Parliament as terrorism."

On tonight’s The Kelly File, host Megyn Kelly carried the meme into a discussion about the hatchet attack. Even though Kelly herself carefully avoided labeling the hatchet attack as terrorism.

She was helped in her snow job by Andy McCarthy, who has previously accused President Obama of having “deep” “Islamic sympathies” and an agenda that “jibes perfectly with the Islamist scheme to destroy America from within.” However, McCarthy was introduced merely as a “former federal prosecutor and contributing editor to the National Review.”

According to Kelly, McCarthy had just written about the importance of using the words "Islamic terrorism" when discussing incidents “like we saw in Canada" and "being investigated in New York tonight.”

In the segment, Kelly made a point of using the Ottawa shooting and the New York attack to accuse Obama over Fort Hood and, yes, Benghazi. Notice how she suggested, rather than said, that Obama did not call the Canadian attack terrorism:

KELLY: You heard the Canadian Prime Minister come out last night and say in no uncertain terms that this was terrorism. And it wasn’t that their investigation was so much further advanced than any of ours have been. Certainly not than, for example, the Fort Hood investigation is at this point in 2014. And yet our leaders don’t want to call these acts terrorism. That’s clear. Even Benghazi. Even while Leon Panetta was telling Barack Obama ‘These are terrorists doing this,’ the president didn’t – for weeks was reluctant to use that label.” (except Obama did use that label the next day and the day after that.) Why does it change the fight that even last night! Even last night! The Canadian prime minister was saying ‘terrorism.’ After he had said that, Secretary of State John Kerry came out and called it ‘violent extremism!’ Just referred to it as ‘an attack!’ ‘An evil attack.’ But not as terrorism. What does that do?

McCarthy claimed, with a straight face, that using the word “terrorism” makes the difference between preventing terror attacks or not:

McCARTHY: It creates an ethos in the government that paralyzes our intelligence and our law enforcement officers who get the message that they are supposed to essentially put blindfolds on and not acknowledge the evidence of sense. If you can’t take stock of the enemy’s threat doctrine, if you can’t assimilate what it is that fuels the threat against us, then you can’t as a practical matter either anticipate what they’re going to do next or stop them. That’s just common sense.

I guess it didn’t occur to Kelly that using the word “terrorism” didn’t help the Canadians prevent the Ottawa shooting.

McCarthy went on to say that we need to “appreciate the work of patriotic American Muslims who actually help us investigate Islamic terrorism.” But, he added, we also have acknowledge “a strain of Islam” that “fuels jihadist activity and that’s just a fact and if we can’t open our eyes to that, then we can’t defend ourselves.”

That’s when Kelly tied it all together in one neat, Obama-blaming package:

KELLY: And that appears to be the position in which we are tonight, as you see a police officer struggling for his life, in critical condition after having been attacked by what under any circumstances can fairly be said to be a mad man on the street of Queens, New York.

Watch it below.