Month: October 2012

Hillary Dives On Benghazi Grenade? HillBuzz Hardest Hit

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by Smitty

CNN, via Drudge:

“I take responsibility” for what happened on September 11, Clinton said in an interview with CNN’s Elise Labott soon after arriving in Lima, Peru, for a visit. The interview, one of a series given to U.S. television networks Monday night, was the first she has given about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
Clinton insisted President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are not involved in security decisions.
“I want to avoid some kind of political gotcha,” she added, noting that it is close to the election.

Stunned. Still nothing at HillBuzz. Wow. I mean, Hillary permitted herself to be set on a shelf in 2008, and now this? One can only speculate on the nature of the dirt #OccupyResoluteDesk has on her, to twist out that kind of mea culpa from Hillary.

Why am I not a Presidential candidate? Because if I was Mitt, I’d be all: “I’d like to congratulate the President on his choice of Secretary of State. After the better part of four years, somebody in the Administration finally took responsibility the way leaders do, on one of those hopefully rare occasions when it involves confessing a shortcoming. In this case, one that involved the butchery of four Americans. Hopefully this President isn’t too old to learn something from all this. Better leaders plan so as to minimize these sorts of tragedies. Lesser men play the Casablanca card and locate a usual suspects for a round-up. How is Nakoula doing these days, Mr. President?”

The bad news here is that a post I had in mind “Workin’ Hard, Tryin’ To Help The Administration Come Up With New Benghazi Lies” is going to have to become a footnote. I had in mind:

  1. High-Order SWATting: Blame Karl Rove for spoofing the White House and having Nakoula arrested.
  2. Tehran Redux: Unnamed Administration officials imply the Romney campaign somehow paid for a smaller strike in Benghazi, to embarrass the President in time for the election.

That was all I had. You need some more material, but this is kind of a hard topic to be light and silly about, in the face of four corpses. Sail a vee.

Update: via Melody:

“[Clinton] seemed to push back against claims of a cover-up, blaming the “fog of war” for the Obama administration’s shifting explanations for the attack.”

When they say there is no cover-up, that, too, is part of the cover-up. They are akin to a scorpion getting a lift on a frog, cover-ups.
More at The Pirate’s Cove

The Most Important Voter in America

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A lot of people laughed at this news last week, but if only she lived in a swing state, Lindsay Lohan would be the perfect example of why Barack Obama’s on the verge of losing this election:

Lohan is a low information voter convinced that (a) employment is really important, (b) thinks that employment is not being sufficiently handled by the White House right now and (c) thinks that Mitt Romney is better equipped to handle employment.
That arguably logical sequence is all that it takes for a low-information voter to support Mitt Romney. The thing is, there are millions of voters like her. That should terrify the Obama campaign.

Matthew Cochrane feigns outrage at the characterization of Lindsay as a “low-information voter,” but contrary to what you might think, the term is not necessarily synonymous with stupid.

A “low-information voter” is simply someone who doesn’t pay a lot of attention to politics. Whereas most people who read blogs like this are political junkies, the typical “swing” voter isn’t. People who tend to vote only in presidential elections — never a primary, and rarely if ever in an off-year — aren’t stupid, they’re just busy with other things: Jobs, families, DUIs, court hearings, probation, rehab . . .

These people show up in polls as “don’t know”/”don’t care” most of the time. They’re not all into the issues, they’re not glued to the tube watching cable news 24/7, but they feel a patriotic duty to vote in presidential elections and they tend to ignore politics until a month or so before Election Day, when they say to themselves, “OK, which one of these clowns am I going to vote for?”

The basis of their decisions may seem simplistic to us political junkies, but this is just how regular Americnas think, and the simplicity of Lindsay Lohan’s logic — “Hey, the economy sucks and Mitt’s a business guy who might know how to fix this problem” — doesn’t mean she’s wrong or stupid. Sometimes things are both simple and true. Look at the latest headline from USA Today:

Swing States poll: Women push Romney into lead

It’s as simple as three words: Chicks dig Mitt.

Did You Say ‘Preference Cascade’?

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“One might have thought that the 2010 mid-term elections . . . would have convinced the Left that they had miscalculated. Instead, they placed their confidence in Obama’s ability to navigate the new environment . . .
“Everything seemed to be proceeding in accordance with those beliefs until Romney dismantled Obama in Wednesday’s debate — a psychological shock that has unhinged the Left, causing them to begin lashing out furiously and rather erratically at anyone who suggests that the dam has broken and that the ‘preference cascade’ may doom Obama to defeat in November.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 6

“[I]t is possible to imagine a scenario where Mitt Romney comes into the Oct. 16 debate sitting on a 4-point lead in the national polls with just three weeks to go before Election Day. And if I can envision such a scenario, you know that Democrats must be imagining the same possibility with a sense of Fear and Loathing.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 7

As a great man once repeatedly said, “Don’t get cocky,” but there are good reasons for Republicans to be optimistic with 22 days remaining in the 2012 campaign. Ed Driscoll has previously invoked the phrase “preference cascade” to describe what we may see if Americans wake up to the reality of the SCOAMF’s incompetence. And today Ed Morrissey employs the same phrase:

I don’t think that Obama has lost the election yet, but there is only three weeks to go now. This is when preference cascades begin to materialize, and usually away from the incumbent, who has had nearly four years to make the case for re-election.

Exactly. While defeating an incumbent president is always an against-the-odds project, history would suggest that (a) the debates would be a decisive factor, and (b) the shift toward the challenger wouldn’t happen until fairly late in the campaign.

If this is what we’re seeing now, then Obama’s poll surge in September — on Sept. 29, he led the Real Clear Politics average of national polls by 4.3 points — was in fact a mirage. Whether or not those of us whom Jonathan Chait called “poll denialists” were right about the skewed samples, Obama’s poll lead prior to the first debate was actually an illusion that did not take into account the underlying reality of (a) Obama’s failed policies and (b) his inability to defend those policies when challenged by Romney outside the media filter.

So far, only one poll (Pew) has shown Romney leading by 4 points nationally, and Romney’s biggest RCP lead was 1.3 points on Saturday, but the latest Gallup tracking poll has Mitt leading 49-47, and if Obama doesn’t score a clear win Tuesday, the whole thing may shift toward an outright Romney landslide.

The RCP Electoral College map currently has the race at Obama 201 and Romney 191, with Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Michigan and Pennsylvania in the “toss-up” category. By this point in 2008, John McCain’s campaign was in meltdown mode and had already pulled out of Michigan. For Romney to win any of those four states would almost certainly be decisive: If Mitt wins Michigan he won’t lose Ohio, and if Pennsylvania is even competitive in the final week of the campaign, Romney could win as many as 300 of 538 Electoral College votes.

What will happen in Tuesday’s debate? Both campaigns are “working the refs” with CNN’s Candy Crowley as moderator, Michelle Malkin reminds us of “plant” infestations at town-hall debates and Noel Sheppard quotes Ed Hart: “We will know in the fullness of time.”

Keep watching the slo-mo walkback by Nate Silver, whose Incredible Mystical Forecasting Model™ has now raised Romney’s odds to a precisely calculated 36.7% after having him at 12.9% Oct. 4.

UPDATE: The Insta-Driscol-lanche! Thanks, Ed.
 




 

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Does This Explain Something?
UPDATE: What a Cover-Up Looks Like

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Why is Obama still leading Mitt Romney in Ohio, but trailing in Florida? This puzzle might be explained by the early blitz of attack ads the Obama campaign laid down against Romney in Ohio back in May and June, which created a sort of “opinion deficit” that Romney has had to try to make up during the past four months.

Yet Obama also hit Mitt early in Florida, and Romney has bounced back pretty strong there in the past two weeks.

Is it Libya? And is it possible that the deadly Bungle in Benghazi has raised concerns about the administration’s Middle East policy among a key constituency in Florida? A friend on Twitter called attention to an article by my American Spectator colleague Jay Homnick:

MIAMI — The Jewish outreach of the Romney campaign leaves a great deal to be desired, about which more on another day. One good thing this wing of the overall effort has been doing is involving Ambassador John Bolton in presenting to Jewish groups. His powerful pro-Israel record and reputation make his name a good draw in the circles of the more knowledgeable Jewish voters. It does not hurt that he has astonishing breadth of knowledge, pristine clarity of thought, and crystalline clarity of expression.
Sunday night he appeared here in Miami at a synagogue bordering the two communities of Surfside and Bal Harbor. The biggest concentrations of Jews in the Miami area are not near that spot, but its equidistance from Miami Beach and North Miami Beach situate it perfectly for such events.
The room was packed to the rafters, and there were no hecklers or provocateurs. The crowd listened raptly and applauded lustily. It is difficult to extrapolate from this to voting patterns on Election Day, but this much was clear: there is a strong Romney-Ryan contingent among both the religious and secular Jews of Florida. . . .

Go read the whole thing. And while we’re at it, remember during last week’s debate, when Joe Biden laughed while Paul Ryan talked about the seriousness of the Iranian nuclear threat?

Biden’s dismissive attitude toward the danger of a nuclear Iran, accusing Republicans of reckless warmongering for taking that threat seriously — how did that play with Jewish voters? Biden’s bulldozing aggression against Ryan may have cheered up demoralized Democrats, but the unseriousness of Biden’s attitude hurt Democrats among undecided voters. Jim Geraghty examines a poll that found the Republicans gained a 3-to-1 advantage from last week’s debate.

But why trust the polls, when we’ve got the word of the Lord?

“And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee . . .”

You never want to get on the wrong side of a thing like that.

UPDATE: The big problem with the scandal now becoming known as “BenghaziGate” is that the Obama administration evidently decided to tell The Big Lie from the start, and so many officials repeated that lie so often that, once it became obvious they were lying, coming up with a plausible new lie was difficult. Ultimately, however, their problem is not their shifting lies, but rather the ugly truth of the administration’s failure. Even such a master of deceit as David Axelrod can’t hide from the facts:

Q. How soon after the attack did the President meet with the National Security Council, with people from state, with people from the…, the Director of National Intelligence, with all of the various people to try to sort out what happened in Benghazi?
A. Look. We are sorting out what happened there. Understand that the President the day after the attack called it an act of terror and charged everyone with responsibility for getting to the bottom of what happened. . . .
Q. Yes, the president made a statement and then he went to a fundraiser in Nevada. Question: Before he went to the fundraiser in Nevada, did he meet with his National Security Council to try to sort out the shifting stories. Because State says they never said it was a spontaneous demonstration; Intel, you are quite right, did. Did he meet with the National Security Council before he went campaigning in Nevada?
A. Chris, I assure you that the president was in contact with all those who had information and responsibility in the national security chain about this incident.

Via Memeorandum.

 

 

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