"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
New ad from Women United PAC hits Obama on the Benghazi cover-up:
It’s a video. On the Internet. And the Muslim Brotherhood won’t like it. Meanwhile, the latest news:
Sources, emails point to communication breakdown
in Obama administration during Libya attack
This is called “blaming the victims” :
Pickering said that Americans’ lack of familiarity with Islam –and not Islamic terrorist attacks on Americans— fuels hostility toward Muslims.
“Data shows that those Americans who do not know Muslims, who do not know much about Islam, are the ones who harbor the greatest feelings of prejudice,” he said.
There is a “strong, continuing, and perhaps, in an unfortunate way in some areas, growing, prejudice against Muslims and Islam,” he said.
Muslims hate Americans so much they’ll kill themselves in suicide attacks against us — and then dance in the streets to celebrate what they evidently consider a “victory” for their faith — yet Thomas Pickering thinks the real problem is American “prejudice.” This kind of matters, because of who Thomas Pickering is:
Pickering’s pontifications came two and a half weeks after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton named him to head a State Department “Accountability Review Board” tasked with examining the circumstances surrounding the deaths on Sept. 11, 2012, the 11th anniversary of 9/11, of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, information management officer Sean Smith, and security personnel Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods at the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.
It was weird: @ali and I were the only media in the room. I was nodding off until — BOOM! Fred makes news. spectator.org/blog/2012/11/0…
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) November 1, 2012
Fred Thompson speaks in West Chester, Ohio
BLUE ASH, Ohio
News happens in weird ways. While we were driving to today’s Americans for Prosperity event in West Chester, Ali Akbar mentioned an article he’d just seen at Foreign Policy about the Benghazi attack. Meanwhile, CBS News was reporting that “during the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, the Obama Administration did not convene its top interagency counterterrorism resource: the Counterterrorism Security Group, (CSG).”
My mind wasn’t on Benghazi much, and when we got there, the sleep shortage started catching up with me. Quite literally, I was nodding off at one point during Fred Thompson’s speech. And then Fred started talking about Benghazi.
Never seen Fred Thompson this passionate. Never. He’s livid at this administration over #Benghazi.
— Ali A. Akbar (@ali) November 1, 2012
Yeah: Fred Thompson just made news. I’ll have story as soon as I get to WiFi.
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) November 1, 2012
He never raised his voice, but he was clearly angry and, when it was over, it was obvious that Fred had definitely made news:
Former Sen. Fred Thompson today said he was “totally disgusted” by the Obama administration’s handling of the Libya terrorist attack, saying that U.S. officials failed to act “while our people were being systematically slaughtered” at the Benghazi consulate.
Speaking at an event sponsored by the free-market group Americans for Prosperity, the former Republican senator from Tennessee invoked his experience nearly 40 years ago as a Watergate investigator, saying that Congress must “get to the bottom of” the administration’s failures in the Sept. 11 incident that left Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans dead in Libya.
“This is probably the biggest cover-up in American history – and you’re talking to an expert in cover-ups,” Thompson said. . . .
Read the rest at The American Spectator.
Update (Smitty): thanks, Instapundit and Daley Gator!
by Smitty
Retired General Norwood gathers some Tea Partiers in Florida to protest CBS 10, demanding the media do their jobs and investigate the Benghazi attack:
Barack Obama had better hope he loses next Tuesday. You can’t sit behind the Resolute Desk with this much albatross hanging from your neck.
via Bluegrass Pundit
Update: Instalanche! Thanks, Ed Driscoll!
Update II: linked at Gay Patriot. Thanks, Mr. Blatt!
by Smitty
The first seven words of the title are from #OccupyResoluteDesk. The last three are from the demented Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore. I’m going to argue that, at a high level of abstraction, the two ideas are equally absurd.
The Washington Times has an article that is useful for tracking the latest rumors. The more that is revealed, the more the whole affair seems to have been an absurd exercise in willful disregard of reality in a combat zone:
We don’t, and are not likely EVER to know the full scoop of the reasons for the situation in Benghazi. Having served a year in Afghanistan, I can tell you that High Value types like an ambassador do not normally get put at any personal risk in war zones, for the reasons you see in Stevens’s wake. However, I’m glad that the details seem to have moved beyond “hostage bait”. That would have been Machiavellian beyond words, and hard to keep a secret, and therefore was always a trifle implausible.
Back to “Apocalypse Now”, Kilgore’s madness is echoed in the idiotic response of blaming “The Innocence of Muslims” and throwing Nakoula in jail. In retrospect, that blame move was as insane as declaring the beach safe while bullets flew. In addition to being wildly un-Constitutional and un-American. Where is the Anemic Commie Laughing Unit (ACLU) on this one? I may have answered my own question.
Kilgore’s foolhardy personal courage, standing there amidst explosions, is a stark contrast to Obama’s technological detachment from those “bumps in the road”. (I don’t personally know how anyone not an actor on a movie set could behave like Kilgore’s character in a no-kidding firefight.) And yet, even a non-combat facing of the music on Benghazi is too much for a feckless worm like Obama. Her Fecklessness now assumes the ‘offended’ pose at the suggestion that she wasn’t workin’ hard, tryin’ to find away to help those poor ex-SEALs fight for their lives.
Charlie don’t surf, Barack, but your worthless carcass is going to have plenty of time to do so, come January.
Update: Linked by God’s Own Crunk.
Update II: Have a look at this rhetorical haymaker (h/t Bluegrass Pundit):
by Smitty
I had never seen or heard of Justice with Judge Jeanine, but this clip, apparently from last night, is succinct, on point, and brutal:
Deeper than the specifics of #Benghaziquiddick* is the leadership problem afoot here. You can overtly cripple the U.S. military with budget cuts. You can covertly cripple the U.S. military by trashing its morale.
On my first WESPAC cruise in 1989, we spent several days which were supposed to be a port call in Singapore carving circles in the water not far from that port. Why? A young deck seaman on one of the Knox-class frigates had gone overboard. Such tragedies occur for all manner of reasons, savory and less so. However, every squid in that battle group knew that, if it was them, the battle group was going to do precisely the same thing: make every reasonable effort to recover you alive, or at least recover you.
This notion of “never leaving a buddy” is pounded into every military head at every rank. Should you hold the privilege of commanding a unit, I perceive it counts double: you neither want to see a buddy left dangling in the breeze, and you really don’t want the anguish of explaining to the world why there was a death within you command.
Which brings us to our current Commander-in-Chief, #OccupyResoluteDesk. I don’t believe the principle of “never leaving a buddy” eluded George W. Bush, say whatever else you will of his policies. In contrast, you have the Obama White House needing to dispute a story that it sends form letters to families of the fallen. Wow.
The idea of a cowardly POTUS, whose ‘gutsy calls’ come only after excessive amounts of Hamlet-esque hand-wringing is staggering. If you don’t grasp the basic notion of “never-leave-a-buddy”, then you are not fit for the role of Commander-in-Chief at all. I would muster measurably more respect for BHO if it turned out he was a Machiavellian scoundrel who was using U.S. lives as hostage bait. Let Ambassador Stevens become a useful crisis for October, to own the news cycle, and freeze out Romney. In such a scenario, he’d do some grand deal around Halloween, and then victory laps until the election. One wishes for certainty that this was not the intent of Benghazi.
Now we see how, BHO’s lack of loyalty down turns into a lack of loyalty up. There exists a category of no-talent clown who thinks that rank or office is what matters, and fundamentals like “never leave a buddy” do not. Au contraire, mon fine French frere. Sir Blames-a-lot may point a finger, but the information leaks are going to continue to point back at him. Obama really isn’t anyone’s buddy, and he’s not actually getting left behind. At least not in the same sense as Stevens, Smith, Woods, and Doherty. Yet the same callous indifference Obama offered Americans in a real-world crisis is being repaid him in spades.
Couldn’t happen to a more deserving piece of work.
Update: linked at Obi’s Sister.
*Don’t “-gate” it when there is a death toll.
What’s wrong with President Obama’s explanation about the attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya? Well, yes, everything — newly released e-mails provide further proof of that — but what’s wrong with the Benghazi story is symptomatic of a larger problem, as historian Daniel Mandel explains:
In the final presidential debate on October 22, President Barack Obama spoke briefly about the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on U.S. officials and personnel in Benghazi. He outlined why the U.S. had gone into Libya before the attack. He outlined the answers he is still seeking following the attack. But he did not say why this terrorist attack had occurred or why the U.S. had been ill-prepared to meet it in what is, after all, a volatile city alive with militias recently freed from dictatorial rule. Nor did he tell us why his Administration strenuously avoided calling it a terrorist attack for two weeks, preferring instead to speak of a spontaneous assault in the course of a demonstration of Muslims offended by an anti-Muhammad video.
Mitt Romney did not pursue the subject, so we got no closer to the heart of the matter, yet the implication of this apologetic gloss of the first two weeks is obvious: Ambassador Chris Stevens was not murdered by Islamists who hate America and its allies and mean to attack us again; he was the victim of the local reaction to one of the products of American freedom of speech. Once the attack was acknowledged as the handiwork of terrorists, however, followers of al Qaeda, virtually the only officially acknowledged extremists, were cited as the perpetrators. And here lies the problem: the Obama Administration will not acknowledge that an extreme and violent segment of the Muslim world ranging far beyond the confines of al Qaeda is at war with us. To do so would have required him to explain why the U.S. had been empowering Islamists, including in Libya, some of whom may have been responsible for leaking information that enabled the terrorists to locate and kill the Americans. . . .
Obama and his surrogates have claimed that, in wrongly describing the attack as the result of a “spontaneous” protest about an obscure YouTube video, the president was simply relying on what the intelligence agencies said. OK, so now that lie is busted, too:
The CIA station chief in Libya reported to Washington within 24 hours of last month’s deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate that there was evidence it was carried out by militants, not a spontaneous mob upset about an American-made video ridiculing Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, U.S. officials have told The Associated Press.
Drew M. at AOSHQ: “CIA to Obama: Hey Barry, you know what’s ‘not optimal’? Your sorry ass.”