Things Heard: e258v1
Monday, May 13th, 2013 at
1:37 pm
OK. Take a few
- Colorado oversteps. Would local zoning laws do it?
- All that sex talk makes Lucy a duller girl.
- A set of odd wheels for bikes.
- Devil(s) … impersonal or not?
- Why? Maybe they were wearing swim suits not sweaters. More on that IRS thing here.
- Touche.
- Purple prose.
- Great apes and swimming … and the resultant map.
- Heh.
- A mom reflects on mother’s day.
- Losing the left on the Benghazi kerfuffle.
- A good question, after all most of the research was supported by your taxes. And is arXIV sufficient to ameliorate the problem?
- Famousness.
The White House talking point on Benghazi is that the hearings “told us nothing new”, which I think isn’t exactly what they were hoping for. You’d think that they would be wanting those hearings to exonerate them, instead of confirming what we already knew, i.e., that they were scoundrels.
Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!
One obvious interpretation is that State and CIA were being careful NOT to say things that they did not yet know for certain, and probably did not want to tip off terrorists about what they actually knew (the latter has actually been stated by then CIA director David Petraeus). The less charitable interpretation, as stated in the article that YOU cite, is that State and CIA didn’t want to get blamed for the attacks and thus decided to be vague. On top of this there is video of the president calling this terrorism on 9/12, which was publicly reiterated by the director of national intelligence. There is also video of Rice saying it could be Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda related, or it may not be. The military has said that no personnel could have been dispatched in time to save people in the embassy, who died in the first wave of attacks. And yet to you all this qualifies as acting like scoundrels… despite the fact that congressional republicans were offered the emails months ago. And refused to provide adequate funding for embassies. And didn’t raise a stink when 11 embassies were attacked under GWB. And didn’t object when Bush politicized terrorist attacks. And blocked any investigation of the mistakes that led to the Iraq War, which led to the deaths of 1000x more Americans than in Benghazi.
Do you really not understand why the left thinks this is a hypocritical, manufactured controversy to score political points? Perhaps you would prefer that the White House and State and CIA have offered pages of speculation which could then have been used against them for months if not years by the GOP.
Honestly, the current crop of republican so-called leadership is the worst in my lifetime, and I lived though Whitewater, the fabricated Vince Foster scandal, and the swift-boating lies that prevented John Kerry from defeating the worst American president ever. Republicans don’t work on substantive issues, and they focus all their effort on attacking democrats and demonizing historically vulnerable citizens, such as women, children, minorities, gays, students, the poor and the elderly.
Talk about scoundrels.
If even the Washington Post gives Obama 4 Pinocchios on his claim of calling the specific incident an act of terrorism, that should give one pause.
4 Pinnochios? That’s a lot of artwork to hide the simple words of the President, don’t you think?
Odd that the WaPo didn’t bother to go to the transcript: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/09/12/statement-president-attack-benghazi
Or, simply check to look at the video — was this more than 24 hours after the attack?
[youtube=http://youtu.be/3Nu6VZ9DeVc]
Try that again:
http://youtu.be/3Nu6VZ9DeVc
If he meant what he said, he should not have had any trouble saying it again when asked. He wouldn’t. Read the article, not just the artwork.
So your response to everything I said – and your justification for the hyperbole, calls for impeachment, and lack of congressional action on a whole range of other important issues to the country due to this growing time suck – is that Obama said terror instead of terrorism. Lame.
blah
So that is why Obama and the White House speeches can be most easily explained as a CYA spin scenario. ‘Cause I’m not seeing how the “misdirect the terrorists” works here. Obama gives a WH garden speech noting “terrorists” were at work immediately after. Few but pundits listen to those speeches but it gets him on record with what they knew to be the case. Then Obama, Rice, Clinton and the press sec push the video story hard. Why? Because they want *that* to stick. And that they screwed up calling off support because they didn’t have 4 months to waffle about it like in the bin Laden takedown.
That it’s the US fault is the narrative they like, it’s domestic, its non-scary. You can allude to your pretend story of Muslim-phobia on the right when you point at the video. And even then when the cards fall out (as they have), Obama has an “out”. “He” said it was terrorism and only his Letterman remarks contradict that.
It’s also complete hokum. The problem with the video story is the video was not the cause of even actual demonstrations in Egypt and elsewhere. It was the pretext. Ordinarily the anti-US riots are pretexts for a local tyrant needing to bolster domestic support, deflect blame for local conditions with anger aimed elsewhere is a common useful tactic used by Middle East rulers. However, the proximity of the “video” protest with the attack suggest that the cause (not again the pretext) of the protests was to provide cover for the setup phone/comm chatter for the actual Libyan attack. Obama and company following the explanation that the video is cause not pretext of cover is perfidy in plain sight (or possibly when he says “there is no there there” he means the “there” is the seat in the Oval office has no “there” and is just occupied by an empty suit).
If you want to make the claim the video and other things were cover for the actual investigation and the chase for the real bad guys. OK. Produce your results from that chase? Tell us how that worked out for you?
I see no realistic call for impeachment. Impeachment is tried in the Senate which has a Democratic majority. There will be no conviction, just a massive waste of time, money, and ink.
He’s an idiot or a scoundrel. But he’s your guy. Still feel good about that?
Mark