Posted on 10/27/2012 1:42:26 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
At a speech in Davenport, Iowa, on October 24, with 13 days left in the presidential election, Barack Obama introduced a new closing argument: “Trust matters,” Obama said.
“There’s no more serious issue on a presidential campaign than trust.”
We agree. It’s a good way—among the most important ways—to evaluate a leader.
On October 18, five weeks after terrorists attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killing four Americans, President Obama told television host Jon Stewart that his administration had moved quickly to share all of the intelligence with the public. “Everything we get, every piece of information we get—as we got it we laid it out for the American people.”
The president reiterated this point in an interview with Philadelphia talk radio host Michael Smerconish on October 26. “This is something that the American people can take to the bank . . . my administration plays this stuff straight. We don’t play politics when it comes to American national security. So what we consistently have done throughout my presidency and what we did in this circumstance is as information came in we gave it to the American people. And as we got new information we gave that to the American people. And that includes, by the way, members of Congress.”
This is false. We know this because senior members of the Obama administration have spoken about the need to keep information from the American people. From the White House to the State Department to the FBI, administration spokesmen have said that they are withholding information until the completion of the several administration-backed investigations into the matter.
On September 14, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland declared that the department would no longer answer questions related to the Benghazi attacks. “It is now something that you need to talk to the FBI about, not to us about, because it’s their investigation.” The FBI, not surprisingly, won’t answer questions about an ongoing investigation.
What about the White House? Last Wednesday, a spokesman for the White House’s national security staff refused to answer very basic questions about the president’s schedule during and after the attacks, telling reporter Fred Lucas: “We decline to comment.”
And the secretary of state? When reporters asked Hillary Clinton last week about emails that the White House received as the assault was unfolding, indicating possible terrorist involvement in the attacks, she refused to provide details. “The independent Accountability Review Board is already hard at work looking at everything, not cherry-picking one story here or one document there, but looking at everything—which I highly recommend as the appropriate approach for something as complex as an attack like this.”
And the president himself? Late Friday, Kyle Clark, a reporter for a Denver television station, attempted to get answers directly from Obama in an interview at the White House. Did the president committed to sharing everything make good on his promise? Here is how Clark’s report of the interview began: “President Barack Obama would not directly address repeated questions from 9NEWS on whether Americans under attack in Libya were denied requests for assistance during the September 11th terror attack.”
Basic questions. No answers.
We know this much: What Barack Obama said is unambiguously false. Members of his administration have not provided information to the American people about Benghazi as they have received it. And in many instances, the opposite has been true. The Obama administration has used every means at its disposal to avoid sharing information about the Benghazi attacks—not only with the American people, but with Congress, too.
Sources tell The Weekly Standard that the administration is ignoring—or denying—routine requests for information from the congressional committees with oversight on national security. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” says one congressional Republican. “Basic questions—unanswered for literally weeks.”
One could argue that this is good news. An administration refusing to provide information about the attacks is an administration that isn’t providing misleading information about those attacks. And that’s what the American public got for the better part of four weeks.
• There was “no evidence” of a planned terrorist attack. At his briefing on September 18, a full week after the attacks, Jay Carney said this: “I’m saying that based on information that we—our initial information, and that includes all information — we saw no evidence to back up claims by others that this was a preplanned or premeditated attack.” (Emphasis added)
There was, in fact, abundant evidence of a planned terrorist attack. Emails sent to the White House as the attacks unfolded reported that Ansar al Sharia (AAS), an al Qaeda-linked group in Libya, had claimed credit for the attack. Virtually everything else about the assault suggested planning—from the precision of the mortar attacks to the “blocking maneuver” used by the terrorists to attempt to ambush the Americans as they fled the consulate for the CIA annex.
• The protest outside the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was about a YouTube video. More Carney from September 18: “We saw evidence that [the attack] was sparked by the reaction to this video. And that is what we know thus far based on the evidence, concrete evidence—not supposition—concrete evidence that we have thus far.” The basis for this claim was a telephone intercept between two al Qaeda-linked terrorists, one from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and the other from the Libyan branch of Ansar al Sharia. There was no “concrete evidence” that the video played a role. The AAS terrorist, who took part in the attack, reported to the AQIM operative that he had been watching the activities in Cairo before participating in the Benghazi attack. He said nothing about the film. Importantly, he never claimed that the Benghazi attack happened because of the Cairo protests. There was never a direct link between the YouTube video and the Benghazi attack. But the administration claimed—repeatedly, and for weeks—a causal relationship between the video and the attack in Benghazi.
The Obama administration built its entire explanation of Benghazi around this detail it learned from a call between two al Qaeda-linked operatives. But as the administration made its public case that the 9/11/12 attacks resulted from a mob spun out of control, top Obama officials emphasized (and manipulated) that detail while excluding the far more relevant fact that the conversation took place between . . . two al Qaeda-linked operatives. Beyond that, there was no protest in Benghazi, as virtually everyone now acknowledges.
So where the administration didn’t hide information, it cherry-picked what it would share. And where the administration shared information, it manipulated that intelligence. Now, as Americans seek information about what happened in Benghazi, the administration stonewalls.
The State Department’s Accountability Review Board is due to report on November 15—9 days after the election. “We don’t play politics when it comes to American national security,” Obama says. What will the State Department have learned in 65 days that it won’t know after 56 days?
And what about the president’s claim, “Everything we get, every piece of information we get—as we got it we laid it out for the American people”?
It’s simply not true. And trust matters.
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Informative links and information: Alive and Deadly - The workings of al Qaeda's expanding franchise
Saturday, October 27 at 1 p.m. ET
Sunday, October 28 at 3 p.m, and 10 p.m. ET
Hosted by Bret Baier
On Sept. 11, 2012, terrorists overran the United States consulate in Benghazi, Libya and murdered our ambassador along with three other Americans.
Now, more than six weeks after the attack, some of the most important questions remain unanswered:
Who did this and why?
Could the attack have been prevented or repelled after it began?
What did the White House know and when?
And, as we enter the final stretch of the race for the White House, which side is closer to the truth: Those who argue this terrible tragedy was largely unforeseeable or those who say we’re seeing President Obama’s foreign policy unraveling right on our TV screens?
Fox News has been on this story from the very beginning. Tune in this weekend, Bret Baier reveals explosive new details that you haven’t heard.
Too bad the sheeple aren’t going to care. Media will just successfully spin this as “Republicans being kooks and crybabies.”
June 2000: Progressive Narcissism ".........
If you were serious about your role as part of humanity’s vanguard, if you had the knowledge (which others did not), that would lead them to a better world, why would you tell them a truth they could not “understand” and that would only servie to hold them back?
If you believed that others could understand your truth, you would not think of yourself as part of a “vanguard.” You would no longer inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite whose members alone can see the light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody could see the same horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would already have happened and there would be no need for the army of the saints.
That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes from. To see yourself as a redeemer. To feel anointed. To be among the elect. In other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism of all.
That is why it is of little concern to them that their socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in the process. That is why they don’t care that their panaceas have caused more human suffering than any injustice they have ever challenged. That is why they never learn from their “mistakes,” why the continuance of Them is more important than any truth...........
Conservatives who think progressives are misinformed idealists will always be blind-sided by the sheer malice of the left -- by the cynicism of those who pride themselves on their principles; by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity; by the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal; and by the ruthless disregard for the well-being of the poor on the part of those who preen themselves as their champions.
Conservatives are surprised because they see progressives as merely misguided, when they are, in fact, morally – and ontologically -- misdirected. They are the messianists of a false religious faith. Since the redeemed future that justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their limitless passion for the continuance of Them..........."
April 2001: The Perils of Designer Tribalism "................
[A] life without piety, including piety to the past, courts grief and does damage to the life of the living individual. —Edward Shils
They are very gentle, and know nothing of evil. —Christopher Columbus
..........It is part of the ethos of designer tribalism to foist all of one’s own attitudes and longings onto the apparently blank canvas of whatever primitive populace happens to be in vogue at the moment. To some extent, this is simply a matter of ignorance, as illustrated, for example, by Christopher Columbus’s report that the people he discovered “are very gentle, and know nothing of evil.” But the culture cultist supplements ignorance with heavy helpings of ideology and idealization. He looks at an exotic culture and, lo and behold, he finds himself looking into a flattering mirror. This is one reason that natives always seem to be non-smoking, vegetarian, sex-worshipping, drug-taking, eco-conscious, progressive-thinking pacifists—according, anyway, to the press releases distributed by the culture cultists.
Sandall speaks in this context of anthropology’s tendency to “normalize the primitive while treating civilization as aberrant.” Consider the Maoris. In contemporary New Zealand, Sandall notes, one finds “a miscellaneous army of teachers, academics, government servants, clergy, radical lawyers, progressive judges, journalists, and numerous other bien pensants promot[ing] the revival of traditional Maori culture even more fanatically than the Maori do themselves.” He cites an Anglican priest who rails against the “monocultural grip on all our institutions” that British colonialism supposedly still exerts (if only!), and cites various teachers who wish to return the education of Maori children to the tribes. In the background is a rose-tinted view of the Maoris as a peace-loving, ecologically conscious, spiritually delicate people who have been abused for two centuries by hard-bitten, materialistic Europeans.
In fact, the ecological record of the Maoris would not win any plaudits from the Sierra Club. Shortly after paddling up to New Zealand in their canoes eight-hundred years ago, the Maori indiscriminately burned huge swathes of forest. They also decimated the wildlife. Actually, “decimate” is far too weak a word. Within a short time, Sandall notes, some 30 percent of the bird life on New Zealand had become extinct thanks to the depredations of the Maoris. All twelve species of moa, for example, a large, flightless bird without natural predators before the Maori arrived, became extinct some six-hundred years ago. According to Sandall, it was perhaps the fastest megafaunal extinction ever recorded. Not that the Maori were particular about where they got their protein. Divided into numerous tribes, they were incessantly at war. Prisoners were routinely baked and eaten. But all of this is papered over. And even as the Maori past is systematically distorted and rewritten, so their future is jeopardized by government policies that, in the name of “bi-culturalism” and preserving tribal customs, dooms its beneficiaries to a life of second-class citizenship................"
To Obama we’re “bull-shitters” and “tea-baggers.”
To Hillary we’re “the vast right-wing conspiracy” crowd.
Obama and Hillary? Those two do not have one coherent thought between them. That’s why they can’t rise above the level of name-calling.
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