Christopher Stevens: Obama lied; he died
Here's one thing we can be sure of about the Benghazi affair: almost everything we've been told since by the mainstream media is a lie, invariably one designed to shore up the creaky and desperate Obama administration.
Consider how quickly the story was spun by Obama's amen corner in the liberal MSM. It should, according to any objective news sense, have been a shocking tale of how a woefully unprotected ambassador was murdered in cold blood by Al Qaeda affiliates. Instead, it almost immediately became – of all things – an excuse to demonstrate why Mitt Romney was unfit to be president.
Here, for example, was NBC the day after.
Yesterday we noted that Mitt Romney, down in the polls after the convention, was throwing the kitchen sink at President Obama. Little did we know the kitchen sink would include — on the anniversary of 9/11 — one of the most over-the-top and (it turns out) incorrect attacks of the general-election campaign .
And here was CBS the day after. (Sounds to me like they have the same White House press officer dictate their stories for them…)
(CBS News) The conventional wisdom emerged in Washington almost immediately on Wednesday: Mitt Romney's handling of the violence in Egypt and Libya was a disaster.
"The comments were a big mistake, and the decision to double down on them was an even bigger mistake," Steve Schmidt, senior campaign strategist to Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, told CBS News. "There are legitimate criticisms to be made but you foreclose on your ability to make them when you try to score easy political points. And the American people, when the country is attacked, whether they're a Republican or Democrat or independent, want to see leaders who have measured responses, not leaders whose first instinct is to try to score political points."
Er, with respect Steve Schmidt – and all those other experty experts consulted by CBS – surely what the American people REALLY want when their country is attacked is the truth. They'd also like to be assured that everything possible had been done to prevent the attack happening; that when the attack was taking place, everything possible was done to try to save the lives of the ambassador and his team and that in the aftermath, serious attempts would be made to punish those responsible, reprimand those culpable for any security lapses, and learn important lessons about why the attack happened and how to avoid further such disasters occurring in future. Little, if any of this seems to have been done.
Instead, the post-Benghazi media coverage quickly became an exercise in finger pointing designed to show that it was anyone's fault but the Obama administration's. First, the attack on Romney. Then, the attempts to deflect attention on to the poor sap who made the anti-Islam hate video (which supposedly – though not at all in fact – provoked the fatal assault in the Benghazi consulate) – as if in some way to persuade us all that, hey, the lynching of the ambassador and his staff/protection kind of wasn't that bad because, hey, we sort of invited it…..
Here in Britain, where the general understanding of Obama's manifold inadequacies is so pitifully thin that about the most vigorous criticism we're prepared to make of him is that maybe the muscle tone on his beautiful arms isn't quite so perfect as that on his immaculate and delightful wife Michelle's the Benghazi scandal hasn't had much play.
But in the US conservative media – which basically means talk radio and the internet and the Wall Street Journal – the story is snowballing. And rightly so.
Here are a few examples: this one, this one and this one courtesy of the mighty Rush. Now, even the not noticeably conservative Reuters is joining the fray with more shocking revelations.
This is a big deal.
The Obama administration's duplicity and mendacity is nothing those of us who've been observing, aghast, his disastrous foreign policy approaches since at least his infamous Cairo surrender monkey speech couldn't have predicted. And while it's nice to see his chickens coming home to roost and encouraging to realise that his chances of becoming a second-term president are diminishing by the minute, it's hardly a situation you might call – hmm what's the word? Oh yeah – "optimal" for the grieving relatives of the four men who died needlessly in order to satisfy the President's wishful thinking that the Al Qaeda threat is diminishing and that there's nothing wrong with the Middle East's intractable problems that can't be solved with a few emollient words, beautiful lies and maybe the occasional NASA-endorsed outreach programme….