But Dude, if you think about it…
…Tommy Vietor was only re-stating the oft-repeated message of the Obama administration about the Benghazi emails.
I yield to none in my contempt for Vietor and in my rage that someone so callow and disrespectful was allowed anywhere near the American presidency. But his actual message—that the right is focusing on behavior both trivial and past the statute of limitations when it criticizes the White House’s lies and politically manipulative messaging to the American people on Benghazi—is actually more pernicious than his lack of style. What’s more, although other Democrats and White House spokespeople haven’t yet gone so far as to say “Dude” when they talk about it, their message is his message and his message is their message. It’s a regular Vulcan mind-meld.
That message is a bigger outrage than “Dude,” or the smirk on Vietor’s face. Theirs is an implicit smirk, a thumbing of the nose, a big middle finger to the American people and to the four men killed that evening in Benghazi.
Transparency? Accountability? That’s for suckers, not for Obama and his people.
[ADDENDUM: Case in point, just from today.]
Exactly right, neo. It’s like blaming Lois Lerner for the IRS scandal or JFKerry for saying “apartheid”. We all know where the buck really stops, no matter how much Obama tries to dodge it with the never-ending help from his MFM enablers.
“Obama Had “Debate Prep” Meeting on September 11, 2012, the Day of the Benghazi Attack”:
http://patterico.com/2014/05/02/obama-did-debate-prep-on-september-11-2012-the-day-of-the-benghazi-attack/
Visitor logs?:
https://explore.data.gov/dataset/3-meet-with-Potus-NO-TIME-LISTED-9-11-12/hg5b-q3e9
Donilon, Ginsberg, Klain:
http://patterico.com/who-are-ron-klain-thomas-donilon-and-david-ginsberg/
Tell that kid to get off my lawn!
That punk is an advisor to the president?
Remember when Hillary C and Democrats were talking about how Bush was risking the lives of our troops needlessly because no Body Armor?
Remember that?
It’s been just awful, hasn’t it? Perhaps the worst part of the Obama degradation has been the good people we know and enjoy and they don’t see it. It’s as if someone walked into a room, let a big fart, a real stinker. Who wouldn’t know? But when half the room doesn’t, you begin to doubt your own nose. Several people immediately expressed disgust, but they were shouted down (birthers) and many of those who knew better let themselves be buffaloed (terrorized) into doubt and quietude. And the farts just kept right on: small ones, big ones, lots of them–pretty soon the air was so foul, we didn’t remember what good air was! And then alot of the smellers saw their leaders were among the afraid, the bullied, and didn’t really want to go up against the farting. Meanwhile, the non-smellers just kept on not smelling. Another argument amongst the smellers was that we should start farting too. So it all got quite noisy and smelly for awhile.
The Jackass Party is unfit to govern and their voters are unfit for self-rule.
The integrity of the entire Democrat Party would rattle if placed in a thimble and lightly shaken.
From the lady who wrote the book on “I have no shame,” Nancy Pelosi: “Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi. Why aren’t we talking about something else?”
Hard to top that.
“What did the President know and when did he know it?” Now a mantra from Watergate.
George Will proposes a new mantra: “What did the President know and when did he not know it?”
The spin mode that the WH was in after the attack at Benghazi is pro-forma political spin. They needed to tamp down the idea that al Qaeda was gaining strength because their campaign slogan was that al Qaeda was mortally weakened after the bin Laden take down. The motive for blaming the video and rejecting the idea that al Qaeda was to blame is clear.
What’s not so clear is why Ambassador Stevens’ repeated requests for added security were denied? There have been some throat clearings about some underling at the DOS bungling and being disciplined but without many specifics. And the MSM has not pursued that at all. This is an area that needs to be investigated in full.
The other thing that’s not clear is why the military didn’t try to launch some sort of relief operation. Panetta and Dempsey claimed that the situation was too muddled to be able to do anything without fear of collateral damage. Fog of war and all that. I don’t recall a solid answer about what the President ordered them to do. Or if they received any orders at all. Obama claimed that he told them to spare no efforts in trying to help. But did he? The recent testimony from General Lovell indicates that no one gave definitive orders to do anything – they just discussed their options – he says that they should have been better prepared and tried to relieve the people under attack.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/05/01/benghazi-testimony-africom-general/8554559/
My guess is that Obama was thinking only of the political consequences. Remember when Bubba Clinton went on record about what a huge political risk Obama had taken to authorize the bin Laden mission. They (the democrats) only look at the politics of it, not the right of it. I’m guessing that Obama told Panetta and Dempsey not to pull the trigger unless they could pull off a clean, successful operation with no screw ups and no collateral damage. So nothing was done because fog of war.
The primary job of the President is as C-in-C and implementer of our foreign policy. Yet Obama puts domestic social programs and his political success as job number one. I don’t know about others, but this citizen sees a President who has failed to perform his sworn duty to protect and defend the United States of America – an impeachable offense. But he will not be impeached. Because race card.
Will we get answers to all the questions? The democrats are already massing against the select committee to investigate Benghazi. If they have their way, the committee will go nowhere, mired down obstruction and partisan attacks. If this gains any traction among voters and the MSM, we could be looking at a big Republican victory in November. On the other hand, if the dems can delay and deter things, we may never have any definitive idea of what really happened and it may be no help in November. We all need to write and call our Congress critters to let them know we want answers.
Congress trusts Democrats more than voters. Voters are just nameless, faceless, serfs on a letter. Democrats in DC are real humans they talk with each day. Guess which one they will pay attention to.
I guess I’ve been ;retty mellow over the years. But I am heartily glad, praise-God glad, that no lib has asked me, sneeringly, about Benghazi.
To ask a soldier about abandoning other soldiers as if it’s no big deal….
Thing is, some of them might think it’s a big deal, but Obama is more imortant. Others don’t see the problem. Hard to think which is more despicable.
What struck me most about this person was how effeminate he was. Effeminate not at all in the sense of being “gay”. Rather, in the sense of being so puerile that adolescence would be a major leap in maturity. Here is a man who has never had a rite of initiation into adulthood, and then grown into it. He’s not even a gelding. He’s…abominable. He’s…a modern liberal.
Mostly I lamented for America. Mostly I felt shame in the faces and the stares of those men of the Greatest Generation who are now almost gone from America and whose passing shows in stark contrast the lesser generations that have followed them. My generation stands midway between them and this…thing.
And here we are all Rockefeller heirs then. We fought we made the fortune, or that it came with life itself.
Now we see the grandchildren can barely wipe the snot off their faces let alone build an empire of steel with shoulders broad enough to build great cities and paint them in gold just for the sheer joy of living.
An America ends in people like that? May God prevent it.
This kind of behavior will continue, and it may go on for a while, but sooner or later it will have to end I’m always amused that the left likes to use military imagery and terminology but doesn’t quite understand the actual mechanics. For our “friends” on the left I’ll throw out Karl von Clausewitz and the concept of a “culminating point”. Some assembly required, “dude”–have at it, you worthless hump….
Vietor: a progressive made “man.” What this ball-less minnow needs is a good stint working hard on a farm, or a mill, something. Still, I don’t think it would do any good. You kind of want to hook this fish out of the water and gaze until the last dying gasp. But, he’s what he is, nurture and nature wise, and nurture hasn’t be too kind. Well, probably too kind.
A pig is a pig. Put lipstick on it. Put it on the farm. Still a pig.
Exactly right, Neo. Tommy was just putting his personal word choice on the WH tactic: mock the question, don’t answer it. Veitor even telegraphed it w/his tweet prior to the interview, and then continued with mocking tweets after. This is the Obama administration trolling those of us who have the audacity to still be talking about it (http://preview.tinyurl.com/p4cpw5r).
Jane Harmon did the same thing this morning on Fox News Sunday, where she likened the whole discussion to nutty conspiracy theories like Area 51 and Vince Foster.
Ymarsakar: “Remember when Hillary C and Democrats were talking about how Bush was risking the lives of our troops needlessly because no Body Armor?”
That is what the Dems want the public to remember.
The predominance of the false narrative of the Iraq mission is the Democrats’ sword and shield. It provides the contextual frame for the Benghazi controversy, which is why the controversy isn’t what it ought to be.
Correcting the popular narrative of the Iraq mission is the necessary baseline for the Benghazi controversy to bear more weight.
Long history, not us, will reveal the Iraqi “war,” I believe, EriK the Red. It warn’t not war, tis true, but how doth a lie appear in moonlight? That lie has disappeared; no spotlight exists to bring it home, but several are serving.
“Warn’t not war,” you say. Yes, I say. War is full expression of power. Warn’t we holding bakum? Yust like Vi-et-nam-um? That ain’t war-um. Hell, we should rule the world taking the purposes of our soviet and marxist “friends.” They would little deign to use any Power. WE HAVE THE POWER. We have not used it. Don’t think that will last overlong long. Still an option. This President has used more power and espionage than any other. (Jefferson, Arbraham, Roosevelt, Nixon and Wilson.) supported by the full throated roar of the “liberal.” Well, no longer. At least that is one myth roasted by the fire.
and Wilson.)
Wilson enabilded FDR who set the stage for LBJ who enabiled Carter-Clinton-BHO. Rot begins at the head of the fish; it smells foul all the way down.
Vietor was channeling Chip Diller with his “all is well” shtick. This was meant to reassure the base and hopefully sway some of the rubes.
But the administration’s credibility isn’t what it once was, even on the left. Obamacare saw to that.
And as more people tune out or default to the opposite of whatever the administration’s position is, things are gonna get bad.
Obama maintained power for as long as he did because he is a demagogue. The way to attack a demagogue is to make him unpopular.
P.S. I am getting the feeling that what soured it for liberals was the undeniable amateurishness of Obama’s foreign policy. The left LOVES to think of themselves as worldly, and the one thing they can’t stand is to be thought of as foolish by the rest of the world.
Funny, considering the rest of the world sucks compared to us.
The Left doesn’t need their god to have credibility, only authority and power. That, is still there.
How different would have been the response had Chelsea & her husband been on the premises ?
The pain of Sean Smith’s mother often seen on Fox.
God bless her on this sad for her upcoming Mother’s Day !
I have heard people defend this administration (both insiders and outsiders) by saying the stupidest things I have ever heard in my life. The serial crimes of Barack Obama have long term consequences. They are not just isolated events that happened “a long time ago.”
A long time ago. If you have the attention span of a gnat.
Take Obama’s lawbreaking when it came to the Chrysler bankruptcy. The law states that secured bondholders are first in line to be made whole in a bankruptcy proceeding.For a very good reason; no one would make loans to companies in financial distress without such guarantees. Yet Obama set aside the law and made sure his buddies in the unions were first in line. Secured bondholders were told they’d get 29cents on the dollar.
I’m sure the Obama administration would say so what, that was a long time ago. No, it’s not a long time ago. And more importantly, we get near daily reminders that Obama will break the law anytime it’s in his or his cronies’ interest. The Obamacare debacle is the most obvious example, but their are others. For instance recall the Solyndra bankruptcy. The DoE managed to pay the hedge funds (Obama bundlers and campaign contributors) first despite the law saying the “taxpayers get paid first. The rationale was actually sound, in a damning sort of way for Obama. It was a risky investment, that’s why government loan guarantees were required in the first place. To reassure investors.
In other words, green energy is such a bad idea it wouldn’t exist unless government created the market. And they paid back their cronies for the exact same reason bankruptcy law says secured investors get paid first! Which they refused to do then because, apparently, the bondholders aren’t Obama cronies.
So we have 0.1% GDP growth for a reason. Do not doubt that the Chrysler bailout is still haunting investors who’d rather sit on their money than invest it in an economy overseen by a criminal administration.
By the same token, we are dealing with people abroad who have attention spans longer than a gnat. By definition that’s true, since some of them still list the loss of Al Andalus and the Crusades among their grievances with the West. There are people out there who, as did I, knew Obama was lying right away about spontaneous demonstrations about the video. Such as the people who planned the violence. Not just in Cairo and Benghazi, but everywhere. These things are never spontaneous. These crowds don’t just form in Khartoum because of a video they wouldn’t know about unless the organizers told them. Similarly, they don’t form spontaneously in Kabul over some nobody pastor in Florida burning Qurans. Somebody has to get the word out.
The Turks knew Obama was lying immediately; their consul general had to drive through Ansar Al Sharia’s barricades to leave the meeting he had with our ambassador. All sorts of countries have effective intelligence services; some our allies, some adversaries. They would have known if not immediately within a day or two exactly what happened. Lying about something that happened in public view in Libya’s second largest city makes about as much sense as lying about the Boston bombing. The truth is going to come out quickly. So these nation’s leaders knew, as Obama was sticking with the lie, that it was a lie. To our nation’s detriment as our allies were dismayed and are adversaries gleefully emboldened.
The groups that organized the Cairo riots and the Benghazi assault had in interest in advancing the anti-Muslim video lie just as much as the Obama administration.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/09/10/jihadis-threaten-to-burn-u-s-embassy-in-cairo/
So this administration’s interests aligned with those of Ansar Al Sharia, Islamic Jihad, the Sunni Group, Al Gamaa Al Islamiyya, and the Muslim Brotherhood. That is, again, criminal. And our allies and our adversaries realized that.
We will be living with the effects of Obama’s criminal foreign policy and national security failures for a long, long time. We see many of those effects in Ukraine, the Baltics where Putin is also using agents to stir up trouble with Russian minorities, in the East China Sea where China is doing everything possible to provoke a war with Japan, in the South China Sea where China is more aggressively enforcing its maritime claims, etc.
And why not? We had already proven we would sit on our hands and do nothing in response to the sinking of an ally’s ship or when the NORKs shelled their islands, causing loss of life in both cases. Then we demonstrated we wouldn’t even defend sovereign US territory in the form of a diplomatic facility, again with loss of life. And I say we because this country re-elected this criminal. And now we have three more years to listen to the completely unqualified people in this administration from the top guy on down talk about how things that any sentient being can see are still having effects now happened “a long time ago” and we should get over it.
I will when Putin does.
Steve57:
Well said.
You might be interested in the post I just put up.
Steve57:
VERY well said.
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