Sandy report
In my neck of the woods all’s well so far (knock wood vigorously). I still have power—which is nothing short of a miracle, considering how easily we lose it here. It’s been gloomy, mostly rainy, and windy, but there have even been moments of calm amidst the storm.
Those photos of New York are upsetting to me. New York’s been through worse, though, a lot worse, and I bet it will recover fairly quickly.
Hope you’re all doing well, too.
Carter/Obama, Tehran/Benghazi, 1980/2012
A comment by “RickZ” about the failed Iran hostage rescue attempt in the waning days of the Carter administration prompted this reply from me, referring to a post I wrote several years ago on the anniversary of Operation Eagle Claw (the name of the doomed rescue effort).
In that post of mine I discussed an article from The Atlantic about the rescue, and now I’m going to quote a portion of that article that I think especially relevant to what happened (or failed to happen) on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi. The Iran rescue mission was famous for a series of disasters that aborted it before the rescuers ever got to Tehran, but reading the following information about it makes me wonder whether things might actually have gone worse (although it’s hard to believe that could be possible) if the forces had had a chance to fulfill the mission as planned—and limited—by then-President Carter.
Compare and contrast to Benghazi:
Another presidential directive concerned the use of nonlethal riot-control agents. Given that the shah’s occasionally violent riot control during the revolution was now Exhibit A in Iran’s human-rights case against the former regime and America, Carter wanted to avoid killing Iranians, so he had insisted that if a hostile crowd formed during the raid, Delta should attempt to control it without shooting people. Burruss considered this ridiculous. He and his men were going to assault a guarded compound in the middle of a city of more than 5 million people, most of them presumed to be aggressively hostile. It was unbelievably risky; everyone on the mission knew there was a very good chance they would not get home alive. Wade Ishmoto, a Delta captain who worked with the unit’s intelligence division, had joked, “The only difference between this and the Alamo is that Davy Crockett didn’t have to fight his way in.” And Carter had the idea that this vastly outnumbered force was first going to try holding off the city with nonviolent crowd control? Burruss understood the president’s thinking on this, but with their hides so nakedly on the line, shouldn’t they be free to decide how best to defend themselves? He had complained about the directive to General Jones, who had said he would look into it, but the answer had come back “No, the president insists.” So Burruss had made his own peace with it. He had with him one tear-gas grenade””one””which he intended to throw as soon as necessary; he would then use its smoke as a marker to call in devastatingly lethal 40 mm AC-130 gunship fire.
Both incidents involved violence against American diplomats in a country that had recently seen a revolution against forces previously friendly to the US and now Islamicist and hostile. The Iranian hostages had been in captivity for quite some time when the rescue was attempted; in Benghazi the incident happened in a single less-than-24-hour period, and involved a firefight and deaths. The Benghazi violence was apparently viewed in real time by the administration; Carter had no such capabilities. Carter approved a rescue mission; Obama failed to do so.
But the similarity—at least as far as I can determine, trying to fill in the blanks—was that the motivation to appear peaceful and friendly resulted in a decision to not fire on the citizens of the host country, even if the situation warranted it, and even at the risk of American lives. The idée fixe remains.
The race card never gets old
Frank Bruni’s latest column is sort of interesting.
Bruni can’t stand Romney, and spends at least half of his piece making that fact crystal clear, just so his readers won’t get the wrong impression. But he’s also disappointed in Obama, and is starting to think it’s even within the realm of possibility that Obama might lose.
Bruni says that with huge regret. But he thinks the mean-spiritedness of Obama’s campaign—a truculence that Bruni believes Obama was forced to display in order to make up for his relative lack of energy in the first debate—has soured the moderate voter on the president:
The miracle ended at the first debate, in Denver, and the problem with that face-off went beyond Obama’s sleepwalking to the kinds of subsequent debates it forced on him. To shake off what happened, he had to turn truculent, and while that technically “won” him his second and third meetings with Romney, he lost something in the bargain. He undercut his high-minded, big-vision brand, whole stanzas of doggerel intruding on the poetry.
His “bayonets” line was clever all right, and plenty fair in its way, but it had a schoolyard nastiness to it, the same nastiness in one of his campaign’s most prominent ads, which showcases Romney’s off-key rendition of “America the Beautiful.” I wonder how that line, that ad and the overall atmospherics register with voters in the middle, some of whom are no doubt asking themselves where “hope and change” went and hid.
Bruni never pauses to recall that the “America the Beautiful” ad was put out way before the first debate ever happened. But never mind. Bruni’s point that something has soured in Obama’s presentation this go-round is well-taken.
But what interests me most about the column is its comments section, which I would imagine is loaded with NY Times regulars. Over and over and over quite a few of them state that, if worst comes to worst and Obama loses, it will be because of racism.
Are they really saying that a country that elected Obama by a large margin in 2008 has become too racist to re-elect him in the intervening four years? That there is no logic to their position—that the majority don’t even try to explain how or why such a thing could be—is a fact that seems to escape them. An Obama loss would equal racism, QED. To them, there is still no other explanation for not voting for Obama—certainly not any possible failings in Obama himself, either of policy or of character.
So if the voters of America decide to do to Obama what they did to Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George Herbert Walker Bush in 1992, it won’t be for the same reasons. Couldn’t be. It will be because we suddenly have become too racist to stomach the wonderful guy who deigned, out of the goodness of his heart, to be our president.
A tricky treat
What do you say to this?
I know what I say. Despite my love for candy corn, I shout a resounding “NO!!” to the above product, a sorry invention that is neither fish (candy corn) nor fowl (oreo) but some dreadful hybrid known as a candy corn oreo.
Do not buy. Stick with the classics.
Obama forced to say something about Benghazi
It’s an evasion, of course, but it’s an indication that the MSM hasn’t been able to totally protect the president on this.
The cliche-generator has been working overtime for Obama:
President Barack Obama said in an interview that if the investigation into the Sept. 11 attack on the American compound in Libya finds that “there was a big breakdown, and somebody didn’t do their job, they’ll be held accountable.”
Speaking with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program on Monday, the president said that “ultimately, as commander in chief, I’m responsible and I don’t shy away from that responsibility. My No. 1 responsibility is to go after the folks who did this, and we’re going to make sure we get them. I’ve got a pretty good track record of doing that.”…
Asked whether the intelligence community provided poor information, Obama replied: “That’s what we’re going to find out from the investigation.”
“But the truth is that across the board, when this happened, my No. 1 priority was secure Americans, figure out what happened, bring those folks to justice. We are in the process of doing that right now,” he added. “Congress has been getting the flow of information continuously from Day One.”
Obama also said there were “all kinds of legitimate questions” about what happened in the eastern Libyan city.
“But I do take offense, as I’ve said at one of the debates, with some suggestion that in any way we haven’t tried to make sure that the American people knew, as information was coming in, what we believed happened,” he said.
Love that “I’ve got a pretty good track record.” Also love that expression “folks” for terrorists, don’t you? (I seem to recall that George Bush spouted that particular euphemism once or twice, as well.)
When do you think we’ll see the results of this “investigation”? And naturally the administration is the best choice for investigating—itself.
Also love the phony outrage: Obama says “I take offense” at the idea that he didn’t inform the American people. Well, you know what, President Obama? I take offense at your taking offense. It’s called criticizing the actions of a president. I seem to recall you used to do a bit of that yourself, back when you were just a mere senator.
October Surprise
Get ready, Republicans.
Romnesia, Rhamnusia
I don’t remember exactly where I saw it, but I hadn’t known before that there’s another name for Nemesis:
In Greek mythology, Nemesis (Greek, ÎÎμεσις), also called Rhamnousia/Rhamnusia (“the goddess of Rhamnous”) at her sanctuary at Rhamnous, north of Marathon, was the spirit of divine retribution against those who succumb to hubris (arrogance before the gods). The Greeks personified vengeful fate as a remorseless goddess: the goddess of revenge. The name Nemesis is related to the Greek word νÎμειν [némein], meaning “to give what is due”.
Perhaps Obama should hesitate before invoking “Romnesia.” It has a similar ring, doesn’t it?
[NOTE: Something about the title of this post reminds me of this:
Hogamous, Higamous,
Man is polygamous,
Higamous, Hogamous,
Woman is monagamous.]
Hating the media and yet being influenced by it
Commenter “kolnai” makes some interesting points about the media and asks some interesting questions:
What I’m questioning, however, is this statistic I’ve seen Caddell and others throwing around stating that only 8% of the public has a favorable view of the media…
…[E]veryone has their social “oomph” for saying they dislike the media.
But we then have to square that with the findings of people like Tim Groseclose (and what we know to be true from simple observation), that a significant chunk of people are swayed to the left by the major media outlets and their framing of the issues. E.g., if NBC, ABC, CBS, the big newspapers and magazines, etc., treat Benghazi like a nothing-burger, a lot of people will swallow it.
That is important to note. They will not be neutral. They will not say, “Hmmm”¦ this is the media I supposedly hate, so let me be skeptical here.” They will swallow it. This must be explained, and it can’t be traced to mere rational ignorance, for, as noted, the logical attitude to take then is skepticism or neutrality until one does one’s own research.
My point is that people swallow it because many, perhaps most, who claim to “hate the media” actually don’t. Democrats love it and get all their info. from the MSM. Independents, or a good deal of them anyway, just swallow what’s fed to them from the surrounding informational aether, so long as it’s spoken in dulcet tones and doesn’t broadcast it’s partisanship.
Only conservatives (and libertarians) truly loathe the media and approach every story with a critical, doubting eye.
Good points. The same polls that ask people whether they trust the media seem to be rather silent on the more important follow-up questions they might ask as to why. Maybe people don’t like the MSM because of too much coverage of the Kardashian family. Maybe they don’t like it because of not enough coverage of the Kardashian family. So we don’t know what so many people don’t like about the MSM, although we pretty much know what conservatives don’t like about the MSM.
But I would submit that the media influences even people who say they don’t like it because propaganda works for a lot of people, in much the way advertising does. One of the most basic principles of advertising is that you don’t have to like an ad—in fact, you can find it quite annoying—for it to work.
There’s still another reason why so many people remain susceptible to the MSM’s propaganda despite not having a favorable view of the press: in order to reject the MSM “narrative” it helps to have a competing one. Yes, a competing one is offered by the press on the right, but most people who are not already at least somewhat to the right don’t ordinarily read or listen to the press on the right. That makes it pretty hard to hear the other side, doesn’t it? One has to seek it out, and if (for example) Fox News has been labeled a lying and biased network by the mainstream MSM, it’s something a person won’t be seeking out unless he/she is exceptionally curious. The more common reaction is probably to listen to the news less, which means that the person is even less likely to hear the right’s version, not more.
It may seem odd to us here, but I’m pretty sure that most liberals and moderates I know (not all, but most) haven’t even heard of the Weekly Standard or Commentary, much less read them. And the liberals I know who have heard of those sources never read them, either.
Take the Benghazi story. I am relatively certain that if I were to poll my friends, the majority of them would be unaware of it at this point, except in some very general way (for example, that the ambassador was murdered, that there was a video, and that something was said in the debate about all this and Candy Crowley pronounced Obama correct). After all, where would they have heard about the rest? Not on NPR, not in the Globe nor in the Times. And if I were to email them the recent Fox News stories on it, they’d most likely say, “Well, it’s Fox, so how do I know it’s true? And why isn’t anyone else reporting on it?”
And yet those very same people might respond to a poll about the MSM by saying they don’t trust it, reflecting a certain general leeriness about it. But that doesn’t mean they’re not highly susceptible to its influence, particularly on the things it chooses to cover versus what it chooses to ignore. If a Benghazi story falls in the forest, does anybody hear it?
Pat Caddell is mad…
…and he’s not going to take it anymore:
Also see this.
Hurricane
Almost all you hear lately around these parts is warnings about the coming hurricane.
I fully expect to lose power. But I lose power when there’s even a whisper of wind.
I just hope this time it’s not for long. And that it won’t be like the time I lost power for 5 days when it was 5 degrees out and I had the flu. It won’t, will it? Will it?
I was wondering what would have happened if Hurricane Sandy had struck on Election Day. Are there any circumstances under which the election would be postponed? I recall, for example, that 9/11 was originally mayoral primary day in New York City, and it ended up being rescheduled a couple of weeks later. But that was just a local primary, not a national election.
Anyway, if you don’t hear much from this blog for a couple of days this week don’t despair. It’ll just be me, sitting here alone in the dark.
[ADDENDUM: I might set up a few posts to automatically publish during the storm just to keep all you folks entertained. That doesn’t mean I have access to a computer. I’ll let you know if it’s really me.]
Impeaching Obama
Roger L. Simon thinks that if Obama is re-elected he should be impeached over Benghazi, and that the offense is far greater than those occurring in Watergate and the Monica affair.
I think there may be grounds for impeachment (we still don’t know enough details from sources willing to go on the record), and that if it gets that far the offense is most definitely worse than the other two incidents. But although the House may vote to impeach, the Senate will never convict, and that would be true even if it were proven that Obama flew to Benghazi and murdered the ambassador and the others himself.
I am quite serious—not about the charge that he personally murdered the ambassador, but about the fact that impeachment is now so politicized, and the need to protect Obama on the part of the Democrats so great, that a Senate that is more or less evenly split will never reach the required 2/3 vote to convict.