Friday, May 10, 2013

Jonah Goldberg's "Bad Faith and Benghazi"



Via NRO



"Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?"



That was how then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously brushed off the question of when she knew that the attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11 that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were, in fact, a terrorist assault and not a protest of an anti-Islam video that got "out of hand."



Clinton's fans in and out of the press loved her "defiant" response... and they should be ashamed of themselves for it.



* DAMN RIGHT!



* GEEZUS... THIS PIECE OF GARBAGE DIDN'T EVEN HAVE THE DECENCY TO GIVE HONEST SNARK! "GUYS OUT FOR A WALK ONE NIGHT [WHO] DECIDE TO KILL SOME AMERICANS?" NO, MADAM SECRETARY... THE "EITHER/OR" WOULD HAVE BEEN "WAS IT A PROTEST... OR A PLANNED AND SUCCESSFULLY CARRIED OUT TERRORIST ATTACK?"



* BY THE WAY... WOULD ANY OF YOU... ANY OF YOU... BE SURPRISED IF IT WERE TO BE PROVEN THAT HILLARY HAD REHEARSED HER INFAMOUS "OUTBURST" AND EVEN HAD IT POLL TESTED PRIOR TO HER APPEARANCE AT THAT HEARING?



What Clinton was really doing there was deflecting attention away from the fact that she had lied.



We now know thanks to Wednesday's congressional hearings and reporting by The Weekly Standard's Steve Hayes that administration officials knew from the outset the video had nothing to do with it.



* WE'VE ALWAYS KNOWN THIS! AT LEAST THOSE OF US WHO WEREN'T WEARING IDEOLOGICAL AND PARTISAN BLINDERS KNEW IT... AND SHOUTED IT FROM THE RAFTERS!



Intelligence sources on the ground in Libya and officials in Washington knew it was a terrorist attack from the beginning. The video was a non-event in Libya... The false video story was simply imposed from above by Clinton, President Obama, and their subalterns.



* AND IF IT WASN'T... THEN THERE'S APPARENTLY BEEN A COUP AND NO ONE HAS NOTIFIED ME!



The hearings exposed another lie. Obama and Clinton have insisted that they did everything they could to help the Americans besieged in Libya; they just "couldn't get help to them in time."



That's simply untrue.



* OF COURSE IT'S UNTRUE!



But even if that were true, it would still be a self-serving falsehood.



If you see a child struggling in the ocean, you have no idea how long she will flail and paddle before she goes under for the last time. The moral response is to swim for her in the hope that you get there in time. If you fail and she dies, you can console yourself that you did your best to rescue her.



But if you just stand on the beach and do nothing as the child struggles for life, saying, "Well, there's just no way I can get to her in time..."



(*SOLEMN NOD*)



...it doesn't really matter whether you guessed right or not - you didn't try.



The White House and State Department insist they guessed right - as if that somehow absolves them of responsibility.



They "would have sent help if they could have," they claim, but they simply weren't ready to deploy forces on September 11...



* ON SEPTEMBER 11TH...



...the one day of the year you'd expect our military and intelligence agencies to be ready for trouble in the Middle East - particularly given that before his murder, Stevens warned of security problems in Benghazi.



* WARNED AND REQUESTED SECURITY REINFORCEMENTS!



[W]e know the administration ordered others who were willing, able, and obliged to come to the consulate's rescue to... "stand down."



They in effect told the lifeguards "don't get out of your chairs."



[An unmanned drone was there to capture the whole thing on video...



* AN UNARMED DRONE SUPPOSEDLY... BUT ONE NEVER KNOWS.



...which must have been reassuring as the mortar rounds rained down.



(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD IN SORROW*)



Leon Panetta, who was the Secretary of Defense during the attack, mocked critics who wanted to know why the Pentagon didn't scramble any jets from Italy to the scene. "You can't willy-nilly send F-16s there and blow the hell out of place. ... You have to have good intelligence." Never mind that real-time video of the attack is pretty good intelligence.



An F-16 doesn't need to "blow anyone to hell" to have an impact. As military expert and former assistant defense secretary Bing West notes, "99% of air sorties over Afghanistan never drop a single bomb." Just showing up is often intimidating enough.



What motivated the White House and the State Department to deceive the public about what they did is unknown.



* OF COURSE IT'S KNOWN! THEY WERE TRYING TO COVER THEIR OWN ASSES! THEY WERE TRYING TO AVOID BLAME! THEY WERE TRYING TO AVOID APPEARING INCOMPETENT AND CRAVEN TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE PRIOR TO THE NOVEMBER 2012 NATIONAL ELECTION...!!!



Maybe it was incompetence or politics or simply understandable bureaucratic confusion.



* BULL$HIT! YES... INCOMPETENCE, SURELY... BUT "BUREAUCRATIC CONFUSION?" NO. THESE BASTARDS KNEW WHAT WAS GOING ON IN REAL TIME! THEY COUNTERMANDERED TIMELY RESCUE/REINFORCEMENT ATTEMPTS! THEY LET OUR PEOPLE DIE! THESE BA$TARDS HAVE BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS.



[W]e do know they deceived the public.



* YES... WE... DO...! (AND SOME OF US HAVE KNOWN THIS BASICALLY FROM DAY ONE!)



Which brings us back to the lies over the video. In the wake of Benghazi, the country endured an intense debate over how much free speech we could afford because of the savage intolerance of rioters half a world away. Obama and Clinton fueled this debate by incessantly blaming the video - as if the First Amendment were the problem.


Clinton and Obama both swore oaths to support and defend the Constitution. But after failing to support and defend Americans left to die, they blamed the Constitution for their failure. That's "what difference it makes."


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