@Thomas,
Thomas wrote:
georgeob1 wrote: The confusion that we saw immediately after the attack occured may have been understandable (though given the real time reports from our embassy staff and the fact that it occurred onn the anniversary of 9/11 make even that a bit hard to swallow). From about two days after the event through about six days later, there appears to have been a consistent and deliberate attempt from the White House and the State Department to falsely portray the event as a spontaneous reaction to the video clip no one has ever seen.
Revelette has dealt with this claim effectively. I won't repeat what she said. But in addition, I would like to point out a double standard here. You're giving Obama a hard time because of alleged confusion that lasted for days. George Bush was either confused or deliberately deceptive about the weapons-of-mass-destruction thing for years, and he started a war rather than admit he was wrong. Nevertheless, you approved of his re-election. You even approved of the way he bullied all allies of America's who had made the right call and stayed out. (I vividly remember sitting in your car and hearing you say, "I strongly approve of inflicting pain on France right now." That was in early 2007.) Perhaps a little perspective is in order here.
I don't believe that revelette has dealt with the issue I raised at all. The evidence of a strange insistence on the part of the President and key administration officials including the White House Press secretary and our UN ambassador that the attack was a spontaneous result of mob outrage ofer the video that no one has seen, started as part of the response to Romney's early criticism and continued for about a week in defiance of both common sense ans accumulating evidence.
I'm willing to give political leaders some slack in their efforts to persuade the nation to alter some currently fixed ideas in the face of serious reason to do so. That might include efforts on the Part of President Obama to persuade us to be less widely judgmental about Islam, and less willing to carry forward Cold War era politics into a now changed world. President Roosevelt engaged in very serious and clear deceptions, and violations of law in his efforts to get this country engaged in yet another war in Europe in the wake of then widespread public dissatisfaction about our involvement in the ghastly stupidity of WWI. I don't know President Bush's inner thoughts and motivations, but I suspect they were similar. The WMD possibility (including chemical & biological weapons) could not be discounted with full confidence, and I have always suspected the Bush administration somehow believed they could create a modern democracy in Iraq. Indeed such an evolution may occur, but not on the time scale they probably envisioned. The folly of the policy is now abundantly clear. A different outcome in WWII might have made Roosevelt look a bit like Bush as well.
In the case at hand my criticism focuses mainly on the clumsy ineptness of the actions involved. I have the feeling that the campaign staff was making the policy decisions here in an attempt to distort reality to make it better fit Obama's underlying agenda, and campaign needs. Worse, they appeared to be doing so in truly foolish disregard of both the unfolding facts and the common sense of the public, - something which I believe they chronically underestimate. When I watched Susan Rice's insistence on the Sunday news shows several days after the event that the assualt was surely nothing but spontaneous mob violence resulting from an offensive video clip, I was offended by both the stupidity of the analysis and the underlying contempt for the listening public that was clearly behind it.
All that, of course fits into my own preconceptions about the dangers attendant to rule by those who claim to know for sure what is good for the rest of us in areas of life not essential for government, and who are willing to impose it on us all.
