Yet another destroyer of Kirkpatrick’s Benghazi apology in the New York Times has been penned by famed World Trade Center bomber prosecutor, Andrew C. McCarthy. He calls the notion that the video sparked the attack and that it had nothing to do with Al Qaeda as laughable and an apology for both Obama and Hillary.
When the Left is called out on their lies, their deliberate fabrications of the truth and their attempts to cover up what they have done, they resort to the old trick of bait and switch. They either change the subject or they jump to another point within the same discussion. Their hope is to muddy the waters and string out the conversation so that the public can accept equal responsibility for both sides in placing blame. They also hope to so deaden the atmosphere that American citizens will say – enough, move on to something else.
But they never answer the questions that would damn them. Once more McCarthy asks them, not that he will get any answers but to highlight the fact that Obama and Hillary refuse to cooperate.
Coherence and historical accuracy are not what the Times is after. The aim is to drag our consideration of a jihadist act of war down a rabbit hole of nitpicking over which jihadists did what. Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s derelictions before, during, and after the massacre — the matter of greatest consequence — remain studiously outside this wearying crossfire.
Remember, the Times-Clinton tag team has run this play before. Start with a president using a young intern to turn the Oval Office into a brothel and then perjuring himself over it. Ought to be a removable offense, right? But the next thing you know, after some epic media investigation dictated by Democratic talking points, we find ourselves kvetching over whether it was really sex; whether she was of consenting age; whether he really lied; whether the lies were really “material”; whether a president’s Oval Office trysts are really part of his “private life”; and “what the definition of ‘is’ is.”
See? None of the ever tinier questions or answers matter. The idea is to exhaust the American attention span until enough people are persuaded that it’s time to — all together now — move on.
Well, the strategy worked for the comparative low comedy of Bill Clinton’s meretricious White House. Will we likewise be exhausted into “moving on” from Benghazi, an act of war invited and unavenged by Obama-Clinton Islamist-appeasement policies? That depends on whether we accept the analytical boundaries the Times, the Obama administration, and the Hillary! campaign seek to impose on us. Will we instead press the real questions — as tirelessly as the Left is obscuring them?
What, to repeat, was Barack Obama doing on September 11, 2012, in the hours before he blithely hopped aboard Air Force One — not to be deterred from a Vegas fundraiser — while anti-American jihadists invaded our soil to war against our country? While those jihadists murdered four American officials and severely wounded others? And speaking of those others, why have they been kept under wraps by the Obama administration for the ensuing 15 months — with nary a peep from the press? Why have they been prevented from speaking publicly about what happened in Benghazi that night?
After being informed about the siege in the late afternoon, did President Obama have personal or telephone contact with any top military brass or any members of his cabinet that night? Any engaged commander-in-chief would have been burning up the phone lines, but the White House initially represented to Congress that Obama made no calls. That astounding version of events was soon contradicted by Secretary Clinton. In January 2013 congressional testimony, she claimed to have had a phone conversation with the president at around 10 p.m. Washington time. That was shortly after she had been fully briefed by Gregory Hicks, the highest ranking State Department official then on the ground in Libya — another official the administration subsequently tried to keep under wraps, and an official who was adamant in his riveting congressional testimony that an obscure anti-Mohammed video had absolutely nothing to do with the terrorist attack in Benghazi.
Did Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton really speak with each other? If they did not, as the White House initially maintained, why did she testify that they did? If they did — as claimed in the amended version of events offered by presidential spokesman Jay Carney only after Clinton’s testimony — then why did the White House originally tell Congress a different story? If Obama and Clinton did speak, moreover, what are we to make of the fact that the purported 10 p.m. call — which would have occurred while Americans, including Doherty and Woods, were still fighting for their lives — happened only minutes before the State Department put out a statement from Secretary Clinton blaming the attack on the video?
Why were there American diplomatic and intelligence facilities in Benghazi in the first place? It is not only one of the most dangerous places in the world for Americans; it is a place where Western installations — including the very State Department facility attacked on September 11, 2012 — had been subjected to serial terrorist strikes. Why, when the British government had the good sense to pull their people out of Benghazi, did Hillary Clinton deny her beleaguered State Department officials there the increased security they repeatedly requested? Indeed, why was security, in a place where Americans were in constant peril from jihadists, contracted out to local Muslim militias? What arrangements were made to ensure that American military assets were on alert to respond in the all too likely event that our facilities were overrun by Islamic supremacists? And what steps did President Obama take — or fail to take — to make sure American military assets responded to the attack?
Why did the Obama administration, at the encouragement of the McCain faction of the GOP establishment, switch sides in Libya? Obama and McCain first told us that Qaddafi was a key American counter-terrorism ally — precisely because he was providing our intelligence services with information about Islamic supremacists in places like Benghazi who had flocked to Iraq to wage jihad against American troops. Obama, with McCain’s support, even increased aid to Qaddafi before suddenly, disastrously, swinging in favor of the jihadists. It was that policy reversal that ousted Qaddafi, empowered jihadists throughout northern Africa, and — in tandem with Obama and Clinton’s shocking failures to provide security to our personnel — directly paved the way for the Benghazi massacre. Why did Obamainitiate an offensive war against a theretofore purported American ally without congressional authorization in the absence of any vital American interest, much less any threat to the United States?
. . . Or, taking the Times’ cues, we can keep talking about the video trailer and whether the jihadists who slaughtered our people knew the secret al-Qaeda handshake.
Down the Times’ Bengahzi Rabbit Hole
Nitpicking over which jihadists did what lets the Obama administration evade the real questions.
By Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review – http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367510/down-times-bengahzi-rabbit-hole-andrew-c-mccarthy
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