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The administration’s Benghazi BS gets some treatment from a few of our favorites. Roger Simon kicks it off.
A couple of weeks ago, the prime minister of South Korea resigned over a tragic ferry accident in his country for which he had no personal responsibility whatsoever
In the USA, the exact opposite has been happening. Going on two years now, our administration has done nothing but attempt to lie, obfuscate and shift the blame concerning the events in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, during which four Americans were murdered.
But as information dribbles out — most recently the long-hidden email from Ben Rhodes — the extent of this prevarication is reaching a tipping point with even a few representatives of the mainstream media (notably Jonathan Karl of ABC) stepping forward to challenge the administration. …
David Harsanyi says, “You know what, Dude; even if Benghazi was about a video, it’s still a scandal.
Judging from the reaction of liberals on my Twitter feed, the appropriate reaction to any #Benghazi talk is snickering and derision. And the defense offered by administration, which amounts to mocking conservatives for offering any questions – former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor dropping “dude” on Fox News’ Bret Baier was tailored to parallel this dismissive attitude – reminds me that even if all this was about a video, even if the GOP’s “conspiracy theory” regarding talking-point timelines is all wrong, the Obama administration’s reaction is still a scandal.
By downplaying the Benghazi attack during the 2012 race, by grandstanding and attacking critics, the president saved himself any serious debate about, not only the attack, but our misguided Libyan intervention, our Egyptian policy, and the administration’s claims that al-Qaeda terrorism had been largely subdued. And by continuing to make the ludicrous assertion that a sophisticated tactical terrorist attack was merely a spontaneous protest by hypersensitive Muslims in reaction to a halfwit’s silly video, Obama defenders remind us that nothing is more important than politics.
From the beginning the administration misrepresented what occurred. And not only in Libya. When Judicial Watch recently made available documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act public, one of them, an email dated September 14, 2012, showed national security official Ben Rhodes editing Libya talking points for Susan Rice. Jay Carney (who initially claimed that these were “stylistic changes“) says the talking points reflected all protests across the Muslim world. The goal: “underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.” But that’s a lie, no matter when the edit was made. It would have been a lie the night of Sept. 11 and it was a lie if Rice was referring to the entire Muslim world or simply Benghazi. And it’s a scandal because the administration knew it was untrue and went out and tacitly blamed the United States for the barbaric actions of others. …
Andrew McCarthy gets to the foundation of the president’s serial lies about Benghazi.
Here is the main point: The rioting at the American embassy in Cairo was not about the anti-Muslim video. As argued here repeatedly (see here and here), the Obama administration’s “Blame the Video” story was a fraudulent explanation for the September 11, 2012, rioting in Cairo every bit as much as it was a fraudulent explanation for the massacre in Benghazi several hours later.
We’ll come back to that because, once you grasp this well-hidden fact, the Obama administration’s derelictions of duty in connection with Benghazi become much easier to see. But let’s begin with Jay Carney’s performance in Wednesday’s exchange with the White House press corps, a new low in insulting the intelligence of the American people
Mr. Carney was grilled about just-released e-mails that corroborate what many of us have been arguing all along: “Blame the Video” was an Obama-administration–crafted lie, through and through. It was intended, in the stretch run of the 2012 campaign, to obscure the facts that (a) the president’s foreign policy of empowering Islamic supremacists contributed directly and materially to the Benghazi massacre; (b) the president’s reckless stationing of American government personnel in Benghazi and his shocking failure to provide sufficient protection for them were driven by a political-campaign imperative to portray the Obama Libya policy as a success — and, again, they invited the jihadist violence that killed our ambassador and three other Americans; and (c) far from being “decimated,” as the president repeatedly claimed during the campaign (and continued to claim even after the September 11 violence in Egypt and Libya), al-Qaeda and its allied jihadists remained a driving force of anti-American violence in Muslim countries — indeed, they had been strengthened by the president’s pro-Islamist policies. …
Let’s spend some time on the coming election. Josh Kraushaar looks at the polls and Nate Silver’s forecasts and suggests the Dems will do more poorly than Silver thinks.
I’m a numbers guy. As a baseball fan, I pore over box scores, regularly second-guess managers who use old-school tactics, and was probably one of Nate Silver’s first readers and an early subscriber to the sabermetric reference book Baseball Prospectus, where he made a name for himself projecting player outcomes. In reporting on and analyzing politics, I rely greatly on fundraising reports and polling data to inform the trajectory of key races.
But count me underwhelmed by the new wave of Senate prediction models assessing the probability of Republicans winning the upper chamber by one-tenth of a percentage point. It’s not that the models aren’t effective at what they’re designed to do. It’s that the methodology behind them is flawed. Unlike baseball, where the sample size runs in the thousands of at-bats or innings pitched, these models overemphasize a handful of early polls at the expense of on-the-ground intelligence on candidate quality. As Silver might put it, there’s a lot of noise to the signal.
The models also undervalue the big-picture indicators suggesting that 2014 is shaping up to be a wave election for Republicans, the type of environment where even seemingly safe incumbents can become endangered. Nearly every national poll, including Tuesday’s ABC News/Washington Post survey, contains ominous news for Senate Democrats. President Obama’s job approval is at an all-time low of 41 percent, and public opinion on his health care law hasn’t budged and remains a driving force in turning out disaffected voters to the polls to register their anger. Public opinion on the economy isn’t any better than it was before the 2010 midterms when the unemployment rate hit double-digits. Democrats hold only a 1-point lead on the generic ballot in the ABC/WaPo survey—worse positioning than before the GOP’s 2010 landslide. …
A. B. Stoddard says the Dems are on thin ice.
… The consensus, among pollsters and prognosticators, is that turnout favors Republicans. Midterm elections attract an older, whiter and more male electorate than presidential elections do, and the participation of the coalition on which Democrats depend tends to drop off dramatically. In 2010, the Democrats had a 5-point lead in the general ballot just before the party lost control of the House majority. Now they are tied in one survey and ahead by just 1 point in another.
The popularity of ObamaCare has seen a slight uptick in the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll but remains unpopular enough among Republican and independent voters that Democrats, for the most part, have refused to run on it, even as all of their GOP opponents run against it. The issue continues to galvanize Republicans while Democrats hold their collective breath, in fear of a spike in premiums set by insurance companies in the late summer could create a wave that costs them 10 seats or more in the Senate. …
Charlie Cook writes on why the Dems should not be celebrating the minor scraps of good news.
There seemed to be a pop-the-champagne mood among Democrats after the Obama administration’s announcement that 8 million Americans had signed up for health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Democrats, desperate for good news, became euphoric at the suggestion that perhaps they had turned the corner on Obamacare, moving from it being a likely political liability to an asset, and that maybe the 2014 midterm elections might not be so bad. The fact that 8 million is less than 3 percent of the 313.9 million people in the United States seemed lost in the shuffle.
My impression at the time was that this sounded a bit too much like whistling past the graveyard. Now an array of new polling from a variety of sources suggests that Democrats have no reason to be encouraged at this point. Things still look pretty awful for the party. Especially meaningful to consider is that—no matter how bad the national poll numbers appear for Democrats—eight of their nine most vulnerable Senate seats this year are in states that Mitt Romney carried in 2012. Further, nine of the most competitive 11 Senate seats in both parties are in Romney states; the numbers in these states will likely be considerably worse than the national numbers. …
Michael Barone likes the idea of more tolls on the interstate system.
It is not often that I can congratulate the Obama administration for adopting a policy I’ve advocated myself. But today I can. Last month in a Washington Examiner column I called for increased use of tolling to finance highways. As I pointed out, the gasoline tax is a diminishing resource — and will diminish more as the administration’s stringent auto mileage standards come into force — and there is great resistance to raising the federal gas tax. Tolls provide a ready alternative, with transponder technology greatly reducing the cost and hassle of exacting tolls from drivers — and with fees pegged closely to actual usage of particular highways.
So I am happy to see that the transportation bill (titled the Grow America Act) that Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is recommending to Congress includes a provision to “eliminate the prohibition on tolling existing free Interstate highways, subject to the approval of the Secretary, for purposes of reconstruction, thus providing States greater flexibility to use tolling as a revenue source for needed reconstruction activities on all components of their highway systems. This section would allow any State or public agency to impose variable tolls on existing highways, bridges, or tunnels for purposes of congestion management, subject to the approval of the Secretary.” This presumably wouldn’t allow tolling for purposes other than “reconstruction” and “congestion management,” but I suspect that could include very many projects. I hope Congress takes Secretary Foxx’s proposal seriously