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We’re going to circle back to the Tommy Vietor interview with Bret Baier. The idea that appalling people like Vietor sat in the Situation Room the night of Benghazi stills draws comments. Jennifer Rubin;
Tommy Vietor, the former spokesman for President Obama’s National Security Council — the entity on which the president depends to synthesize national security information and policy — went on Fox News to answer questions about Benghazi. Mind you, the entire episode — the failure to keep tabs on the influx of jihadis, the failure to protect Americans in Libya, the massive confusion and misinformation that persisted up through the president’s Sept. 25, 2012, speech at the United Nations — was as much the responsibility of the NSC as any other entity. When asked about the e-mail Ben Rhodes sent out, Vietor snarked, “Dude, that was like two years ago.” And that’s when it became crystal clear how things like Benghazi happened in this administration.
Here are seven lessons we should keep in mind, ably illustrated by Vietor (who subsequently insulted Fox News rather than apologize, on MSNBC, declaring, “I guess you’re only supposed to use the Queen’s English on Fox.”):
1. An error like Benghazi happens because multiple people have a hyper-partisan mindset that submerges everything to politics.
2. The staff reflects the boss. If the staff is rude, immature and callous, the boss almost invariably is. …
Roger Simon has on open letter to William Goldman who wrote the screenplay for All The President’s Men. Simon pitches a new project for a sequel – All the President’s Dudes. Simon suggests the role for Vietor go to Justin Bieber.
Hey, William Goldman. You’re getting a little long in the tooth — we all are — but America needs your Oscar-winning brilliance for a new screenplay, a must-do sequel to your original called All the President’s Dudes.
You won’t be able to use Hoffman and Redford this time. They’re also, er, a little long in the tooth to play, say, Tommy Vietor. But there are a number of younger players out there. (I see Justin Bieber as Tommy.)
Look, I know you’re a liberal and want to protect the fort. But don’t you think things have gone a bit far with this Benghazi business?
I know. I know. It’s not over yet. We need a Deep Throat or at least a John Dean to put an icing on the proverbial cake. Maybe we’ll have one. But even if we don’t, think of the dramatic possibilities.
Let’s start with that ten p.m. phone call between Obama and Hillary …
John Hinderaker wants to know where the prez and secstate were.
As I wrote here, one of the striking features of the White House’s latest email production is the complete absence of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton from the communications on the evening of September 11, 2012. Their names appear only later, when staffers write heartfelt statements about the deaths of four Americans to be released over their names.
So where were they on the fateful night of September 11? Tommy Vietor–formerly Obama’s van driver, now, apparently, a foreign policy spokesman–says that Obama wasn’t in the situation room. Where was he? Resting up for his big fundraising trip to Las Vegas the next day? And how about Hillary? As Paul wrote earlier this evening, retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Lovell testified today that the military should have tried to rescue the besieged Americans in Benghazi. Why didn’t they? They were waiting, he testified, for a request from the State Department that never came. …
Andrew Malcolm only wants to know where the president was that night.
… When Bin Laden perished, we were treated to a detailed “tick-tock,” what every White House knows it must provide Washington media after major events. A minute-by-minute recounting of what the president was doing at the time.
There’s no way for even conscientious reporters to check all the hand-fed, self-serving details. So, they are passed on to the public as gospel of how our nation’s leader addressed the issue, always with seriousness, deliberation and, in the end, calm decisiveness.
But, curiously, not Benghazi. …
… This president does love speech-making, often on minute public issues. Why the suspicious silence on his Benghazi doings?
So, let’s turn the question around:
What could President Barack Hussein Obama have possibly been doing that deadly night, what could his physical and mental condition have been that’s so terrible and shocking that the know-everything chief executive would rather Americans think he was asleep at the national security switch?
That’s something to awaken any American at 3 a.m. — or earlier.
… Former White House national security spokesman Tommy Vietor agreed to come on Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier Thursday night to answer questions about Benghazi. Either unprepared or unwilling to answer perfectly reasonable and predictable questions, Vietor got exasperated and said, “Dude, that was like two years ago.”
Four people died in Benghazi. Even defenders of the Obama administration acknowledge errors of omission in the run-up to that day and on that day, and errors of commission in the days that followed. Yet Vietor thought it appropriate to laugh off Bret’s question. And the next night, on MSNBC, Vietor didn’t apologize: “Bret was asking me to remember what––if I changed a word on September 14th, 2012, and my frustration came through. I guess you’re only supposed to use the Queen’s English on Fox.” Ho ho. But then Vietor added, in a pathetic attempt to re-establish some modicum of gravitas, “But obviously what happened that day was an absolute tragedy.”
Obviously.
And one obviously speaks about tragedies by saying, “Dude, that was like two years ago.”
Vietor was just a press flack, and is no longer part of the administration. His comment is, in a way, no big deal. But it does reveal a level of flippancy and vulgarity rare even for Washington, and even for this day and age.
So, a new phrase: “Veni, Vidi, Vietor”—I came, I saw, and I made a fool of myself.
Peter Wehner says we’re watching a presidency die.
… The mid-term elections are still six months away, but the political landscape for Democrats is perilous. And the odds are as good or better that things will get worse, not better, for Democrats between now and November.
The American public, at least at this point, seem intent on deliver a stinging rebuke to President Obama, his party, and liberalism itself. The left, knowing this, is going to become even more desperate, more ad hominem, and more deranged in their attacks.
It won’t alter the outcome. We are watching the Obama presidency die. The cause of death? Massive incompetence. Flawed ideology. And the Obama agenda coming into contact with reality.
We are not the only people in the world watching the collapse of this presidency. Richard Fernandez posts on how the world treats this administration with disrespect.
President Obama is still received throughout the Western alliance as the “leader of the free world”, a position American presidents have held de facto since the end of the Second World War. Despite the increasingly strident domestic criticism of the president and falling poll numbers, other leaders find it impolitic — not to mention diplomatically improper — to openly express doubts about Obama’s character or competence.
So they’ve taken a page out of his playbook and decided to do a little backstabbing themselves. The exact moment when the Benghazi crisis began to clip Obama’s wings will probably be identified as August 29, 2013. That is the date the British parliament refused to join Barack Obama’s impending strike on Syria after it had crossed his “Red Line”.
Congress couldn’t stop him. The American press couldn’t delay him but the British parliament, by pulling out of the deal, tossed a wrench into the gears.
And now the Germans are doing the same thing. Though the Washington press try to portray Obama’s inaction against Putin as the result of his generous nature, Obama is hampered by a more basic problem: Germany won’t go along.
NBC news says that while “Obama wants the United States and Europe to stand together and force Russia to rethink its moves in Ukraine.” But Angela Merkel isn’t taking orders. …
An American, watching this train wreck in Washington, is likely to call out, “Mayday.” A blog named Today I Found Out posts on how we came to use mayday to denote extreme distress.
Today I found out why those aboard planes and ships use the word “Mayday” to indicate they are in extreme distress.
In 1923, a senior radio officer, Frederick Stanley Mockford, in CroydonAirport in London, England was asked to think of one word that would be easy to understand for all pilots and ground staff in the event of an emergency. The problem had arisen as voice radio communication slowly became more common, so an equivalent to the Morse code SOS distress signal was needed. Obviously a word like “help” wasn’t a good choice for English speakers because it could be used in normal conversations where no one was in distress.
At the time Mockford was considering the request, much of the traffic he was dealing with was between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport in Paris, France. With both the French and English languages in mind, he came up with the somewhat unique word “Mayday”, the anglicized spelling of the French pronunciation of the word “m’aider” which means “help me”. …