It’s Monday, October 22nd, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

Leading off the week, in anticipation of the final presidential debate, two commentaries from the WSJ which relate the dismal reality of Team Tick-Tock’s foreign policy fiascoes.  First, as Gordon Crovitz accurately observes….

YouTube Videos Don’t Kill People

In a speech last week, Obama dropped his standard claim that ‘al Qaeda is on the run.’

 

This from Pakistan, the cradle of religious tolerance.

The October surprise is that the final presidential debate may be the last chance before the election to clarify who knew what, and when, about the role of an anti-Islam Internet video in the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. For weeks, instead of blaming organized Islamist terrorists, the Obama administration claimed this made-in-America video turned demonstrators into killers.

A timeline disproves the administration’s story. The murder of four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya and two Navy SEALs, happened on the anniversary of Sept. 11, but the relevant facts start earlier:

In MARCH, the State Department’s regional security officer on the ground, Eric Nordstrom, began asking for additional security for Benghazi. He was rebuffed. “It was abundantly clear: We were not going to get resources until the aftermath of an incident,” he said in congressional testimony this month.

In APRIL, two Libyans threw a bomb over the fence of the consulate. In JUNE, assailants blew a hole “big enough for 40 men to go through” in the consulate’s north gate.

The infamous video was posted on YouTube in JULY. The amateurish 14-minute trailer did lead to protests in many cities, but not in Benghazi the night of the attack.

On SEPTEMBER 8, the Libyan militia protecting the consulate cited numerous threats and called the security situation “frightening.” On SEPTEMBER 10, al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri called on Libyans to avenge the death of his Libyan deputy in a drone strike in Pakistan.

On SEPTEMBER 11, armed gunmen attacked and torched the Benghazi consulate. Eyewitness accounts, including live ones on the BBC, described dozen of members of the Islamist group Ansar al-Shariah, which has close ties to al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, entering the consulate armed with rocket-propelled grenades.

Nevertheless, President Obama’s Rose Garden remarks on SEPTEMBER 12 began by blaming the video: “We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. But there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence.” Note: “violence,” not “terrorism.” He concluded with a reference to terror—but in the context of recalling the 9/11 attacks of 2001, not the events in Benghazi.

On SEPTEMBER 13, White House spokesman Jay Carney said: “The protests we’re seeing around the region are in reaction to this movie.”

On SEPTEMBER 16, Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, went on the Sunday talk shows, calling the video the “proximate cause” of the murders.

On SEPTEMBER 20, Mr. Obama told Univision: “The natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video were used as an excuse by extremists.”

On SEPTEMBER 25 the president blamed the video several times in his address to the United Nations: “There is no video that justifies an attack on an embassy,” he said, adding, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

Then, on OCTOBER 9, the day before congressional hearings, the State Department finally admitted that the murders were by organized terrorists, not a crowd protesting a video. Officials said “nothing was out of the ordinary” outside the consulate before the attack.

A reporter asked what “led officials to believe for the first several days that this was prompted by protests against the video.” A State Department official replied: “That is a question you would have to ask others. That was not our conclusion.”

So there were warnings about the situation in Benghazi for months before the attack, and intelligence officers suspected organized terrorists right away and knew for certain well before the Obama speech to the U.N.

Why did the White House keep pointing to the video instead of terrorists? Recall the great lengths to which the administration went to blame the video. The White House brushed aside the First Amendment by asking YouTube to consider censoring the video. The Egyptian-born Coptic Christian who made the video was arrested in California, in handcuffs, supposedly for violating terms of his parole. The State Department created an advertisement apologizing for the video and bought airtime in Pakistan to run it.

Mr. Obama recently acknowledged the resurgence of Islamist terrorists in Libya and elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East, at least by omission. His standard stump speech had long used the phrase “and today, al Qaeda is on the run.” This phrase was deleted last week in a speech he gave in Iowa.

But Silicon Valley has noticed that it got blamed and not the terrorists. “If you were paying attention last month,” an article on the technology website CNET said last week, “you might remember alarming headlines reporting an anti-Islam YouTube video ‘Sparks Violence in Libya,’ is ‘Inciting Violence’ and caused ‘U.S. Embassy Workers’ Deaths.’ One problem: Those reports were untrue.”

The Internet may be a powerful medium, but it isn’t an all-purpose scapegoat. Islamists remain a present danger. YouTube videos don’t kill people. Terrorists kill people.

Islamic terrorists, Mr. President, Islamic terrorists!

Looking to compound America’s confusion, Team Tick Tock continues to release new “intelligence” assessments….

Latest Intel Disclosures on Libya a Planned ‘Defense’ of Administration?

 

….deliberately designed to dissimulate and deflect attention from The Obamao’s most blatant lie since January 20, 2009….when he promised to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Meanwhile, this video forwarded by G. Trevor, Lord High King of All Vietors demonstrates The Dear Misleader’s place in the pantheon of Memorable Moments in Oval Office Oration:

And since we’re on the subject of playing politics, the WSJ addresses rumors of one possible October Surprise:

The Iran Talks Gambit

Someone seems to be playing politics with national security.

 

‘This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.” That’s what President Obama was overheard telling then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in March on an open microphone when he thought he was speaking privately. The exchange is worth recalling with the weekend story that the White House has agreed “in principle” to a bilateral meeting with Iran on its nuclear weapons program—after the election.

A White House spokesman immediately denied the New York Times report “that the United States and Iran have agreed to one-on-one talks or any meeting after the American elections.” But he added that “we continue to work” with other nations “on a diplomatic solution and have said from the outset that we would be prepared to meet bilaterally.”

We’ll go with the New York Times on this one. Someone senior clearly was bragging about the one-on-one deal, and probably because the source or sources thought it would help Mr. Obama. The timing also is suspicious coming before Monday’s foreign-policy debate, and while the White House is on defense about its security failures in Benghazi. The Times’s dispatch treated the news as a diplomatic breakthrough that could make Mr. Obama look like a peacemaker and put Mitt Romney on the spot.

As with so much else about Mr. Obama’s second-term agenda, the question is why he won’t elaborate before November 6. On taxes and spending, Mr. Obama doesn’t want to say because he knows more of the same economic policies aren’t popular.

One of the few people with less foreign policy expertise than the entire Obama Administration

As for foreign policy, he’s going to be under increasing pressure from around the world to intervene in Syria as that country’s rebellion threatens to become a regional war. A top Lebanese security official, a Sunni who supported the Syrian rebels, was assassinated by a bomb on Friday. Turkey has stopped Syrian flights from crossing into its airspace, and the two countries are engaged in cross-border shelling. Taking action on Syria before the election would interfere with Mr. Obama’s political narrative that “the tide of war is receding,” but after Election Day he’ll have more “flexibility.”

Regarding Iran, Mr. Obama has offered to hold direct talks with Iran for four years to no avail. It’s hard to believe that Ayatollah Khamenei has had a sudden change of heart. Most likely, the bow to diplomacy is another attempt to buy more time so Iran can get still-closer to having a bomb. Iran has already bought four years on Mr. Obama’s watch, but Israel is increasingly impatient as evidence builds that Iran may get a bomb next year. Iran may feel now is the time to play the direct talks with America card and keep Mr. Obama on a string.

The Iran leak also underscores how some people in this Administration have been willing to exploit national security for political purposes. The self-serving leaks to the media have been legion and sometimes damaging, notably after the killing of Osama bin Laden.

The blow-by-blow accounts of that raid were so extensive that Robert Gates, who was Defense Secretary at the time, went on the record to denounce them. “Frankly, a week ago Sunday, in the Situation Room, we all agreed that we would not release any operational details from the effort to take out bin Laden,” Mr. Gates said, according to a Politico story at the time. “That all fell apart on Monday—the next day.”

Then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, added that “We are close to jeopardizing this precious capability that we have, and we can’t afford to do that.” (This coming from a man who, from extensive personal experience, is intimately familiar with jeopardizing U.S. defense capabilities.) Mr. Gates and his successor, Leon Panetta, both declined to participate in an NBC News special timed to the anniversary of the raid this May, but the White House was all over the piece.

Who knew “the most transparent Administration in history” meant their lies and deceptions would be so obvious?!?

Now, two weeks before the election, we get another leak designed to make the President look good but which may have unpredictable consequences in the real world. Iran’s foreign minister also denied the report of direct talks, but who knows what impact the leak will have on Iran’s internal politics or other regional players. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday he wasn’t aware of any U.S. plans for bilateral talks with Iran.

At last week’s debate, Mr. Obama got huffy and said he resented any implication by Mitt Romney that his Administration had played politics with national security with its misleading accounts of what happened in Benghazi. The real question is when has this Administration not tried to exploit national security for political advantage?

Yet as his polling numbers continue to fall faster than Sandra Fluke’s panties on a first date, this is the best response Team Tick-Tock has to offer:

To which we can only reply by saying….

As has been said many times before, if student test scores were directly related to education funding per pupil and/or student-teacher ratios, public schools in the Nation’s Capitol should….should, mind you….be leading the country.

This was in 2007; it’s only gotten worse since then!

Yet not only are they not close, they’re for all practical purposes dead last.  Which is why The First Marxists deemed it prudent to send Malia and Sasha to an exclusive private school (“security”, you know!), a privilege they adamantly refuse to offer ordinary middle and lower-class Americans.  You know….the people about who they supposedly care so much!

In other New of Note, as these next three headlines clearly indicate, all is not well in Obamaoland:

Obama Campaign Borrows $15M from Bank of America

 

Calif. official whose agency under-reported unemployment stats was Obama campaign donor

 

Free Pot Offered to Lure Residents to Vote

 

Dimocrats are, at least for once, consistent; they run their political campaigns the same way they run the country.

Next up, courtesy of the WaPo, Charles Krauthammer details what he believes to be….

The great gaffe

 

“And the suggestion that anybody in my team, whether the secretary of state, our U.N. ambassador, anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, governor, is offensive.”

— Barack Obama, second debate, Oct. 16

Fight night at Hofstra. The two boxers, confined within a ring of spectators — circling, feinting, taunting, staring each other down — come several times, by my reckoning, no more than one provocation away from actual fisticuffs, of the kind that on occasion so delightfully break out in the Taiwanese parliament. Think of it: the Secret Service storming the ring, pinning Mitt Romney to the canvas as Candy Crowley administers the 10 count.

The actual outcome was somewhat more pedestrian. President Obama gained a narrow victory on points, as borne out by several flash polls. The margin was small, paling in comparison to Romney’s 52-point victory in the first debate. At Hofstra, Obama emerged from his previous coma to score enough jabs to outweigh Romney’s haymaker, his dazzling takedown of the Obama record when answering a disappointed 2008 Obama voter.

That one answer might account for the fact that, in two early flash polls, Romney beat Obama on the economy by 18 points in one poll, 31 in the other. That being the overriding issue, the debate is likely to have minimal effect on the dynamics of the race.

The one thing Obama’s performance did do is re-energize his demoralized base — the media, in particular. But at a price.

The rub for Obama comes, ironically enough, out of Romney’s biggest flub in the debate, the Libya question. That flub kept Romney from winning the evening outright. But Obama’s answer has left him a hostage to fortune. Missed by Romney, missed by the audience, missed by most of the commentariat, it was the biggest gaffe of the entire debate cycle: Substituting unctuousness for argument, Obama declared himself offended by the suggestion that anyone in his administration, including the U.N. ambassador, would “mislead” the country on Libya.

This bluster — unchallenged by Romney — helped Obama slither out of the Libya question unscathed. Unfortunately for Obama, there is one more debate — next week, entirely on foreign policy. The burning issue will be Libya and the scandalous parade of fictions told by this administration to explain away the debacle.

No one misled? His U.N. ambassador went on not one but five morning shows to spin a confection that the sacking of the consulate and the murder of four Americans came from a video-motivated demonstration turned ugly: “People gathered outside the embassy and then it grew very violent and those with extremist ties joined the fray and came with heavy weapons.”

But there was no gathering. There were no people. There was no fray. It was totally quiet outside the facility until terrorists stormed the compound and killed our ambassador and three others.

The video? A complete irrelevance. It was a coordinated, sophisticated terror attack, encouraged, if anything, by Osama bin Laden’s successor, giving orders from Pakistan to avenge the death of a Libyan jihadist.

Not wishing to admit that we had just been attacked by al-Qaeda affiliates, perhaps answering to the successor of a man on whose grave Obama and the Democrats have been dancing for months, the administration relentlessly advanced the mob/video tale to distract from the truth.

And it wasn’t just his minions who misled the nation. A week after the attack, the president himself, asked by David Letterman about the ambassador’s murder, said it started with a video. False again.

Romney will be ready Monday.

Here’s the theme Mitt needs to hit….again, and again, and again:

Besides Benghazi, perhaps even including it, access to energy is one of the two most important foreign policy issues facing America.  Were we truly self-sufficient in oil and natural gas (we already have enough coal to last several centuries, and with fracking and other cutting edge fossil fuel extraction methods, possess oil and gas supplies of similar duration), indeed a net exporter of same, America’s foreign policy would undergo a transformation not seen since the cruise of the Great White Fleet.

OPEC would be hobbled, the Arab world rendered impotent and, most importantly, America’s economy invigorated by a steady source of efficient, inexpensive energy.

All that’s standing in the way is….

Romney needs to hammer this home like its the last nail in The Obamao’s coffin….which we hope and pray it is.

Meanwhile, Media Matters again demonstrates its detachment from anything remotely resembling reality:

Contrary To Right-Wing Media Claims, Report Confirms Anti-Islam Video Was Catalyst For Libya Attack

 

Media outlets have continued to suggest that the Obama administration lied when it said that an anti-Islam video served as a catalyst for the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. In fact, The New York Times reports that the attackers said they were motivated by the video.

Well, not exactly the attackers….but people who knew the attackers; actually, people who knew someone who knew the attackers.  But they swore that’s what the attackers said!

Then there’s this bit of wishful thinking from Jeff Jacoby:

Can a Conscientious Liberal Back Obama?

 

http://townhall.com/columnists/jeffjacoby/2012/10/21/can_a_conscientious_liberal_back_obama

“Conscientious Liberal”; talk about an oxymoron!  Their hopelessly misguided policies have, since the early ’70s, caused the deaths of tens of millions innocents, both at home and abroad; and Jacoby thinks another vote for The Dear Misleader will cause them to lose any sleep?

Speaking of delusions, here’s today’s “MSM Bias….WHAT Bias?!?” segment, courtesy of MSDNC‘s Alex Wagner and Media Research Center‘s Dan Gainor:

MSNBC host: Obama answering to ‘higher calling’ by running again, Romney just moving on to ‘next thing’

 

Political junkies are still laughing at little-known, little-watched MSNBC host Alex Wagner’s Oct. 17 appearance talking with comedian Conan O’Brien. In Wagner’s mind (Do MSNBC hosts actually have those?), Obama isn’t a typical politician. He’s running for office as a “higher calling.”

Romney, oft-reviled by nearly every drone taking an MSDNC paycheck, is just a guy following in his daddy’s footsteps doing “the next thing he should be doing with his life.”

News junkies were baffled by her conclusion. By “higher calling,” did she mean the Democratic attacks on Romney’s faith, the class warfare or the race-baiting? Or was she revering the president on the level of Newsweek (remember them?) Editor Evan Thomas, who once said Obama was “sort of God?”

Most likely, even Wagner had no idea. Pretty much every sentence most MSNBCers spew is just a rationalization for Obama’s tingly greatness or Romney’s inherent evil.

Wagner, to those who don’t watch her (and we’re talking about roughly 307.7 million of the 308 million people in this country, has a laughably predictable liberal resume. She was Cultural Correspondent or as Elle described her “Minister of Culture” (Wow, that sounds Soviet, doesn’t it?) for the Soros-funded Center for American Progress. She has also been a writer for Huffington Post and ran the advocacy group Not On Our Watch, which was founded by liberal Hollywood actors George Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt and Don Cheadle.

Perhaps if Obama has some added free time after November, Wagner can help him toward the ultimate “higher calling” — a job as an MSNBC host.

We’ll be the first to admit most if not all politicians are possessed of over-sized egos.  But Alex Wagner demonstrates an inherent inability to distinguish narcissistic self-absorption from relative selflessness.

Which brings us to today’s Money Quote, courtesy of what is in reality Planned Infanticide:

“In short, Planned Parenthood helps women nationwide get access to mammograms, as part of the range of health care Planned Parenthood health centers provide to nearly three million people a year. Planned Parenthood doctors and nurses do this like any other primary care provider or ob-gyn does,” it admits.“Women rely on Planned Parenthood for referrals,” the abortion business admits. “Planned Parenthood doctors and nurses refer patients to other facilities for mammograms.”

Which we guess makes the three benighted bimbettes above worthy of either four pinocchios….

….or its Team Tick-Tock equivalent….

….two douchebags!

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, in another titillating tale ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter….

Two off-duty Florida officers fatally shoot armed, naked woman

 

Two off-duty Florida law-enforcement officers fatally shot an armed, naked woman who confronted them at a party Saturday, authorities said.

Pay attention America; you should have the same feeling about the Emperor….

….with the new clothes.

Magoo