Tag Archives: morality

What Did He Know

Posted on by
Reply

…and when did he know it?

Recall that for weeks after the terrorist attack on our Libyan consulate in Benghazi Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama and his staff and surrogates insisted that the attack was the result of mob action in response to a video.  Recall further that in the second Presidential debate Obama claimed that he’d called it a terrorist attack the day after in a Rose Garden speech.  Pay no attention to the folks behind the door making those later claims of reaction-to-a-video after Obama’s claimed Rose Garden characterization.

Fox News‘ Chad Pegram has obtained a slew of emails sent in near real-time as the attack was in progress and then winding down, and Fox News has published three of them (they also can be viewed here).

They are presented here.

and

and

These seem clear enough; however, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton now is busily denying their significance.

Posting something on Facebook is not in and of itself evidence.  And I think it just underscores how fluid the reporting was at the time and continued for some time to be.

See no evil, hear no evil….

Maybe They Should Just Stick to the Subject

Posted on by
Reply

It has seemed to me, in the present campaign season, that there is considerable indiscipline in candidates’ political speech.  We might expect this out of citizen representatives, for whom public office is an additional duty and so are not schooled in words.  However, for those for whom politics is an avocation, and so words are their stock in trade, this is less understandable and not at all acceptable.  Some examples will illustrate.

Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said, on the subject of abortion by a woman made pregnant by a rape,

I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen [, and so I oppose abortion in such a circumstance].

That Democrats have chosen to misinterpret Mourdock as saying that God intended the rape itself is beside the point.

Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin made much the same mistake:

From what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare.  If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.  But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.

Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate Joe Biden is well known for his speaking mistakes, one of the most recent of which is his claim to a predominantly black audience that Republicans want to “put y’all back in chains.”

Then there’s Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s post-first debate loss claim that Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney won by lying and Obama’s continued steady drumbeat that Romney still is lying.

But these remarks have, in fact, jeopardized these men’s (re)election chances through their blatant outlandishness.  The carelessness of this speech, by men who know better, goes beyond that, though; it denies us Americans of our right to know what’s truly in the minds of these men who claim to want to represent us.

Mourdock and Akins, for instance, would have been better served to leave aside the extraneous verbiage, apparently added solely for the purpose of being…cute.  As The Washington Post put it,

[They] could not, of course, walk away from [their] deeply held view that abortion shouldn’t be lawful even in cases of rape.  But [they] didn’t need to.  [They] just needed to stop [their] theology lesson with the proposition that life is a gift from God.

Biden didn’t need to clown around with serious subjects.  It would have been sufficient, in the example, for instance, to argue that Republican preference for less regulation would result in greater loss of individual freedom in dealings with Wall Street.

Obama’s drumbeat of “he lies” as his response to anyone who disagrees with him simply destroys the credibility of his own position through his evident reluctance to argue for that.

Indeed, these men’s ad hominem remarks, whether intended to be funny or serious, are foolish, and self-demeaning.  As Charles Krauthammer said recently with his cynical tongue in his cheek, “Always tell the truth; it’s easier to memorize.”

Practically, stick to the subject.  There are fewer opportunities for shooting yourself in the foot when you stay with what you know.

Weasel Words

Posted on by
Reply

Or breathtaking incompetence.

Fox News is reporting that the Obama administration is changing, again, its story about what happened to our Libyan consulate in Benghazi.   Now they’re reverting to insisting that the terrorist attack was a response to, and spread of, the Cairo riots at our Egyptian embassy and the burning of our American flag flying above it.  These are riots which Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s minions also are laying off to a YouTube video.

Now the White House is saying that the video sparked the planned, organized, coordinated, three-pronged assault on our consulate.

All the while acknowledging, given the evidence that’s been released since that attack, that

there was no actual protest in Benghazi at the time of the attack and that “extremist” elements were likely involved.

So now Obama’s folks are trying to manufacture an amalgamation of, on the one hand, the…flawed…account our UN Ambassador Susan Rice gave on five Sunday talk shows and which Obama frequently repeated through his Press  Secretary Jay Carney at his noon press conferences that the attack was a “spontaneous” response to a video and, on the other hand,  real-time and within-24-hours reports, Senate testimony by National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew G Olsen in mid-Sep, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s later claim that it was a coordinated terror attack.

Now it’s…what…an organized and fairly complex terrorist attack ginned up in response to a video and “rioting” elsewhere?

The intelligence official who spoke to Fox News about this on condition of anonymity (because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly (which raises its own questions about his integrity and the reliability of his claims)) said that that everything is subject to change.

You bet.

It Doesn’t Get Any Clearer Than This

Posted on by
Reply

Ustad Ahmad Farooq, al Qaeda’s spokesman for Pakistan, has issued a statement, addressed to his “beloved Pakistani brothers and sisters.”  That statement says, in part,

Nobody spoke up for thousands of such Malalas who became victims of military operations, and nobody protested for them on the roads.  But these circles made so much noise when we targeted this girl who made of fun of jihad, the veil and other Islamic values on behest of the British Broadcasting Corporation. … I may ask why? Why is Malala’s blood more important than those killed by the army?  The attack on Malala has been termed a national tragedy, but no one pays any attention when…the army targets gems of the Ummah who come to Khorasan to wage jihad from Arab lands and other places of world.  Why these double standards?

I’ll ignore the…inaccuracy…of the BBC’s role in Malala Yousufzai’s push for educating herself and educating other girls, and women, generally.

Threat Matrix (the above link) also cites SITE Intelligence Group‘s translation of Farooq’s statement as including Farooq’s “puzzlement” over why “these circles” ignore women who die due to poverty and those women (and children) killed during military operations.

In civilized nations, though (and here I include Pakistan), the people and their governments work hard to alleviate that poverty so that all—women, children, men—can lead safer, more confortable lives.  In civilized nations, the people, their military, and their governments work very hard to minimize deaths from collateral damage, as well as work very hard to minimize collateral damage to real estate and other facilities when battles are fought.  They mourn the deaths, they hold accountable those responsible for the collateral damage and deaths that could have been avoided with more careful targeting.

These are accidental, and they are generally within our power to minimize, if not to avoid altogether.  They are not the result of deliberate acts.

But al Qaeda (in Pakistan, and everywhere else) insists, through Farooq, that the deliberate murder of a particular child, on the one hand, is of a piece with these accidents and conditions that civilized peoples work tirelessly to alleviate, and on the other hand is entirely justifiable as a deliberate act.  Al Qaeda insists, through Farooq, that those who “come to Khorasan to wage jihad”—that is who go to Khorasan for training in the techniques of murdering the Mulalas and any other innocents they can reach, for training in the mass murder of Americans, Spanish, British, Pakistanis, Afghanis, of anyone—are not legitimate targets: we are not to defend ourselves.

Can any civilized person have any doubt left that al Qaeda—that terrorist gangs everywhere—must be destroyed?

Sometimes

Posted on by
Reply

It’s important to note that the last two Americans to die in the terrorist attack on our Benghazi consulate weren’t killed until several hours after the attack started.  Gary Bernsten, retired CIA officer, had this on our real-time response to the attack (i.e., while our State Department officials were listening to the attack-in-progress*) and this administration’s decision to take no meaningful response during the several hours it was going in:

You find a way to make this happen.  There isn’t a plan for every single engagement.  Sometimes you have to be able to make adjustments.  They made zero adjustments; they just stood and they watched, and our people died.

It’s also sometimes necessary to act entirely ad hoc.  But it takes a measure of courage and a willingness to run risks and a willingness to step into the unknown to do these things.

 

*This is from the State Department brief on 9 Oct:

I neglected to mention from the top that that agent from the top of this incident, or the very beginning of this incident, has been on the phone. He had called the quick reaction security team, he had called the Libyan authorities, he had called the Embassy in Tripoli, and he had called Washington. He had them all going to ask for help. And he remained in the TOC.

And from the Chicago Sun-Times:

We now know that the State Department had real-time communications with Benghazi during the attack….