It was a little much when President Barack Obama said that he was
"offended" by the suggestion that his administration would try to
deceive the public about what happened in Benghazi. What has this man
not deceived the public about?
Remember his pledge to cut the deficit in half in his first term in
office? This was followed by the first trillion-dollar deficit ever,
under any president of the United States — followed by trillion-dollar
deficits in every year of the Obama administration.
Remember his pledge to have a "transparent" government that would
post its legislative proposals on the Internet several days before
Congress was to vote on them, so that everybody would know what was
happening? This was followed by an Obamacare bill so huge and passed so
fast that even members of Congress did not have time to read it.
Remember his claims that previous administrations had arrogantly
interfered in the internal affairs of other nations — and then his
demands that Israel stop building settlements and give away land outside
its 1967 borders, as a precondition to peace talks with the
Palestinians, on whom there were no preconditions?
As for what happened in Libya, the Obama administration says that
there is an "investigation" under way. An "on-going investigation"
sounds so much better than "stonewalling" to get past Election Day. But
you can bet the rent money that this "investigation" will not be
completed before Election Day. And whatever the investigation says after
the election will be irrelevant.
The events unfolding in Benghazi on the tragic night of September
11 were being relayed to the State Department as the attacks were going
on, "in real time," as they say. So the idea that the Obama
administration now has to carry out a time-consuming "investigation" to
find out what those events were, when the information was immediately
available at the time, is a little much.
The full story of what happened in Libya, down to the last detail,
may never be known. But, as someone once said, you don't need to eat a
whole egg to know that it is rotten. And you don't need to know every
detail of the events before, during, and after the attacks to know that
the story put out by the Obama administration was a fraud.
The administration's initial story that what happened in Benghazi
began as a protest against an anti-Islamic video in America was a very
convenient theory. The most obvious alternative explanation would have
been devastating to Barack Obama's much-heralded attempts to mollify and
pacify Islamic nations in the Middle East.
To have helped overthrow pro-Western governments in Egypt and
Libya, only to bring anti-Western Islamic extremists to power would have
been revealed as a foreign policy disaster of the first magnitude. To
have been celebrating President Obama's supposedly heroic role in the
killing of Osama bin Laden, with the implication that al-Qaida was
crippled, would have been revealed as a farce.
Osama bin Laden was by no means the first man to plan a surprise
attack on America and later be killed. Japan's Admiral Yamamoto planned
the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War
II, and he was later tracked down and shot down in a plane that was
carrying him.
Nobody tried to depict President Franklin D. Roosevelt as some kind
of hero for having simply authorized the killing of Yamamoto. In that
case, the only hero who was publicized was the man who shot down the
plane that Yamamoto was in.
Yet the killing of Osama bin Laden has been depicted as some kind
of act of courage by President Obama. After bin Laden was located, why
would any president not give the go-ahead to get him?
That took no courage at all. It would have been far more dangerous
politically for Obama not to have given the go-ahead. Moreover, Obama
hedged his bets by authorizing the admiral in charge of the operation to
proceed only under various conditions.
This meant that success would be credited to Obama and failure
could be blamed on the admiral — who would join George W. Bush, Hillary
Clinton, and other scapegoats for Obama's failures.
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