It’s nice that senior Romney advisers are “chortling with glee” that the Obama administration and the State Department lost four Americans in Benghazi. I guess they have no idea how quickly and badly they will be slapped down if they go too far into trying to politicize their deaths. Take any one of those men’s widows and/or children and cut a 30-second ad of them scolding Romney for trying to become president on the back of their husband and father, and Team Mitt will be reduced to a smoldering pile of rubble.
Consider what they are trying to do. They are trying to make the argument that the man who liberated Libya from decades of tyranny should be voted out of office because of an intelligence failure that caused the deaths of four men. You might as well have run against the president who oversaw D-Day because of the intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor.
So, the Republicans think they can make the president look weak on terrorism because the administration had some scraps of intelligence that weren’t acted on in a timely manner, even after the president has killed Usama bin-Laden and countless of his lieutenants. And they are “jubilant” that they think they can exploit this tragedy for their advantage and turn Barack Obama into a latter-day Jimmy Carter.
They will have the taste slapped out of their mouths. They will get hit so hard they’ll wind up at next Tuesday. If these fools think they’ve found the magic trick that will make Romney president, they are about to get themselves massacred.
Off this topic (but still under the “Stupid Republicans” umbrella), it looks like some weight is being thrown around in Arizona.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/10/boom-dscc-going-up-in-arizona-137179.html
There’s also the Mother Jones tape with “if such an opportunity arises I will take advantage of it” or whatever the exact quote was. Treason is a good word
Sounds like a job for Joe Biden. Have him shoot the warning shot across their bow in some public remarks.
No. Don’t you remember? He should be voted out of office for invading Libya absent a Congressional declaration of war in the first place.
Feh. Some ‘progressive’.
That was pretty cheesy.
(Looks at Mitt Romney).
Yeah. Well, anyway…
What happened to the video of the cop punching the woman? I clicked to comment and the whole story disappeared.
I think Steve and I were posting and editing and reposting all at the same time. Sorry for the confusion.
Yeah, it came back. I thought maybe the internet cops were at work.
Like that was so much of an issue with George W. Bush, whose dismissal of a much stronger warning led to 9/11. But to the GOP, W kept us safe.
I don’t think the public will buy this Hail Mary regardless of how the Obama campaign responds.
And it is against a substantially different background than Jimmy Carter’s so-called “Rose Garden Strategy”. Carter was not engaged in the campaign but was trying to negotiate the release of hostages. The Reagan campaign violated the Logan Act and entered into a prospective arms-for-hostages agreement that required Iran to delay the release of the hostages so that Reagan could win.
Forget country before party, they put winning ahead of the lives of all those hostages.
My blood still boils about this, all these decades later. It was so wrong, on every level.
Yup. And it seems to have been whitewashed from history somehow. Mention this stuff in polite company and they look at you like you’re a conspiracy nut. It happened and it was well documented…
Also infuriating was that he prohibited the CDC and the NIH from even investigating the mysterious “Gay Cancer” later named AIDS/HIV. It was “God’s will” for him to force public health agencies to let it kill thousands upon thousands of people. The day he finally kicked the bucket I mentioned this as the reason I hated him (in mostly gay company) and many (the younger people) didn’t believe me until an older couple backed me up. They literally thought I was nuts.
The power of Republican PR…
The whitewashing is almost unbelievable.
I remember the night he was re-elected. I was absolutely certain that people couldn’t possibly be stupid enough to elect him again. I came home from a night out on the town, heard the news from my roommate, and sank to the floor, sobbing.
It was at that point that I permanently downgraded my opinion of the collective intelligence of the american people.
I’m confused. The night who was re-elected?
What I can see happening is that Romney will, during the debates, mention some fact that he could only know from one of his intelligence briefings. When Obama calls him on that, it is game, set, match.
“Doesn’t anyone here know how to play this game?” — C. Stengal, baseball maven and prescient political operative.
Recall those heady 444 days of “vengeance and mutual incomprehension”.
Note the operative use of the term 444 DAYS? The actual crises was bad enough. The killer, for Carter, was the ongoing nature of the crises. He waited until April to attempt a rescue. Said rescue was a failure. There is more to that story than was reported, but that is neither here nor there.
I feel cheated. Kind of like when Agnew was arrested. Damnit! The Vice Presidency is worth MORE than $25K, and these assholes are supposed to smart!
You’re probably missing the word “be” in that last clause, but I kinda like it the way it is.
Speaking of stupid Republicans, anyone have polls on this race?
Cantor gets his teeth punched in
Powell kicked some serious butt apparently. Hope his GOTV is as sharp as his elbows.
Heard his manager is the same guy who got Webb elected in ’06. So, maybe…
I haven’t seen any signs for either candidate really.
That debate sounds good. Gonna watch it now at C-Span online.
I don’t know much about this Wayne Powell guy but it sure is a joy to watch him kick that smarmy Eric Cantor’s ass so thoroughly in this debate. And Eric Cantor just continues on rattling off his bullshit as though no one noticed it.
Yes and no. As another commenter mentioned, this is peanuts next to the 9-11 intelligence failure – or even the more recent failure to heed the father’s warnings about the underwear bomber. And after Romney’s well-publicized, appalling initial reaction to the attacks (accusing Obama of “siding with the terrorists”), his credibility on this issue is nearly nil.
That said, there are legitimate questions about why the Obama administration continued for over a week to paint the Libya attack as part of the spontaneous anti-movie trailer protests unfolding at the same time, when there were clear reports even at the time of the attack that Benghazi was a completely different animal. It’s of a piece with serious questions under both Obama and Bush about the whitewashing for political purposes of critical initial reports of big military or terrorism stories – from Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman to the vaccine scam used to set up the bin Laden raid to the countless trumped-up arrests of hapless, harmless domestic “terrorists” and the constant lying about civilian deaths in Iraq and now Afghanistan. This seems to be a constant, bipartisan habit now.
In Obama’s case, the reason why is obvious: Libya, post-Qaddafi, is teetering on being ungovernable, and Obama’s team would rather not draw attention to that during the election.
That’s understandable, but it’s no excuse for spending a week lying about a well-planned terrorist attack. A rational opposition party would take Obama to the cleaners over it. Alas, Romney and the GOP are so far gone into their alternate universe that even when they’re right they mix in so many paranoid fantasies they think are just as true that they wind up discrediting everything they say.
Well, true, but for the purpose of the election Romney is grasping at straws. The Iran hostage situation was all Americans talked about for months. ABC’s Nightline began as a nightly show on the Iran hostage situation. It was THE topic of 1980 – well, the second was the Olympic boycott, which wasn’t very popular.
This issue simply won’t resonate at all except with the birther sect. Yes, 4 people were killed – but we’re completely numb to those kind of reports from strange foreign lands in the middle east after the last 10 years.
I think they just didn’t want to spout off before they had solid information.
After Bush, it’s tough to find fault with that.
also there were demonstrations outside all the US embassies in that part of the world at the same time evidently connection with the movie trailer
Exactly. The terrorists took account of that in hopes of winning support.
Sooooo, correct me I’m wrong here but, shouldn’t an October Surprise be an actual, you know, surprise? Cuz telegraphing what this surprise is going to be all over the Intertoobs seems, and this is just my opinion of course, to be kind of taking the element of, you know, SURPRISE out of it. But maybe I’m not seeing it from the Rethug perspective or something.
Maybe that WAS the surprise. It just fizzled.
I think a lot of things lin the Romney campaign have misfired like that. It’s almost as if his campaign had been planned ten years ago. A lot of the stuff he’s been pulling might have worked then.