As if we needed another fact-check to prove President Obama was accurate and Mitt Romney is a fool.
The article is titled "Clearing the Record" about Benghazi and definitively answers the question about who said what and when.
The dispute over how the Obama administration has characterized the lethal attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, last month boiled over once again in the debate on Tuesday night between President Obama and Mitt Romney. But questions about what happened in the attack, and disputes over who said what about it, have left many people confused. Here are some of the facts as they are now known:
The New York Times characterizes this contrived right-wing farce as a "dispute," but in fact, the reality is indisputable:
Mr. Obama applied the “terror” label to the attack in his first public statement on the events in Benghazi, delivered in the Rose Garden at the White House at 10:43 a.m. on Sept. 12, though the reference was indirect. “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for,” he said.
So Romney was flat-out wrong.
But there's more--he was doubly wrong. Because the next day (not two weeks later as Romney contended), President Obama said pretty much the exact same thing:
The next day, Sept. 13, in a campaign appearance in Las Vegas, he used similar language. “And we want to send a message all around the world — anybody who would do us harm: No act of terror will dim the light of the values that we proudly shine on the rest of the world, and no act of violence will shake the resolve of the United States of America,” he said.
There's that pesky "act of terror" language again.
Wait, we're not done yet!
Why, with these two obvious statements in the record, did Republicans keep pursuing this bogus charge? The New York Times doesn't know, but they do speculate:
In the vice-presidential debate, for instance, Representative Paul D. Ryan declared, “It took the president two weeks to acknowledge that this was a terrorist attack.” Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. did not directly contradict the charge.
So the fact that the Vice-President didn't contradict a blatant lie, one of multiple lies spewed out by the zombie-eyed granny starver during their debate, may have prompted the GOP to run with this. Because in the topsy-turvy world we live in, failure to immediately contradict a lie somehow lends it more credence. Now I understand why the Republican Party has gotten as far as it has in this country. As the GOP seemingly has an endless supply of lies at its disposal it's damn hard for the Democrats to keep up.
The Times floats another possible reason the GOP ran with this bogus lie: People in the Administration allowed themselves to forget about it!
The “act of terror” references attracted relatively little notice at the time, and later they appeared to have been forgotten even by some administration officials.
So remember, Democrats, never forget anything you say. Otherwise the Republicans
might lie about it. And that could cause "confusion."
The Times muses that some of the statements made by Administration officials may have misled the poor Republicans:
On Sept. 16, Ms. Rice said, “What this began as was a spontaneous, not a premeditated, response to what happened, transpired in Cairo,” where protesters angered by the video stormed the grounds of the American Embassy. Hedging her remarks by saying that her information was preliminary, Ms. Rice also said, “We believe that folks in Benghazi, a small number of people, came to the embassy to — or to the consulate, rather — to replicate the sort of challenge that was posed in Cairo.” That initial protest, she said, “seems to have been hijacked” by “extremists who came with heavier weapons.”
So let that be a lesson to you, folks. You should never attempt to inform the American public with
preliminary information. Your conclusions should be rock-solid before opening your mouth, even if that certainty takes...weeks or months. Meanwhile you should ignore the constant howling for information by the media and the Congress. Just tell them you're working on it and you'll get back to them. I'm sure they'll understand.
Now that we've got that straight, how long was it before the Administration called it a terror act again? Was it two weeks as suggested by Mr. Romney? Why no!
On Sept. 19, Matthew G. Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said about the killings in Benghazi during a Senate hearing, “Yes, they were killed in the course of a terrorist attack on our embassy.” The next day, asked about Mr. Olsen’s testimony, Mr. Carney declared, “It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack.”
That would not be two weeks. That would be seven days from the morning after the attacks. That is far different than two weeks. It's 50% less than two weeks. You would have to add another whole week to make that two weeks. And you would have to conveniently ignore that the President said it was a terror attack twice during the first two days after the attack occurred. But it's understandable you might have "forgotten about that."
So how could this remarkable amnesia on the part of the Republican Party and its standard bearer, Mitt Romney. have possibly happened? What could explain such a shocking lapse in memory?
Again, the Times engages in sheer speculation:
As the centerpiece of his national security record, Mr. Obama has highlighted his administration’s aggressive efforts against militants in Pakistan and Yemen, as well as the successful raid to kill Osama bin Laden.
Not only has the Administration been successful in killing Bin Laden. It's been successful in killing much of Al Quada's entire membership.
Republicans have seized on the Benghazi attack — which resulted in the first killing of an American ambassador in decades — to counter this Democratic line, suggesting that the administration has exaggerated its success against Al Qaeda and has pursued policies that have left the Middle East in chaos.
It appears that the very thought of a Democratic President succeeding in fighting terrorism where Republicans have universally failed is evidently too much for them to mentally handle, and it's caused a colossal breakdown of their sanity. Asking them to accept the dichotomy of a strong Democratic President goes against everything they've been told by Fox News and their own noise machine,and as a result they've become collectively unhinged. This is the only logical conclusion that can be reached. They've lost both their minds and their memories.
Or maybe....just maybe...they were lying!
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