I can see where Glenn Kessler is coming from in his fact-checker column. At least when it comes to the President - who prefers misdirection to Governor Romney's favored tactic of repeated, overt, and incoherent lying - Mr. Kessler has displayed a tendency to go after not the facts, but the emotions they suggest. I am not a regular Mr. Kessler watcher, but let's say for a moment that that is not inherently indicative of bias - that Romney almost never misdirects as opposed to lying, so Kessler can't possibly mirror his treatment of Obama's misdirection.
Some readers may think we are dancing on the head of pin here. The Fact Checker spent nine years as diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post, and such nuances of phrasing are often very important. A president does not simply utter virtually the same phrase three times in two days about a major international incident without careful thought about the implications of each word.
The White House understands this. Our timeline noted that only after Matt Olsen went to Capitol Hill on Sept. 19 and called it a terrorist act did White House spokesman Jay Carney on Sept. 20 tell reporters that it was “self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack.”
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As we have previously documented, for at least two weeks Obama in particular did not want to utter the “T” word. His speech to the U.N. General Assembly made repeated references to a vile video that the administration initially suggested was behind the attacks. A day later, he still shied away from calling it an act of terrorism.
I can see where Mr. Kessler is coming from. President Obama did use a term that implied it was an act of terror, but which gave him plausible deniability if the facts did not come out to support that. This is also where Mr. Kessler drops the ball as a reporter, in my view. It'd be one thing if he relied purely on mechanistic legalese, but he attempts to go after intent regularly. So here's a question for him: Why anyone should care?
President Obama's Rose Garden speech made it clear that he was keenly interested in finding and punishing those responsible for the violence at Benghazi, and that the United States would not tolerate such behavior. The fact that Mr. Obama has to play shuttlecock over whether or not it was specifically an act of terror is a distraction by the Romney campaign intended to draw away from the President's firm disapproval. Is the verbiage so important, when it comes to deterring those who are looking at the US from the outside, scheming about how to weaken it?
No. It's a soundbite game. And if he's really interested in diplomatic nuance, I think Mr. Kessler should be pointing that out as well.