So I’ve been spending most of my time recently on a political forum which, while one could not quite call it a “conservative” message board, is certainly a lot more full of crazy than this one. Liberals are in a minority, and those who are present are mostly not really that smart or informed. And everyone, everyone is up in arms about the cover-up by the Obama campaign. Like, every other thread in the current events section is about how Obama lied about the intel, and how the administration has been pushing a lie… So I figured, for the sake of balance, I should really ask what many of the more enlightened liberal posters (I would ask the liberals over there, but I’m probably the smartest liberal poster there, which is an incredibly bad sign) here on SDMB: what’s your take on the issue? Is this some big cover-up? Did the Obama administration even really blame it on “The Innocence of Muslims”? I see it as quite a problematic sign for Obama, even though it doesn’t, as some conservatives seem quite ready to assert, erase all the good that Obama’s foreign policy has done, let alone his policies overall. But what about you guys?
It’s just “4 bumps in the road”. Obama has released several versions of his actions-none of them seem to jibe with the facts. But bear in mind , there are a lot of people involved-its hard to keep a story straight.
I don’t think it exists. It is literally a bunch of partisans being outraged over nothing at all.
The administration didn’t have all the info when it first happened and they thought it was related to the video. That’s not a -gate, it’s muddy intelligence.
Look at Romney’s pratfall during the second debate. He thought “not calling it terror” was some big gotcha. Aside from the fact that he’s wrong, think about how utterly stupid and vapid you’d have to be to get outraged over the president using or not using the word “terrorism”.
This is an example of what I was talking about. Ralph has no idea what he’s angry about, so he takes the “bumps in the road” comment out of context. He then points to the story changing as intelligence came in as something sinister.
It’s nonsense. And no one who isn’t an utter partisan is seething over this non-issue. In the real world people don’t have true knowledge pumped to them from on high. Sometimes people make mistakes.
The right wing is okay with* going to war* based on bad intelligence, but fuck if you make a statement that needs to be revised because of it. :rolleyes:
I may not be exactly a liberal but I do have an opinion. The administration probably screwed up the announcement and the poor Republicans are trying to make hay out of it because that is all they have to work with. Obama, or his speech writer, may have even taken the route that was best politically and I would say shame on them for that. But otherwise it’s a tempest in a teapot. Isn’t there anything else the Romneyites want to talk about?
Every time I hear the right wing outrage they are claiming an American embassy was attacked. That small mistake (or is it a lie?) makes me wonder what other mistakes (lies?) are going on. Maybe Obama lied, I don’t know, but his political opponents are obviously lying in their efforts to out him. Cripes, I grew up in the Reagan years. Leaks and lies from the White House were so normal then I wonder that anyone even cares anymore.
I’m a liberal Obama supporter, and I think my thoughts are best expressed by my OP in this thread. If there was a coverup, what were they covering up? What supposed self-serving motivation could possibly have been at work?
Occam’s razor tells me that to the extent that anything happened at all, it was just minor miscommunication.
Four people died. Everyone agrees on that, and knew it from the start. What possible motive would there be to slightly obfuscate the manner of that death?
The opinion of anyone who has come to a conclusion on this before we get all the facts and see what happens in a followup isn’t really worth much.
I admit I haven’t followed all the ins and outs of what was announced and disclosed at one time, but the concerns are basically this: could the attack have been foreseen because of the volatility in the area and thus prevented? Were requests for additional security at the consulate ignored and could they have made a difference? And lastly, has the administration been forthcoming about what happened? The response to the attack and descriptions afterward were certainly confused, but based on what I have read, I don’t see intent to deceive or mislead. Which doesn’t address the issue of whether or not this could have been stopped because the situation in the city was clearly getting worse, but that may take more time to figure out.
I have to admit I haven’t been following it all that closely, but I see it as “that thing my token Republican grad school classmate is always banging on about on Facebook, along with Solyndra, Obama’s college transcripts, and something called ‘Fast and Furious’.” IOW, there have been so many manufactured scandals at this point that I tend to tune them all out. (Ironically, if Obama ever DOES turn out to be guilty of genuine misconduct, the news will probably have a hard time gaining traction for reasons expounded by Aesop 2,500 years ago).
If it had happened in a year not divisible by 4, there would be no big stink. We have limited capability of protecting embassies and consulates, particularly those in fledgling nations. I was far more offended by Romney dancing on the warm bodies trying to politicize it than I was with the somewhat less than clear explanations that came from the administration.
While the deaths of four Americans is obviously a tragic outcome, there’s just not enough evidence there to see how the Obama administration could have plausibly done something different to prevent it. Maybe their will be some in coming months, but when that occurs it should be tailored to solving a problem (and, yes, assessing blame if there’s a particularly egregious faliure).
The speed and initial predictability of the Republican response, coupled with their ever-evolving criticism of it as new facts are uncovered, exposes their political motives quite clearly. And these motives are especially galling and hypocritical given the lack of similar criticism from Democrats in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and their holier-than-thou outrage about going after a president “in a time of war” when real questions about the Bush administraion started to surface. That, to me, is the real scandal.
My opinion is: I don’t understand what people are upset about. It seems to me people are upset because Obama didn’t say it was a terrorist attack for a while.
My thoughts: Who cares? As long as they were dealing with it internally, I couldn’t care less what was said to us. I don’t see why it matters.
I think about a lot of these things like an avalanche of ping pong balls (Captain Kangaroo for the older members of the board). On some of those ping pong balls are clues but on the vast majority there is non-sense or wrong information. It is easy after the fact to find the ping pong balls that tell the story. It is another issue to identify the relevent clues when the balls are falling.
I felt that the Bush administration took some unfair criticism for 9/11 because of this and think that the same thing is happening with the Obama adminstration on this one. NASA with the space shuttle disasters are other examples of this.
If someone sent an e-mail saying it was terrorism immediately it is irrelevent without knowing how many e-mails with conflicting info were sent.
As an embarrassingly lame attempt by the right wing to pretend to be outraged by something, but without ever articulating what they’re outraged about.
I think Romney really fucked up when he made his accusations before the bodies were cold. And he knows he fucked up.
The “scandal” is simply damage control by the Romney team, that seems to have gained some traction with some of the conspiracy believing partisan rightists.
They’ve been successful, in that few are now talking about Romney’s original fuck-up.
The Pubbies didn’t show any outrage over one of Dick Cheney’s henchmen outing CIA operative Valerie Plame, an act which was entirely politically motivated, unethical, and treasonous. They’re counting on the fact that their target audience won’t remember, and/or won’t care.
Yes, it is. CNN reports that a message claiming a terrorist group had taken responsibility for the attack appears to have been accurate.
Can I ask which one? I’ve been looking for a conservative moderated message board worth reading.
Sorry. They knew about it and deliberately lied to the American public. Benghazigate is probably a more accurate term than intended. This has the potential to be Obama’s Watergate.
http://news.yahoo.com/white-house-told-militant-claim-two-hours-libya-010758099.html
It’s a bunch of hot air. There’s always fog of war when something like this happens, especially when it’s far away, at night, in an area where your resources on the ground are limited. There’s a lot of information coming in (some of which, in spite of idiots like Darrell Issa, is classified), and it takes a long time to sort through it all and figure out what is and isn’t accurate.
In my experience, a lot of the people on the right either seem to believe that the White House should have known every single detail in “real time”, or that Obama should have been able to drop a company of Navy SEALs into Benghazi within half an hour and save the day. This entire “coverup/conspiracy/whatever” business is a fantasy concocted to find something, anything to blame on Obama.