Wait, I see it now, like through a glass darkly, like the pilot sees the mountain through the fog just before…
The Dems get an estimate from their ACORN and CASA operatives of how many illegal and bogus voters they are going to get to the polls. That’s the tricky part, because you want to get all the ones who actually speak English. Anyway, they hand the estimate to Nate, and he cooks his polls so that when the vote actually comes in, they match!
But Rasmussen, being the very embodiment of candor and straight talk, doesn’t get a copy, so they turn out to be “wrong”!
(Actually, that would be cool to believe, but I don’t, of course. The Democrats couldn’t shoplift a pack of gum from the 7-11. Not that I wish they would do something cynical and Republican, but I’d like to believe they could, if they so choose…)
Oh, yes. I’m the uninformed one who is trivializing things. Tell me again, who was the one who called Benghazi a “bump in the road”? As it is, please meander back through this thread and you’ll see it’s one side who provides facts after fact while the other side dismisses those sources, for no other reason than they don’t like them. But hey-- I can’t blame you.
On election day November 2000, I was 15. Couldn’t vote.
On election day November 2004, I was 19. Didn’t feel like voting.
And just for the hell of it, on election day November 2008, I was 23 and voted for Obama.
The simple fact is that Bush is gone and whatever he did or didn’t do has no bearing on what Obama does and doesn’t do. The fact that you can’t stop talking about the previous guy is proof enough that your current guy doesn’t have any leg to stand on. Anyway, next argument please.
Not really. The only time his name comes up is to deflect away from the current administration’s failure.
I direct you to posts #40 and #51, of which the substance of said posts went ignored (unsurprisingly). But that’s the way it goes around here.
Oh, and by the way, I’m sure that has something to do with the Boosh.
Neither of those posts refer to the matter of the CIA base so I am not sure why you are pointing me to them.
Here is the argument as it currently stands:
Your Side: The administration is not telling the truth about the attack. The most likely explanation of this is that it is a cover up for political purposes.
Their Side: Even if they’re not telling the truth, it turns out the place was a CIA base, so it would appear the unclear-to-false story that was given probably involves the protection of state secrets.
Your Side: _____________________
That’s a blank you have to fill in, unless you want to concede your original point isn’t persuasive.
Sorry, not a “base” but an outpost. Apparently there’s a CIA outpost in Benghazi. This makes it plausible, to my mind, that false stories about Benghazi are as likely due to diplomatic concerns as to political concerns.
Anyway, all that aside, even if it were all about political concerns, is that it? Is that the entire problem? If so, then that’s hardly a problem and I don’t understand what the point of the argument is supposed to be. So an administration lied (or selected evidence) based on political worries? YOU DON’T SAY?!
Is there something more to the problem? If not then I’m unimpressed. I wouldn’t blame Bush himself for telling me a false story about Bengazi in order to increase his chances of reelection. I wouldn’t even think it particularly harmful.
Well, of course it political! Everybody knows that the State Department is totally under the direct supervision of the President, helps him fill in his days, what with so little to do. And everybody in the State Department is fired when a new administration comes in, and replaced with party operatives! So, yeah, Obama is totally responsible.
Only thing I totally don’t understand is OMG’s “Boosh” schtick.
If the intelligence was pointing to protests, wouldn’t it be smart to go with that line until it changed? The CIA was telling them it was related to the ongoing protests. As more info came along, the position changed. It seems to me as if conservative outrage revolves around the attacks taking place, Romney’s original critique, then evolved to the cover up claim, which holds no water if there were any intelligence sources blaming protests, which there were.
One of the buildings at the consulate was a CIA post. The original reporting on the attack in the NYT mentioned about a dozen CIA people were evacuated along with the rest of the consulate staff. The administration asked them not to talk about CIA presence and the Times dropped it.
Then in Darrell Issa’s “emergency” hearing on the subject last Wednesday, the showed an aerial view of the photo and referred to the CIA building as the Annex. At that point, Chaffetz, (R-Utah) bounced up and objected because they were discussing classified info.
After some back and forth on the subject what is and is not classified, and who does and does not want to talk about it, (all of this on C-Span, of course) the State Department said there was a seven person strike force there, possibly still in place, who were not under the control of State (and they weren’t the FBI, as Issa confirmed later.) Instead, everyone referred to “The Other Government Agency” which has video of the attack but isn’t releasing it because they’re “investigating” it. And by Other Government Agency, of course, I do not mean the Tennessee Valley Authority.
After some more sniping, Issa shut the meeting down until the whole committee could get a briefing on the classified materials.
So that’s where things stand. I would assume someone from the “TVA” told them to be careful talking about this on television. From the republican’s point of view, they don’t need to do more. They can go on insinuating and “just asking questions” and talking about a cover-up and there’s nothing anyone in the administration can really do about it - because there is a cover-up: we’re covering up an active, classified, CIA mission.
That said, I am personally uncomfortable with the way the administration has been handling this. If they haven’t actually screwed this up, they need to start doing a better job of explaining themselves. The more momentum this gives to Romney, the more pissed I get.
You’re confusing Clinton and Reagan, who ran on the good conditions they’d set up over their entire first terms, with Obama, who has sought to merely delay bad news until just after the election.
The real deal, as said by Biden, who knows more about this issue than any of us, is that they didn’t know what happened the day of.
The intelligence community probably had a lot of conflicting info at the moment. So as they learned more the explanation changed.
But the people on the right, who live to be outraged, and who point at trivialities and shriek, hoping that others will join in have pointed and squeaked at this and are hoping that enough of the populace will be stupid enough to believe it is warranted.
Today on Meet the Press we learn that indeed, the request for more security funding was for the Embassy in Tripoli, not the Bengazi outpost. Moreover, the Repubs saw fit to cut the funding for diplomatic security abroad, so obviously requests for funding would be vetted very carefully if there’s no petty cash to cover it.
To wit, we’re getting transparency within two weeks of this tragedy. How long was it before the Bush administration copped to the events that lead up to 911? Or how about that domestic tragedy Katrina?
What the fuck people, tragedies are going to happen under any president’s watch. It’s HOW an administration reacts to the situation to rectify it that matters, not the Romney bullshit of running his mouth off without the facts.
It is: Medicare Advantage, Greece’s EU exit, WARN notices. THey also considered opening the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to get prices down, but I guess that would have been too obviously political. And now this. They had obviously hoped that they could keep a lid on this until the investigation was complete in December.
No, they knew the day after. Yet stuck to their Youtube story for over a week. As Jon Stewart said, “Do these guys talk to each other?”
Admiinstration talking point/excuse. Here’s why it doesn’t hold water:
There was not cut. There was less than the administration requested, but the administration requested $200 billion more than Congress was willing to approve across the entire budget. Diplomatic security funds actually went up, just not as much as the administration wanted.
Money wasn’t the issue. There are marines guarding ambassadors in safe places. Politics was the issue. At no point in the process did the State Dept plead lack of funds or personnel. It was a diplomatic decision to not provide extra security.
You know why this is a big deal? Because the administration’s dishonesty infests this whole thing. The talking point about the diplomatic security budget just further reinforces this. It’s an incredibly dishonest talking point designed to simply muddy the waters sufficiently to get them through the next month. If that doesn’t work, they’ll come up with a fourth or fifth big lie.
BTW, the one thing there should really be outrage about but there isn’t? Arresting the filmmaker on a trumped up charge of violating probation. He is being punished for exercising his 1st amendment rights and they just wanted to get him for something.
And again, an evolving story over two weeks as people get the Facts, something Romney has an aversion to. Why the fuck was the GOP jumping on this when they got it wrong AGAIN, the Request for funds wasn’t for Bengazi, it was for Tripoli
There is nothing new that wasn’t known 24 hours after the attack. And it doesn’t excuse either the arrest of the filmmaker or the lying about the budget.
Within 24 hours they knew it was terrorism.
It also doesn’t excuse the administration shooting first, aiming later.
Well, you got us on that one, if there is any group of people who are the very paragons of careful planning and consideration when putting together a galactic level clusterfuck, it would be the Republican Party. It took them…what?..months to assemble the disaster that soiled our honor and disgraced our flag. They didn’t just screw the pooch, they fucked that dog with a steam hammer!
You can’t accomplish something so wretched without careful planning, can’t improvise the massacre of a hundred thousand innocent people just on the fly. It takes planning, and logistics. We may never see anything like it again, certainly not from a wussy like Obama.* You think it might help any if he went and cleared some brush?
Oh, good! So everybody responsible has been properly scolded, have they? A sharp talking to, a stern rebuke? You think it might go on their permanent record? Are they cut dead while summering in the Hamptons, shunned while skiing in Aspen? Paul Wolfowitz, Dan Senor, John Bolton, they stand by the freeway entrance with signs that say “Will Lie For Food”?
Pretty rough. Not as bad as being dead, I’m thinking. Pretty sure about that one. And it doesn’t bother me all that much that people in other countries hate my flag. What bothers me is they have damned good reasons.