BO`s Benghazi BS and Cover Up Far Worse Than Watergate
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Mark Steyn draws valuable lessons about American's decline and impending collapse from the politicial leaders response to the Sandy and Benghazi crisis:
Published: Nov. 2, 2012 Updated: 5:20 p.m.
By MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist
In political terms, Hurricane Sandy and the Benghazi consulate debacle exemplify at home and abroad the fundamental unseriousness of the United States in the Obama era. In the days after Sandy hit, Barack Obama was generally agreed to have performed well. He had himself photographed in the White House Situation Room, nodding thoughtfully to bureaucrats ("John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; Tony Blinken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; David Agnew, Director for Intergovernmental Affairs") and Tweeted it to his 3.2 million followers. He appeared in New Jersey wearing a bomber jacket rather than a suit to demonstrate that when the going gets tough the tough get out a monogrammed Air Force One bomber jacket. He announced that he'd instructed his officials to answer all calls within 15 minutes because in America "we leave nobody behind." By doing all this, the president "shows" he "cares" – which is true in the sense that in Benghazi he was willing to leave the entire consulate staff behind, and nobody had their calls answered within seven hours, because presumably he didn't care. So John Brennan, the Counterterrorism guy, and Tony Blinken, the National Security honcho, briefed the president on the stiff breeze, but on Sept. 11, 2012, when a little counterterrorism was called for, nobody bothered calling the Counterterrorism Security Group, the senior U.S. counterterrorism bureaucracy.
President Barack Obama gestures while speaking to supporters at Austin Straubel International Airport in Green Bay, Wis.,Thursday, Nov. 1, 2012, before departing to Las Vegas
Meanwhile, FEMA rumbles on, the "emergency management agency" that manages emergencies, very expensively, rather than preventing them. Late on the night Sandy made landfall, I heard on the local news that my state's governor had asked the president to declare a federal emergency in every New Hampshire county so that federal funds could be "unlocked." A quarter-million people in the Granite State were out of power. It was reported that, beyond our borders, 8 million people in a dozen states were out of power.
But that's not an "emergency." No hurricane hit my county. Indeed, no hurricane hit New Hampshire. No hurricane hit "17 states," the number of states supposedly "affected" by Sandy at its peak. A hurricane hit a few coastal counties of New Jersey, New York and a couple of other states, and that's it. Everyone else had slightly windier-than-usual wind – and yet they were out of power for days. In a county entirely untouched by Sandy, my office manager had no electricity for a week. Not because of an "emergency" but because of a decrepit and vulnerable above-the-ground electrical distribution system that ought to be a national embarrassment to any developed society. A few weeks ago, I chanced to be in St. Pierre and Miquelon, a French colony of 6,000 people on a couple of treeless rocks in the North Atlantic. Every electric line is underground. Indeed, the droll demoiselle who leads tours of the islands makes a point of amusingly drawing American visitors' attention to this local feature.
If you're saying, "Whoa, that sounds expensive," well, our government is more expensive than any government in history – and we have nothing to show for it. Imagine if Obama's 2009 stimulus had been spent burying every electric pole on the Eastern Seaboard. Instead, just that one Obama bill spent a little shy of a trillion dollars, and no one can point to a single thing it built. "A big storm requires Big Government," pronounced The New York Times. But Washington is so big-hearted with Big Government it spends $188 million an hour that it doesn't have – 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including Thanksgiving, Christmas and Ramadan. And yet, mysteriously, multitrillion-dollar Big Government Obama-style can't do anything except sluice food stamps to the dependent class, lavish benefits and early retirement packages to the bureaucrats that service them, and so-called government "investment" to approved Obama cronies.
So you can have Big Government bigger (or, anyway, more expensive) than any government's ever been, and the lights still go out in 17 states – because your president spent 6 trillion bucks, and all the country got was a lousy Air Force One bomber jacket for him to wear while posing for a Twitpic answering the phone with his concerned expression.
Even in those few parts of the Northeast that can legitimately claim to have been clobbered by Sandy, Big Government made it worse. Last week, Nanny Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, rivaled his own personal best for worst mayoral performance since that snowstorm a couple of years back. This is a man who spends his days micromanaging the amount of soda New Yorkers are allowed to have in their beverage containers rather than, say, the amount of ocean New Yorkers are allowed to have in their subway system – just as, in the previous crisis, the municipal titan who can regulate the salt out of your cheeseburger proved utterly incapable of regulating any salt on to Sixth Avenue. Imagine if this preening buffoon had expended as much executive energy on flood protection for the electrical grid and transit system as he does on approved quantities of carbonated beverages. But that's leadership 21st-century style: When the going gets tough, the tough ban trans fats.
Back in Benghazi, the president who looks so cool in a bomber jacket declined to answer his beleaguered diplomats' calls for help – even though he had aircraft and Special Forces in the region. Too bad. He's all jacket and no bombers. This, too, is an example of America's uniquely profligate impotence. When something goes screwy at a ramshackle consulate halfway round the globe, very few governments have the technological capacity to watch it unfold in real time. Even fewer have deployable military assets only a couple of hours away. What is the point of unmanned drones, of military bases around the planet, of elite Special Forces trained to the peak of perfection if the president and the vast bloated federal bureaucracy cannot rouse themselves to action? What is the point of outspending Russia, Britain, France, China, Germany and every middle-rank military power combined if, when it matters, America cannot urge into the air one plane with a couple of dozen commandoes? In Iraq, al-Qaida is running training camps in the western desert. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are all but certain to return most of the country to its pre-9/11 glories. But in Washington the head of the world's biggest "counterterrorism" bureaucracy briefs the president on flood damage and downed trees.
I don't know whether Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan can fix things, but I do know that Barack Obama and Joe Biden won't even try – and that therefore a vote for Obama is a vote for the certainty of national collapse. Look at Lower Manhattan in the dark, and try to imagine what America might look like after the rest of the planet decides it no longer needs the dollar as global reserve currency. For four years, we have had a president who can spend everything but build nothing. Nothing but debt, dependency, and decay. As I said at the beginning, in different ways the response to Hurricane Sandy and Benghazi exemplify the fundamental unseriousness of the superpower at twilight. Whether or not to get serious is the choice facing the electorate Tuesday.
But let him keep the bomber jacket.
©MARK STEYN
- Kreskin ... It is duck soup to be a popular world leader among the masses in other people's countries - all you have to do is assure them that you won't actually be a leader and that they can do whatever the hell they like with no interference from you and that you will spend your foreign travel time bowing and scrapping to their leaders, apologizing for the supposed errors and imperfections of your own country and BSing about how great their country and religion is, and handing out lots of money from your country to theirs with no strings attached.
- But while all this will usually win you the Miss Congeniality polls and award it does nothing to protect or advance the real long term interests of your country or to make the world a safer and more peaceful and prosperous place and it tends to arose the ire and concern of one's friends and allies who dislike seeing a supposedly allied leader with a banana for a backbone and it also tends to arose the aggressiveness and militancy of one's enemies who use this appearance of weakness to destabilize the world and to build and test and eventually use their own military might for nefarious purposes.
- Certainly, among actual world leaders, Obama is more "popular" among the socialist dictators like Castro and Chavez and Mugabe and the Chinese and others, most of who have publicly endorsed him in this election, But among thinking world leaders who share common Western liberal values and similar political and economic systems and insititutions, not a one has come forward to endorse management trainee BO nor will they because he is "The Amateur" in world affairs and weak amateurs are dangerous, albeit unwittingly so.
- BTW - Can you actually cite any recent opinion polls to support your point? The last one I saw was several weeks ago by the Pew Institute and it showed that BO was starting to smell among even the ordinary people of the world and that the US was now actually LESS POPULAR among almost all Middle East countries than it had been during the time Bush was in office!
- That's something we would never hear from you, eh?
Published: Nov. 2, 2012 Updated: 5:20 p.m.
By MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist
In political terms, Hurricane Sandy and the Benghazi consulate debacle exemplify at home and abroad the fundamental unseriousness of the United States in the Obama era. In the days after Sandy hit, Barack Obama was generally agreed to have performed well. He had himself photographed in the White House Situation Room, nodding thoughtfully to bureaucrats ("John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; Tony Blinken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; David Agnew, Director for Intergovernmental Affairs") and Tweeted it to his 3.2 million followers. He appeared in New Jersey wearing a bomber jacket rather than a suit to demonstrate that when the going gets tough the tough get out a monogrammed Air Force One bomber jacket. He announced that he'd instructed his officials to answer all calls within 15 minutes because in America "we leave nobody behind." By doing all this, the president "shows" he "cares" – which is true in the sense that in Benghazi he was willing to leave the entire consulate staff behind, and nobody had their calls answered within seven hours, because presumably he didn't care. So John Brennan, the Counterterrorism guy, and Tony Blinken, the National Security honcho, briefed the president on the stiff breeze, but on Sept. 11, 2012, when a little counterterrorism was called for, nobody bothered calling the Counterterrorism Security Group, the senior U.S. counterterrorism bureaucracy.
President Barack Obama gestures while speaking to supporters at Austin Straubel International Airport in Green Bay, Wis.,Thursday, Nov. 1, 2012, before departing to Las Vegas
Meanwhile, FEMA rumbles on, the "emergency management agency" that manages emergencies, very expensively, rather than preventing them. Late on the night Sandy made landfall, I heard on the local news that my state's governor had asked the president to declare a federal emergency in every New Hampshire county so that federal funds could be "unlocked." A quarter-million people in the Granite State were out of power. It was reported that, beyond our borders, 8 million people in a dozen states were out of power.
But that's not an "emergency." No hurricane hit my county. Indeed, no hurricane hit New Hampshire. No hurricane hit "17 states," the number of states supposedly "affected" by Sandy at its peak. A hurricane hit a few coastal counties of New Jersey, New York and a couple of other states, and that's it. Everyone else had slightly windier-than-usual wind – and yet they were out of power for days. In a county entirely untouched by Sandy, my office manager had no electricity for a week. Not because of an "emergency" but because of a decrepit and vulnerable above-the-ground electrical distribution system that ought to be a national embarrassment to any developed society. A few weeks ago, I chanced to be in St. Pierre and Miquelon, a French colony of 6,000 people on a couple of treeless rocks in the North Atlantic. Every electric line is underground. Indeed, the droll demoiselle who leads tours of the islands makes a point of amusingly drawing American visitors' attention to this local feature.
If you're saying, "Whoa, that sounds expensive," well, our government is more expensive than any government in history – and we have nothing to show for it. Imagine if Obama's 2009 stimulus had been spent burying every electric pole on the Eastern Seaboard. Instead, just that one Obama bill spent a little shy of a trillion dollars, and no one can point to a single thing it built. "A big storm requires Big Government," pronounced The New York Times. But Washington is so big-hearted with Big Government it spends $188 million an hour that it doesn't have – 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including Thanksgiving, Christmas and Ramadan. And yet, mysteriously, multitrillion-dollar Big Government Obama-style can't do anything except sluice food stamps to the dependent class, lavish benefits and early retirement packages to the bureaucrats that service them, and so-called government "investment" to approved Obama cronies.
So you can have Big Government bigger (or, anyway, more expensive) than any government's ever been, and the lights still go out in 17 states – because your president spent 6 trillion bucks, and all the country got was a lousy Air Force One bomber jacket for him to wear while posing for a Twitpic answering the phone with his concerned expression.
Even in those few parts of the Northeast that can legitimately claim to have been clobbered by Sandy, Big Government made it worse. Last week, Nanny Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, rivaled his own personal best for worst mayoral performance since that snowstorm a couple of years back. This is a man who spends his days micromanaging the amount of soda New Yorkers are allowed to have in their beverage containers rather than, say, the amount of ocean New Yorkers are allowed to have in their subway system – just as, in the previous crisis, the municipal titan who can regulate the salt out of your cheeseburger proved utterly incapable of regulating any salt on to Sixth Avenue. Imagine if this preening buffoon had expended as much executive energy on flood protection for the electrical grid and transit system as he does on approved quantities of carbonated beverages. But that's leadership 21st-century style: When the going gets tough, the tough ban trans fats.
Back in Benghazi, the president who looks so cool in a bomber jacket declined to answer his beleaguered diplomats' calls for help – even though he had aircraft and Special Forces in the region. Too bad. He's all jacket and no bombers. This, too, is an example of America's uniquely profligate impotence. When something goes screwy at a ramshackle consulate halfway round the globe, very few governments have the technological capacity to watch it unfold in real time. Even fewer have deployable military assets only a couple of hours away. What is the point of unmanned drones, of military bases around the planet, of elite Special Forces trained to the peak of perfection if the president and the vast bloated federal bureaucracy cannot rouse themselves to action? What is the point of outspending Russia, Britain, France, China, Germany and every middle-rank military power combined if, when it matters, America cannot urge into the air one plane with a couple of dozen commandoes? In Iraq, al-Qaida is running training camps in the western desert. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are all but certain to return most of the country to its pre-9/11 glories. But in Washington the head of the world's biggest "counterterrorism" bureaucracy briefs the president on flood damage and downed trees.
I don't know whether Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan can fix things, but I do know that Barack Obama and Joe Biden won't even try – and that therefore a vote for Obama is a vote for the certainty of national collapse. Look at Lower Manhattan in the dark, and try to imagine what America might look like after the rest of the planet decides it no longer needs the dollar as global reserve currency. For four years, we have had a president who can spend everything but build nothing. Nothing but debt, dependency, and decay. As I said at the beginning, in different ways the response to Hurricane Sandy and Benghazi exemplify the fundamental unseriousness of the superpower at twilight. Whether or not to get serious is the choice facing the electorate Tuesday.
But let him keep the bomber jacket.
©MARK STEYN
- Kreskin ... It is duck soup to be a popular world leader among the masses in other people's countries - all you have to do is assure them that you won't actually be a leader and that they can do whatever the hell they like with no interference from you and that you will spend your foreign travel time bowing and scrapping to their leaders, apologizing for the supposed errors and imperfections of your own country and BSing about how great their country and religion is, and handing out lots of money from your country to theirs with no strings attached.
- But while all this will usually win you the Miss Congeniality polls and award it does nothing to protect or advance the real long term interests of your country or to make the world a safer and more peaceful and prosperous place and it tends to arose the ire and concern of one's friends and allies who dislike seeing a supposedly allied leader with a banana for a backbone and it also tends to arose the aggressiveness and militancy of one's enemies who use this appearance of weakness to destabilize the world and to build and test and eventually use their own military might for nefarious purposes.
- Certainly, among actual world leaders, Obama is more "popular" among the socialist dictators like Castro and Chavez and Mugabe and the Chinese and others, most of who have publicly endorsed him in this election, But among thinking world leaders who share common Western liberal values and similar political and economic systems and insititutions, not a one has come forward to endorse management trainee BO nor will they because he is "The Amateur" in world affairs and weak amateurs are dangerous, albeit unwittingly so.
- BTW - Can you actually cite any recent opinion polls to support your point? The last one I saw was several weeks ago by the Pew Institute and it showed that BO was starting to smell among even the ordinary people of the world and that the US was now actually LESS POPULAR among almost all Middle East countries than it had been during the time Bush was in office!
- That's something we would never hear from you, eh?
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Phew! I need a cigarette after reading all that cover up stuff..............
It's always been obvious that the Benghazi story was as bogus as the Fast and The Furious story, and that it is the only thing the republicans have left to cling to due to all the misinformation and flat out lies. The people would have raised holy hell if troops had been on the ground are now the people thinking somehow we can bypass all prep time it takes to launch a plan of action (and in this case it was 24 minutes) and magically have teleported troops in. And of course they never mention that they voted to cut funding for embassy security. Just like they voted to cut funding for Pandemic Flu response before the Swine Flu outbreak. And like when they vote against global warming preventive measures before (and after) Katrina, Ike, The hottest summer on record, Colorado fires, The largest tornado outbreak in recorded history in 2011, and a whole host of other extreme weather. They will continue to do so post Sandy.
Rivera did not mention Fox News—which has aired much of the "GOP bloodlust" over Benghazi—in his criticism of the criticism.
Geraldo slams
Geraldo stands up to Fox and Friends on Benghazi - YouTube
Geraldo Rivera Explodes at Eric Bolling 'You're Misleading The American People' Over Benghazi - YouTube
In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush officials attempted to deflect criticism that they had ignored C.I.A. warnings by saying they had not been told when and where the attack would occur. That is true, as far as it goes, but it misses the point. Throughout that summer, there were events that might have exposed the plans, had the government been on high alert. Indeed, even as the Aug. 6 brief was being prepared, Mohamed al-Kahtani, a Saudi believed to have been assigned a role in the 9/11 attacks, was stopped at an airport in Orlando, Fla., by a suspicious customs agent and sent back overseas on Aug. 4. Two weeks later, another co-conspirator, Zacarias Moussaoui, was arrested on immigration charges in Minnesota after arousing suspicions at a flight school. But the dots were not connected, and Washington did not react.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/o...-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
It's always been obvious that the Benghazi story was as bogus as the Fast and The Furious story, and that it is the only thing the republicans have left to cling to due to all the misinformation and flat out lies. The people would have raised holy hell if troops had been on the ground are now the people thinking somehow we can bypass all prep time it takes to launch a plan of action (and in this case it was 24 minutes) and magically have teleported troops in. And of course they never mention that they voted to cut funding for embassy security. Just like they voted to cut funding for Pandemic Flu response before the Swine Flu outbreak. And like when they vote against global warming preventive measures before (and after) Katrina, Ike, The hottest summer on record, Colorado fires, The largest tornado outbreak in recorded history in 2011, and a whole host of other extreme weather. They will continue to do so post Sandy.
Rivera did not mention Fox News—which has aired much of the "GOP bloodlust" over Benghazi—in his criticism of the criticism.
Geraldo slams
Geraldo stands up to Fox and Friends on Benghazi - YouTube
Geraldo Rivera Explodes at Eric Bolling 'You're Misleading The American People' Over Benghazi - YouTube
In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush officials attempted to deflect criticism that they had ignored C.I.A. warnings by saying they had not been told when and where the attack would occur. That is true, as far as it goes, but it misses the point. Throughout that summer, there were events that might have exposed the plans, had the government been on high alert. Indeed, even as the Aug. 6 brief was being prepared, Mohamed al-Kahtani, a Saudi believed to have been assigned a role in the 9/11 attacks, was stopped at an airport in Orlando, Fla., by a suspicious customs agent and sent back overseas on Aug. 4. Two weeks later, another co-conspirator, Zacarias Moussaoui, was arrested on immigration charges in Minnesota after arousing suspicions at a flight school. But the dots were not connected, and Washington did not react.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/o...-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
Mark Steyn draws valuable lessons about American's decline and impending collapse from the politicial leaders response to the Sandy and Benghazi crisis:
Published: Nov. 2, 2012 Updated: 5:20 p.m.
By MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist
President Barack Obama gestures while speaking to supporters at Austin Straubel International Airport in Green Bay, Wis.,Thursday, Nov. 1, 2012, before departing to Las Vegas
WHAT did Romney catch you doing???????????
And people take Mark Steyn seriously...how does FEMA prevent a hurricane from causing power outages? Of course it's expensive...infrastructure needs to be fixed without all of the infrastructure available and in place. That's why it's called a disaster and not routine maintenance.:roll:
What a maroon.
Got a link for the populace liking the Bamster more? We know that Chavez and Castro and Putin want him back because he is a dissembler.
FEMA? Isn't that the organization that didn't take calls on the weekend when hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans?
WHO was president then? Republican named george the lesser comes to mind.
WHO was president then? Republican named george the lesser comes to mind.
And the current GOP Presidential candidate said paying for things like FEMA is likened to stealing from future generations, so that is immoral, and that disasters should be used to make revenue for private industry. Seriously. 8O
When you think about it, it does make sense... The Feds (via FEMA) will be spending monies on the reconstruction, clean up, etc regardless of 'who' the money is paid to.
Directing it into the private sector will see almost half of the capital returned in taxes (after op/costs). In addition to that, there is also the ability to hold a private company obligated via a contract to complete the work to a specified level.
Not only have five valued Flag Level Commanders been "relieved of duty" and it now is reaching down into the ranks of those who do Satellite Photo interpretive work. The skies have eyes and they were working. Some has let out that there are some DVD's of Crypted messages relating to this tragic event trying to get to Wiki Leaks. I hope they do too.
Oh Fox News, what has become of you?
How could you have failed to alert the faithful to the numerous dangers that have threatened them this week?
Yes, Benghazi must be covered -- people simply keep missing how much the Benghazi events make Obama into a prematurely reincarnation of Jimmy Carter...but WHAT ABOUT SANDY??!?!
You have failed to cover the fact that Obama's ability to control the weather. It is clear that Sandy was created to hit the Red seaboard southern states, including Florida but because he apparently forgot to lower the ocean (he has kept none of his promises!) so instead the storm veered off course and hit godless Blue states.
It's true that your viewers don't really care about anything happening in New York or New Jersey, but you are missing the point of the storm altogether --FEMA ("displaced persons"--ha!) Camps!
Don't you get it Fox? This was a plot at last minute indoctrination attempt by the Obama administration. They are on the ground brainwashing right now...but jokes on them...they were probably going to win the pinkos in New York and New Jersey anyway. But they got to Chris Christie! and Michael Bloomberg!
Come on Fox! Are you waiting for the FEMA thugs to come for you?
Obama should have been destroyed by now. That was the plan. It would be a classic smear.
He was going to be “Swift Boated” in this election, just like John Kerry was in 2004...
But Benghazi has proven to be not dynamite, but a firecracker. The October surprise has not turned into a bombshell. Instead, it has bombed.
Opinion: 'Swift-Boating' of Obama fails - Roger Simon - POLITICO.com
How could you have failed to alert the faithful to the numerous dangers that have threatened them this week?
Yes, Benghazi must be covered -- people simply keep missing how much the Benghazi events make Obama into a prematurely reincarnation of Jimmy Carter...but WHAT ABOUT SANDY??!?!
You have failed to cover the fact that Obama's ability to control the weather. It is clear that Sandy was created to hit the Red seaboard southern states, including Florida but because he apparently forgot to lower the ocean (he has kept none of his promises!) so instead the storm veered off course and hit godless Blue states.
It's true that your viewers don't really care about anything happening in New York or New Jersey, but you are missing the point of the storm altogether --FEMA ("displaced persons"--ha!) Camps!
Don't you get it Fox? This was a plot at last minute indoctrination attempt by the Obama administration. They are on the ground brainwashing right now...but jokes on them...they were probably going to win the pinkos in New York and New Jersey anyway. But they got to Chris Christie! and Michael Bloomberg!
Come on Fox! Are you waiting for the FEMA thugs to come for you?
Obama should have been destroyed by now. That was the plan. It would be a classic smear.
He was going to be “Swift Boated” in this election, just like John Kerry was in 2004...
But Benghazi has proven to be not dynamite, but a firecracker. The October surprise has not turned into a bombshell. Instead, it has bombed.
Opinion: 'Swift-Boating' of Obama fails - Roger Simon - POLITICO.com
"Swift-boating"???
Don't make me laugh.
Although Obama is a joke, increasingly an very bad pun.........Osama, Obama, both were trying to destroy the USA, only one seems to be succeeding.
And the media??? Unbelievable!!!
Benhoozi? - By Mark Steyn - The Corner - National Review Online
Oh my God...
Nothing has killed more people (other than natural causes) in the past 100 years than Govt and YET there are morons who somehow think they are presently out to do the world favours.
Oi ****ing vey!
Nothing has killed more people (other than natural causes) in the past 100 years than Govt and YET there are morons who somehow think they are presently out to do the world favours.
Oi ****ing vey!
