"The entire reason
that this has become the political topic it is, is because of Mitt Romney and
Paul Ryan."
Thus, Stephanie
Cutter, President Obama's deputy campaign manager, speaking on CNN about an
armed attack on the 9/11 anniversary that left a U.S. consulate a smoking ruin
and killed four diplomatic staff, including the first American ambassador to be
murdered in a third of a century. To discuss this event is apparently to
"politicize" it and to distract from the real issues the American
people are concerned about. For example, Obama spokesperson Jen Psaki, speaking
on board Air Force One on Thursday:
"There's only
one candidate in this race who is going to continue to fight for Big Bird and
Elmo, and he is riding on this plane."
She's right! The
United States is the first nation in history whose democracy has evolved to the
point where its leader is provided with a wide-body transatlantic jet in order
to campaign on the vital issue of public funding for sock puppets. Sure,
Caligula put his horse in the Senate, but it was a real horse. At Ohio State
University, the rapper will.i.am introduced the President by playing the Sesame
Street theme tune, which, oddly enough, seems more apt presidential walk-on
music for the Obama era than "Hail To The Chief."
Obviously, Miss
Cutter is right: A healthy mature democracy should spend its quadrennial
election on critical issues like the Republican Party's war on puppets rather
than attempting to "politicize" the debate by dragging in stuff like
foreign policy, national security, the economy and other obscure peripheral
subjects. But, alas, it was her boss who chose to "politicize" a
security fiasco and national humiliation in Benghazi. At 8.30 p.m., when
Ambassador Stevens strolled outside the gate and bid his Turkish guest good
night, the streets were calm and quiet. At 9.40 p.m., an armed assault on the
compound began, well-planned and executed by men not only armed with mortars
but capable of firing them to lethal purpose – a rare combination among the
excitable mobs of the Middle East. There was no demonstration against an
Islamophobic movie that just got a little out of hand. Indeed, there was no
movie protest at all. Instead, a U.S. consulate was destroyed and four of its
personnel were murdered in one of the most sophisticated military attacks ever
launched at a diplomatic facility.
This was confirmed
by testimony to Congress a few days ago, although you could have read as much
in my column of four weeks ago. Nevertheless, for most of those four weeks, the
President of the United States, the Secretary of State, the U.S. Ambassador to
the United Nations and others have persistently attributed the Benghazi debacle
to an obscure YouTube video – even though they knew that the two events had
nothing to do with each other by no later than the crack of dawn Eastern time
on Sept. 12, by which point the consulate's survivors had landed safely in
Tripoli.
To
"politicize" means "to give a political character to." It
is a reductive term, capturing the peculiarly shrunken horizons of politics:
"Gee, they nuked Israel. D'you think that will hurt us in Florida?"
So media outlets fret that Benghazi could be "bad" for Obama – by
which they mean he might be hitting the six-figure lecture circuit four years
ahead of schedule. But for Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone
Woods, it's real bad. They're dead, over, gonesville. Given that Obama and
Secretary Clinton refer to Stevens pneumatically as "Chris," as if
they've known him since third grade, why would they dishonor the sacrifice of
their close personal friend by peddling an utterly false narrative as to why he
died? You want "politicization"? Secretary Clinton linked the YouTube
video to the murder of her colleagues even as the four caskets lay alongside her
at Andrews Air Force Base – even though she had known for days that it had
nothing to do with it. It's weird enough that politicians now give campaign
speeches to returning coffins. But to conscript your "friend's"
corpse as a straight man for some third-rate electoral opportunism is surely as
shriveled and worthless as "politicization" gets.
In the
vice-presidential debate, asked why the White House spent weeks falsely blaming
it on the video, Joe Biden took time off between big toothy smirks to reply:
"Because that was exactly what we were told by the intelligence
community." That, too, is false. He also denied that the government of
which he is nominally second-in-command had ever received a request for
additional security. At the risk of "politicizing" things, this
statement would appear also to be untrue.
Instead, the State
Department outsourced security for the Benghazi consulate to Blue Mountain, a
Welsh firm that hires ex-British and Commonwealth Special Forces, among the
toughest hombres on the planet. The company's very name comes from the poem
"The Golden Journey To Samarkand," whose words famously adorn the
regimental headquarters of Britain's Special Air Service in Hereford.
Unfortunately, the one-year contract for consulate security was only $387,413 –
or less than the cost of deploying a single U.S. soldier overseas. On that
budget, you can't really afford to fly in a lot of crack SAS killing machines,
and have to make do with the neighborhood talent pool. So who's available? Blue
Mountain hired five members of the Benghazi branch of the February 17th
Martyrs' Brigade and equipped them with handcuffs and batons. A baton is very
useful when someone is firing an RPG at you, at least if you play a little
baseball. There were supposed to be four men heavily armed with handcuffs on
duty that night, but, the date of Sept. 11 having no particular significance in
the Muslim world, only two guards were actually on shift.
Let's pause right
there, and "politicize" a little more. Liberals are always going on
about the evils of "outsourcing" and "offshoring" – selfish
vulture capitalists like Mitt Romney shipping jobs to cheap labor overseas just
to save a few bucks. How unpatriotic can you get! So now the United States
government is outsourcing embassy security to cheap Welshmen who, in turn,
outsource it to cheaper Libyans. Diplomatic facilities are U.S. sovereign
territory – no different de jure from Fifth Avenue or Mount
Rushmore. So defending them is one of the core responsibilities of the state.
But that's the funny thing about Big Government: the bigger it gets, the more
of life it swallows up, the worse it gets at those very few things it's
supposed to be doing. So, on the first anniversary of 9/11 in a
post-revolutionary city in which Western diplomats had been steadily targeted
over the previous six months, the government of the supposedly most powerful
nation on Earth entrusted its security to Abdulaziz Majbari, 29, and his pal,
who report to some bloke back in Carmarthen, Wales.
In the days before
the attack, Joe Biden had been peddling his Obama campaign slogan that:
"Bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive." The first
successful terrorist attack on U.S. sovereign territory since 9/11, and on the
very anniversary and by al-Qaida-linked killers, was not helpful to the Obama
team. And so the nature of the event had to be "politicized": Look,
over there – an Islamophobic movie! "Greater love hath no man than
this," quoth the President at Chris Stevens' coffin, "that a man lay
down his life for his friends." Smaller love hath no man than Obama's,
than to lay down his "friend" for a couple of points in Ohio.
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