By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
This was written back in 2012 during presidential candidate debates, but not published for some reason, so I publish it now re: Obama and terrorism.
It was really quite a moment -- the debate was really real at that moment and not canned presentations of pre-packaged statistics and anecdotes.
Romney rightly challenged Obama on his failure to forthrightly state that the attacks on the US embassy in Benghazi were organized by Al Qaeda -- were terrorist attacks -- and not something that evolved spontaneously out of demonstration by angry mobs insulted by the anti-Muslim video.
It did indeed take days -- weeks -- for the White House to finally come around to admitting that the attack on the embassy was organized and planned and not spontaneous -- it was on September 11, after all -- and was done by Al Qaeda, not ordinary people angry at a video.
It was wonderful to see Romney simply and sincerely keep coming back and challenging the president directly.
Glaring like a trapped animal, Obama said it wasn't true, and to get the transcript.
Romney held his ground and didn't budge -- really? he said. Because he knew the truth and that the transcript would bear him out.
Unfortunately, Candy Crawford, trying to ameliorate what she must have felt was an uncomfortably raw fight between two males, butted in then and claimed that the transcript would show the president was telling the truth.
Crawford then somewhat compensated for her blundering in to this very important challenge by saying that it was true it did take the White House 14 days to get to the point where they dropped the "spontaneous mob" bit.
The transcript is easily found online.
And it to be sure, it does contain the search string "act of terror" -- and the geeky gotcha gang might thing it's Romney who lied, not Obama.
But Obama is -- let's at least say prevaricating, and certainly literalizing and Fisking -- that is, taking something isolated out of a claim when challenged that is very literally true in a narrow sense and flogging it as if it were true in the larger sense -- so named for the master of this annoying know-it-all debating technique, Robert Fisk.
Because when the president says "no act of terror" at the end, it's a generic phrase, a coda about all such acts, not a specific acknowledgement that Benghazi was such a terrorist attack. No way.
Commentary had this analyzed days ago thoroughly, and also took us through the various pundits out there who sided with the president and wouldn't admit the larger point, either. It's like the efforts Obama and his Truth Team made after his "you didn't build that" speech to try to spin it back to whether it didn't sound so bad.
The "no act of terror" comment at the end of the Rose Garden speech was not an admission that the attack wasn't due to a spontaneous mob, but was planned by Al Qaeda. Not at all. Read the transcript. It's unmistakable.
We know it. And at some level Obama knows it, judging from the fierce and angry glare in his eye when confronted on this.
And if you aren't happy with what's an obvious generic reference that isn't at all what we mean by an admission about Benghazi as terrorism, go over to Obama's UN speech, where he keeps referring to the hate video. The word "terrorist" appears once -- in relationship to Iran only.
Not Benghazi.
Obama said, "That is what we saw play out in the last two weeks, as a crude and disgusting video sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world."
He didn't say "Al Qaeda". And worse, while Obama said this rightly:
It is time to marginalize those who -- even when not directly resorting to violence -- use hatred of America, or the West, or Israel, as the central organizing principle of politics. For that only gives cover, and sometimes makes an excuse, for those who do resort to violence.
-- he also set back years of efforts to prevent a global blasphemy resolution at the UN with this zinger:
The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.
Er, "slander" the prophet? Who gets to decide what that means? The OIC? Mobs outside embassy gates?
Obama's handling of the attacks in Cairo and of course Benghazi and other Muslim cities was weak and emanated from an unsound foreign policy to begin with dating back to the apologetic 2009 Cairo Speech. And Romney is right to call him out on this.
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