Unprecedented events in the second debate

Did a president of the United States ever tell such a big lie as Obama told in the second debate when he said that he had called the Benghazi attack a “terrorist” attack the day after it occurred? And did an opposing candidate ever look a president of the United States in the eye, his expression showing amazement and disbelief, and ask the president to repeat what he had said, because it was such a big lie? And did a supposed moderator ever interject herself into the debate to support the president’s big lie?

Carol Iannone demonstrated the lie yesterday at VFR; and Michael Walsh does the same today in the New York Post.

On a separate point, it is silly and incorrect to refer to the Benghazi attack as a “terrorist” attack. It was an organized, military-style assault on a U.S. embassy. We Americans greatly overuse the word terrorist, automatically and thoughtlessly applying it to any military action against us by jihadists, whereas terrorism properly refers to unpredictable assaults on civilians, designed to sow terror in a society and break down a people’s will. So, for example, we call the destruction of the U.S. Marines’ barracks in Lebanon in 1983 that killed 241 U.S. servicemen a terrorist attack. But it was not. It was an attack on a military target, committed with the aim of getting the U.S. to remove its military forces from Lebanon, in which aim it was successful.

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Or as Jennifer Rubin puts it in her Washington Post blog:

If Obama figured out in a day that this was a planned terrorist attack, why was Jay Carney sent out on Sept. 14 to insist it was all about an anti-Muslim video? Why didn’t someone tell U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice before she went on five Sunday talk shows tying the murder of four Americans to a protest growing out of a video? Why did the president repeat this in his Sept. 20 Univision appearance and then dwell on the anti-Muslim videoat the United Nations? Declaring that the president knew full well on Sept. 12 that he was dealing with terrorism makes him and many in his administration liars.

So why push this story line? Well, the president made a big deal of it in the debate. Maybe his ego got the best of him and he couldn’t allow himself to be taken for a fool for not seeing the terror connection on 9/11 . Whatever the reason, both the White House and the campaign are now insisting on an unhelpful timeline, which in turn will require more quibbling, trimming and prevaricating.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 18, 2012 02:24 PM | Send