Benghazi and the stimulus: the two worst things (other than Obamacare) that Obama has done

Andrew McCarthy gives two reasons why Obama must be defeated: Benghazi and the stimulus. On Benghazi he says:

President Obama and his administration recklessly erected a diplomatic installation in a place too dangerous to have one even if there had been U.S. military security. It contracted out what passed for security to Libyans incapable of providing it—and, almost certainly, disinclined to provide it. It had mega-notice that jihadist terror attacks were not only in the offing but had recently occurred, and that September 11 was a day that screamed out for heightened protective measures. The commander-in-chief was aware of the attack as it was occurring — indeed, hours before it ended — had military assets a short distance away and capable of suppressing the enemy, yet failed to take actions that could easily have saved American lives.

Despite all this, the president and his administration outrageously blamed the attack on an obscure video that had nothing to do with what happened. They went so dishonorably far as to cite the video in the presence of the coffins of Americans killed in Benghazi. Not content with that, they launched a mendacious, vindictive prosecution against a man said to be responsible for the video — a man whose only apparent “crime” was to exercise his First Amendment rights in a manner disapproved of by our Islam-pandering president. And for want of a better explanation (gross incompetence doesn’t come close), all this was done in the service of a political agenda to portray Obama’s disastrous Libya policy as a success, the “Arab Spring” as an Obama-driven triumph of democracy rather than an Obama-enabled ascendancy of Islamic supremacism, and Obama counterterrorism as a bin Laden-slaying victory rather than an al-Qaeda surging failure.

On the stimulus he says:

Second, the storm that strafed the East Coast days before the election ought to remind every American to ask: What happened to the $800 billion-plus in stimulus funds? (And I’d note that, at Cato, Thomas Firey puts it at more like $2.5 trillion — and itemizes.) I do not subscribe to the Keynesian conceit that a dollar of government spending results in a dollar-plus of positive economic activity in the private sector, but if you’re going to do it, the constitutional concept of “general welfare” demands no less than that taxpayer money be spent only in a manner that benefits all Americans. (As I’ve argued before, I believe it may only be spent for the purposes enumerated in Article I, but put that aside for now.) Where are the improvements in our infrastructure? Where are the billions that could have been spent on improvements that might have left a region less paralyzed by a weather-related disaster?

In stark contrast, Obama took over $800 billion from us and shoveled it to his base, his cronies, the illusion of “green energy,” and state and municipal governments nearly as poorly run as the federal Leviathan. He has robbed Americans of millions of jobs, present growth, and future prosperity. This is larceny on an unprecedented scale, and we have nothing to show for it but mountainous, exploding debt — debt that will crush our children and their children … if we get that far. It is a profound betrayal of the intergenerational bond that is the foundation of our society.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 06, 2012 08:34 AM | Send