“More Problems For Romney”: After Sabotaging The Economy, Republicans Now Desperate For An “America Under Siege”
One reason the Benghazi controversy has always seemed so bogus to me is that I’ve never bought the core premise, which is that the administration had any clear political reason or advantage to gain by claiming the attack was tied to the video as opposed to a pre-planned assault. (Here’s our look at how Benghazi evolved into a GOP talking point.) In addition to a great number of hacks peddling this idea, some people I respect a great deal seem to credit the idea too. But again, it doesn’t add up to me.
However that may be, the factual premise itself now seems to be coming apart. In this morning’s Washington Post, David Ignatius comes forward with new evidence suggesting that Susan Rice’s now notorious claims about the centrality of the video were pretty much verbatim from CIA talking points prepared that day for administration officials.
From Ignatius …
The Romney campaign may have misfired with its suggestion that statements by President Obama and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice about the Benghazi attack last month weren’t supported by intelligence, according to documents provided by a senior U.S. intelligence official.“Talking points” prepared by the CIA on Sept. 15, the same day that Rice taped three television appearances, support her description of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate as a reaction to Arab anger about an anti-Muslim video prepared in the United States. According to the CIA account, “The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate and subsequently its annex. There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.”
Meanwhile, an article published yesterday afternoon in the LA Times suggests that these initial reports remain what US intelligence still believes happened: an attack with relatively little advanced planning, a high degree of disorganization and at least some level of triggering by the riots in Cairo earlier that day.
From the LAT …
The attack was “carried out following a minimum amount of planning,” said a U.S. intelligence official, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a matter still under investigation. “The attackers exhibited a high degree of disorganization. Some joined the attack in progress, some did not have weapons and others just seemed interested in looting.”A second U.S. official added, “There isn’t any intelligence that the attackers pre-planned their assault days or weeks in advance.” Most of the evidence so far suggests that “the attackers launched their assault opportunistically after they learned about the violence at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo” earlier that day, the official said.
It would be wrong to think we now know what happened in any definitive sense. Maybe it was triggered by the video. Maybe it was planned months in advance. For me, the main issue is that a US diplomatic team was killed — and whether it was a relatively unplanned haphazard attack or one with a lot of advanced planning is operationally significant but sort of beside the point in political or policy terms. It underscores that Libya is an incredibly dangerous place right now and the Ambassador lacked the protection he should have had.
As I mentioned after the debate last week, Romney totally got hoisted on his own petard by the ridiculous hyperfocus on the word “terror”. But really the whole focus on this word only makes sense in a hyper-ideological mindset in which using the ‘terror’ buzzword signifies you fully understand some global war on Islamofascism which Romney’s advisors are trying to bring back from the middle years of the Bush era.
My global take remains the same: only in the final weeks or a presidential campaign, with one candidate desperate for a America under siege Carteresque tableau to play against, would this ever remotely have been treated like a scandal. A bunch of reporters basically got played and punk’d.
By: Josh Marshall, Editors Blog, Talking Points Memo, October 20, 2012
“Dick Cheney With A Smile”: Paul Ryan Confirms That In The GOP, Neoconservative Fantasy Dies Hard
Never afraid to go against the crowd, or the facts, Dick Cheney found Paul Ryan’s performance in Thursday night’s vice presidential debate dazzling.
Following the debate, Cheney declared that ”there is no question in my mind when I look at Joe Biden and Paul Ryan on the stage there last night, I think Paul Ryan’s got what it takes to take over as president. I don’t think Joe Biden does.”
How did George W. Bush’s number-two see what so many mere mortals missed?
Cheney pays serious attention to Ryan.
Indeed, he says: “I worship the ground that Paul Ryan walks on.”
And no one should doubt Cheney’s sincerity.
The former Republican vice president adores the Republican vice presidential candidate because Ryan is a fresh, young Cheney.
Cheney moved to Washington as soon as he could and became a political careerist, working as a Capitol Hill aide, a think-tank hanger on and then a member of Congress. Ryan followed the same insider trajectory.
Cheney’s a hyper-partisan Republican with a history of putting party loyalty above everything else. Ryan’s an equally loyal GOP mandarin.
Cheney’s a rigid ideologue who has never let reality get in the way of cockamamie neocon theories about where to start the next war. And Ryan’s every bit as much a neocon as Cheney.
Americans should reflect on Ryan’s performance in Thursday’s vice presidential debate with Cheney in mind. When they do, they will shudder.
In the 2000 vice presidential debate at Centre College in Kentucky, Cheney was asked if he favored using deadly force against Iraq. “We might have no other choice. We’ll have to see if that happens,” he replied. Why? He said he feared Saddam Hussein might have renewed his “capacity to build weapons of mass destruction.” “I certainly hope he’s not regenerating that kind of capability, but if he were, if in fact Saddam Hussein were taking steps to try to rebuild nuclear capability or weapons of mass destruction, you would have to give very serious consideration to military action to—to stop that activity.”
Two years later, Cheney was leading the drive to send US troops to invade Iraq. Three years later, US troops were bogged down in an occupation that would cost thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. No weapons of mass destruction were found and America’s international credibility took a hard hit.
Cheney didn’t care. He never apologized for leading America astray. And he never offered any indication that he had learned from the experience.
Thursday, in the 2012 vice presidential debate at Centre College, Ryan put a smile on the Cheney doctrine. But there was not a sliver of difference between the politics of the former vice president and the pretender to the vice presidency on questions of how to deal with foreign policy challenges in Afghanistan, Syria and Iran.
At the close of an extended discussion of Afghanistan, in which he repeatedly suggested that the Obama administration was insufficiently committed to fighting America’s longest war, Ryan actually suggested: “We are already sending Americans to do the job, but fewer of them. That’s the whole problem.”
On Iran, Ryan was so bombastic that an incredulous Biden finally asked: “What are you—you’re going to go to war? Is that what you want to do?”
Ryan did not answer in the affirmative Thursday night in Danville.
Neither did Cheney twelve years ago in Danville.
But Cheney signaled his inclinations in the 2000 vice presidential debate. And Ryan has signaled his intentions this year—confirming that the neoconservative fantasy, despite having been discredited by experience, dies hard on the neocon fringe of the Grand Old Party.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, October 14, 2012
“Completely Clueless”: No Wonder Romney-Ryan Pretends There’s No War In Afghanistan
For much of the campaign, Mitt Romney seemed to forget that the United States is still fighting a war in Afghanistan, culminating in his convention speech which inexplicably ignored the war and American troops altogether.
Last night, we were reminded of why the Republican ticket says so little about the conflict: they haven’t the foggiest idea what they’re talking about. In reference to Paul Ryan, Charles P. Pierce wrote overnight, “He was more lost in Afghanistan than the Russian army ever was.”
In a debate which had plenty of ups and downs, the congressman’s efforts to be coherent on the war were cover-your-eyes awful. One the one hand, Ryan supports the Obama administration’s withdrawal timetable:
“Now, with respect to Afghanistan, the 2014 deadline, we agree with a 2014 transition.”
On the other hand, Ryan thinks the Obama administration’s withdrawal timetable is dangerous:
“[W]e don’t want to broadcast to our enemies ‘put a date on your calendar, wait us out, and then come back.’ … What we don’t want to do is give our allies reason to trust us less and our enemies more — we don’t want to embolden our enemies.”
What’s the Romney-Ryan ticket’s position on the war? No one has a clue because the Republican candidates, four weeks from the election, haven’t picked one yet. As Rachel noted in the post-debate coverage, “The Romney-Ryan ticket is not credible on the issue of the war…. Paul Ryan embarrassed himself on Afghanistan tonight in a way that he embarrassed himself on no other issue. He did not understand the question well enough to know that he was making a mistake because he’s just learned this for the test. He doesn’t understand any of it. I find that terrifying.”
Incidentally, Dan Senor, a leading Romney-Ryan adviser on foreign policy, told Fox News yesterday that the Romney-Ryan position on Afghanistan “is the same as the president’s,” adding that Romney “obviously supports the president’s position.” Senor also said, “We have some disagreements with the president on Afghanistan.” After endorsing 2014 withdrawal, Senor added, “If you’re the Commander-in Chief, to broadcast timelines so our enemies are in the know about our next move” is a mistake.
If this wasn’t so critically important, I might even feel sorry for the Republican ticket.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 12, 2012
“Specifics Please”: Joe Biden Calls Paul Ryan Out On Repeated Falsehoods
What a difference a week makes. In the first presidential debate, President Obama let Mitt Romney’s attacks on him stand, and seemed disengaged. Vice President Joe Biden stayed in Rep. Paul Ryan’s face for the entirety of Thursday’s vice presidential debate. In the process, he forced Ryan, and by extension the Romney campaign, onto the defensive for a large part of the evening. Obama has a lot to be grateful for.
Last week, Romney repeated over and over that the president’s health care bill cut $716 billion. Obama didn’t push back much to explain that the cuts came from providers and insurance companies, not beneficiaries. This week, Ryan was forced again and again to answer for his voucher/”premium support” approach to Medicare, which Biden hammered at relentlessly.
Last week, Romney flatly denied he had proposed $5 trillion in tax cuts. This week, Ryan had to keep dodging the question of what middle-class deductions would have to be eliminated to pay for the tax cuts. The moderator, Martha Raddatz, who effectively challenged both candidates throughout the debate, at one point turned to Ryan and asked: “No specifics again?” The discussion revived an issue Obama badly needs in play.
And Ryan made a major mistake in defending his past support for privatizing Social Security. Last week, Obama made a mistake of his own when he said that his position and Romney’s on Social Security were similar, thereby closing off a matter that has always been a Democratic staple. The Republicans should have let things sit right there. Instead, Ryan brought the privatization issue to life. His standing his ground on his Social Security ideas (rather than simply saying that Romney had no plans to move in that direction) will allow the Democrats to add Social Security to Medicare in their arsenal of issues they hope to use to cut Republican margins among seniors.
Biden was hot, avuncular, occasionally sarcastic, and always engaged. He laughed a lot, and never let a point slip. I am certain that the cheers in Democratic living rooms around the country were as loud as the sighs of relief. That alone was vital to Obama. Demoralized Democrats themselves contributed to the story line of Obama’s failure in the first debate. The days of demoralization are over.
Some will no doubt write that Biden was too hot and overreacted to Obama’s disengagement. But this misreads the net impact of the debate, which was to renew the doubts about Romney, Ryan and their approach that were hurting the GOP before the last debate. Biden stayed on Romney’s class bias from the beginning to the end — he was not shy, as Obama was, about mentioning Romney’s 47 percent comments. A Romney presidency, Biden said, would concentrate on “taking care only of the very wealthy.”
Ryan probably did himself some good with his conservative base, and he generally preserved his cheerful demeanor. The debate will help advance his chances for a 2016 Republican nomination if the Romney-Ryan ticket loses this year. But his main tasks on Romney’s behalf were to keep the momentum from last week’s debate going and to keep the campaign colloquy focused on Obama’s weaknesses. In this, he failed. The news is likely to shift again toward the problems with Romney’s ideas, and with Ryan’s own. A particularly revealing moment was Ryan’s heartfelt defense of his staunch opposition to abortion. It was an honest answer that will keep him in good stead with conservatives, but it almost certainly hurt Romney, who has been trying to soften his stance on the subject.
In 2004, after John Kerry’s clear victory over George W. Bush in the first presidential debate, then-Vice President Dick Cheney came out on top in most of the commentary about his encounter with John Edwards. Cheney thereby slowed Kerry’s momentum. Dick Cheney has never been Joe Biden’s role model, but Biden’s imperative Thursday night was the same as Cheney’s eight years ago. And with a very different style, he achieved the same result. It will now be Obama’s task to pick up where Biden left off, but the vice president clearly brought his president back to a much better place.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., The National Memo, October 12, 2012
“Sentimental Storytelling”: Beware Of Mitt Romney’s “Softer Side”
Everyone is talking about Mitt Romney’s “softer side.”
That’s how some reporters are characterizing a recent shift in Romney’s stump speeches.
Because Governor Romney has started talking about dead people: the Navy SEAL who died in Benghazi. The 14-year-old boy who died of leukemia (profiled at the Convention). The long-lost friend stricken with multiple disabilities, who drags himself to meet Mitt Romney at a campaign rally. And dies the next day.
The New York Times reports Romney’s stump speech: “I reached down and I put my hand on Billy’s shoulder and I whispered into his ear, and I said, ‘Billy, God bless you, I love you.’ And he whispered right back to me—and I couldn’t quite hear what he said… [He] died the next day.”
And a hush fell over the crowd.
What does this have to do with running for president?
Look, people tell tear-jerkers about dead people all the time. Dying moms and kids especially.
Glenn Beck did it with his book The Christmas Sweater, in which a boy turns up his nose at a particularly unattractive but dearly-bought sweater his mother gifted him for Christmas.
And she dies in a fiery car crash a few pages later.
Beck learned the genre, I once argued, from a particularly bruising subgenre of Mormon sentimentality: Sunday School manual anecdotes and movies that circle like vultures around accidental, lonely, and untimely deaths. Just to make us cry.
This sentimental storytelling is an American tradition dating back at least to the nineteenth century. It encourages us to zero-in on the anecdote—to identify with and shed tears for the helplessness of the victim—and lose complete sight of the big picture.
Is there anything in Romney’s foreign policy that will ensure that more Navy SEALS, sailors, and soldiers will come home quickly?
Does the Romney-Ryan budget maintain the social safety net on which disabled people depend?
And how will repealing the Affordable Health Care Act help out the thousands upon thousands of American families who don’t have access to medical care or who face medical bankruptcy as their loved ones fight cancer?
Time to ask harder questions about the “softer side.”
By: Joanna Brooks, Religion Dispatches, October 11, 2012
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