Patrick Caddell
He has worked for Democratic presidential candidates George McGovern in 1972, Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980, Gary Hart in 1984, Joe Biden in 1988, and Jerry Brown in 1992. He also worked for Colorado Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff in 2010.[1]
He has served as a consultant to various movies and television shows, most notably the movies Running Mates, Air Force One, Outbreak, In the Line of Fire, and the serial drama The West Wing. He was also a marketing consultant on Coca-Cola's disastrous New Coke campaign.[2]
In 1988, Caddell left Democratic consulting firm Caddell, Doak and Shrum after what the Washington Post described as an "acrimonious lawsuit."[3] Republicans would often cite Caddell's tirades against the Democratic Party when they spoke on the floor of the House and the Senate.[4][5][6]
According to researchers, Caddell had wide influence in the Carter White House, and was the chief advocate of what later became known as Carter's "malaise speech".[7]
His analysis on polls and campaign issues often puts him at odds with the current leadership of the Democratic Party. He has been criticized by media watchdogs and columnists for predicting negative consequences for the Democratic Party.[8][9] Critics point out that he has defended the Bush administration by arguing that Republicans did not exploit the issue of homosexual marriage in the presidential election of 2004.[citation needed] He also denounced Democrats in the House who voted against the Palm Sunday Compromise, which sought to reinstate Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, as "cold blooded,"[citation needed] and called environmentalism "a conspiracy 'to basically deconstruct capitalism.'"[1]
Caddell is a regular guest on the Fox News Channel, and he is listed as an official 'Fox News Contributor'. This has earned him the label of a "Fox News Democrat" by critics such as liberal opinion magazine Salon.com[1] He has also frequently appeared on the conservative website Ricochet.com discussing politics.[10][11][12]
According to Slate,[13] Caddell was involved in identifying people willing to participate in the 2012 anti-Obama documentary The Hope and the Change, produced by Citizens United.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Caddell
America could be on the cusp of a great victory--a victory for accountability and truth. The Benghazi debacle is, at last, breaking into the public consciousness. Indeed, in its outlines, finally visible as the coverup unravels, Benghazi is starting to look like a scandal, bringing up memories of an earlier scandal, Watergate.
Yet the Republicans could still blow it, not only for themselves, but much more importantly, for the country. They could blow it, that is, if they make the terrible mistake of turning an honest and necessary inquiry about the events of 2012 and 2013 into a contrived exercise in political positioning for 2016.Yes, I am looking at you, Karl Rove. After your abysmal campaign performance in 2012, it’s painfully evident that your too-clever-by-half tricks in 2013--injecting your presidential-campaign-style attack spot into the Benghazi investigation--could undercut your own party yet again.
We’ll get back to Rove in the third installment, but first, let’s assess where we are on Benghazi.
As we all know by now, the Obama administration bungled everything about Benghazi on September 11, 2012, leading to the tragic death of our ambassador and three more brave Americans. Yet at the same time, we must admit that the administration was successful in covering up its own fecklessness--at least well enough to get through last year’s presidential election.
Yet in the last few days, that coverup has been uncovered, as all Americans can now see.
Peggy Noonan wrote on Friday, the Wednesday testimony before Rep. Darrell Issa’s investigative committee has punched through public apathy:
“The Benghazi story until now has been a jumble of factoids that didn't quite cohere, didn't produce a story that people could absorb and hold in their minds. This week that changed. Three State Department officials testifying under oath to a House committee changed it, by adding information that gave form to a growing picture. Gregory Hicks, Mark Thompson and Eric Nordstrom were authoritative and credible. You knew you were hearing the truth as they saw and experienced it.”In addition, Noonan added, the testimony demolished MSM attempts to dismiss the hearings as nothing more than a “Republican investigation.” As she wrote of the three witnesses, “Not one of them seemed political,” adding, “They put the lie to the idea that all questioning of Obama administration actions in Benghazi are partisan and low.”
Indeed, some in the MSM have become cognizant of this new reality: The front page of the Washington Post featured a heart-wrenching photograph of Dorothy Narvaez Woods, the widow of Tyrone Woods, as she watched Gregory Hicks give his detailed first-person account, under oath, before the Issa committee. In Mrs. Narvaez Woods’ mournful but attentive face, the rest of us could see the agonizing human toll of this entire matter--not just the tragic incident of eight months ago, but also the frustratingly stubborn attempts to obstruct the true course of justice.
Speaking of coverups and the obstruction of justice, I might add that for me, as someone who experienced Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal firsthand back in the 70s, the memories of that sordid mess have all come flooding back as I think on this new sordid mess.
The cliché of scandals is that it’s usually not the incident itself that’s so serious, but rather, the cover-up of the incident. That was certainly true of Watergate; yes, it was a criminal conspiracy from the outset--a conspiracy to rig the re-election of Richard Nixon--but it’s not clear that Nixon knew about it in advance. Yet he did know soon after the June 17, 1972 break-in, and instead of cleaning house, he helped to cover it up. That’s what turned Watergate from a election scandal into an impeachment scandal.
The original incident in Benghazi was plenty serious, too, of course. And so Barack Obama could have--and should have--gone to the country and told the truth. He could have declared, “Our country has been attacked by vicious terrorists. We will continue to hunt them down and kill them. We will win the war on terror.” I am no fan of Obama, but if he had done so, the country would have cheered his resolve, and I would have, too. Indeed, it’s most likely that the voters would have rallied around him.
That’s what happened to one of my heroes, John F. Kennedy, who rebounded in the wake of the disastrous invasion at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, in April 1961. Many historians point out that the planning for the ill-fated anti-Castro operation had begun long before JFK took office, just three months earlier. So it might have been possible for JFK to try to shift the blame for the debacle onto his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, or on to others in the national security establishment.
But Kennedy would have none of that kind of weaseling. In an April 21, 1961 press conference, Kennedy told the world, “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan....I am the responsible officer of this government.” JFK took it like a man, and the American people loved him for it--his popularity soared.
So, quite possibly, Obama could have done the same thing. But of course, then Obama would have had to cancel his campaign events, hunker down in the White House, and prove himself to be a real commander-in-chief.
That’s what my old boss, Jimmy Carter, did in 1979, when he was confronted with another attack on US diplomats, the Iranian hostage crisis. Cynics back then called it the “Rose Garden Strategy,” alleging that Carter was campaigning from the White House Rose Garden. But that wasn’t the case. Whatever some might think of Carter, there was no artifice to him when it came to taking his White House job seriously. I was there as a close adviser, although I was never involved in the actual national security deliberations--that’s the way Carter wanted it, no politics.
In the wake of the hostage seizure on November 4, 1979, Carter simply decided that the hostages were more important than politics or his own re-election, and so he spent most of his time working the issue from the Oval Office or the Situation Room. During that tense year, Carter consulted closely not only with foreign leaders, but also with the bipartisan leadership of the Congress. Others, including me, would be left to sort out the politics for him--the 39th President was going to do his job as he saw it.
So if Carter’s taking his commander-in-chief duties seriously counts as a “strategy,” fine--let’s have more such strategies. Let’s have more presidents who focus on the requirements of their oath of office, not the desire to win 270 or more votes in the electoral college.
So back to Obama, a very different kind of president. As we know, Obama chose not to follow the Carter approach--or the approach that any serious-minded chief executive would have followed. No, Obama is Obama, and so he did what he always does: He gave a nice little speech, and then he got back to his one and true first priority, politics.
It never seems to have occurred to Obama, or anyone else in his administration, that the Benghazi tragedy required some sort of midcourse correction, away from campaigning and toward governing. No, the campaign strategy had been set in Chicago long before: The Obama re-election campaign was predicated on the idea that the 44th President had killed Osama Bin Laden and won the war on terror.
So Obama’s team was all assembled for that famous photo in the White House Situation Room as they awaited the news of the Bin Laden raid in Pakistan on May 1, 2011. But then, more than a year later, a new attack by Al Qaeda on a new 9/11 simply wasn’t part of the carefully laid out campaign script. And since campaigning was paramount, the Al Qaeda role in the Benghazi attack had to be airbrushed out by the White House--with the aid, of course, of an adoring media.
Thus the terrorist assassins became, in the Obama narrative, just an unruly mob, fired up by some dumb Mohammed video made in California. Once that cover story was settled upon, that was the beginning of the cover-up of Benghazi.
As the rubble in Benghazi was still smoldering, the President declared, on September 12, 2012, “We will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people.” And then he was aboard Air Force One, off to Las Vegas, for a rally and fundraiser.
The immediate question, of course, is what Obama left behind in Washington D.C. that day. Increasingly, it appears that he left his underlings in Washington to work out the new and dishonest Benghazi narrative--the cover-up. The goal was to insulate the President from all this bad news--he had nothing to do with it. Isn’t it interesting, for example, that no photos were ever released of the President working on the Benghazi crisis on the night of the attacks? Nope, with the November election just six weeks away, the White House strategy was clear: The President was to kept far, far away from anything that might make the votes wonder if they had the right commander-in-chief.
Thus we come to the more important question--the ultimate question: What did the President know?
Everything else, in the long run, flows from that. Obama might not know it or think it, but he is, as JFK said more than a half-century ago, “the responsible officer of this government.” That is, the President is primary in the Benghazi saga; inquiries into the role of anyone else--including the former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton--are decidedly secondary or even tertiary. In an investigation such as this, we shouldn't be looking to the capillaries, or even the arteries; we should be going right to the heart--Obama. If others wish to obscure his role, well, we must seek to clarify his role.
Yet even as we keep our focus on the President, we still have to understand how his men and women acted on his behalf.
The first document of the cover-up, of course, were those dozen-times rewritten Benghazi talking points, the ones that Susan Rice used to mislead the nation on September 16, 2012--five ways to Sunday, one might say. We might immediately note that the Mohammed video never appears in those “talkers.” It was only in the days to come that the blame-the-video narrative was repeated by not only the President, but also the Vice President, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and everyone else in the administration. So there’s a mystery to be unraveled? Who dropped the Mohammed video argument into the national dialogue?
So who was ultimately in charge of those talking points? Not Hillary Clinton, nor her State Department. Instead, the buck seems to have stopped at the White House--but nowhere near the President, of course.
Instead, it was a second-tier functionary at the National Security Council who took the lead. The key figure seems to be one Ben Rhodes, whose title is deputy national security adviser for strategic communications and speechwriting--which should be translated to, “spinning and talking-point massaging.” He was the main rewrite guy.
But here’s where the cover-up gets even more interesting. How so? Because, after all, Rhodes is not in charge of the NSC. And if the actual head of the NSC doesn’t leap to mind, well, that’s proof that the plan is working. What plan? The plan to keep Tom Donilon out of the news and out of the line of fire.
The Benghazi cover-up at the White House was, in fact, a double cover-up. As we have seen, the President was to be insulated from Benghazi. But so, too, was someone else.
That someone else is Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser at the White House, who is, of course, Ben Rhodes’ boss at the National Security Council. So if Rhodes is doing something as vital as managing the Benghazi message, we can be reaonably sure that Donilon was all over it. We can be reasonably sure of it, that it, but what we can’t actually see it, because Donilon has chosen to become politically invisible. Yes, if you and I haven’t heard much of Donilon lately, that’s not an accident; even though he is very ambitious, he has always been a behind-the-scenes player. And he’s been very behind-the-scenes for these past eight months.
I consider Donilon to be the greatest spinner and string-puller working in Washington today, and those talents have been good for his career. He started out as a political hack who then parlayed those talents into a gig that made him millions at Fannie Mae . And while the Fannie scandal has destroyed many Beltway careers, and deservedly so, Donilon managed to worm his way up into the highest rung of US national-security policymaking.
Yet not surprisingly, Donilon’s rise has been terrible for the country. I have warned about Donilon extensively in the past, noting, in particular, his skill as a master-leaker and news master-manipulator. In particular, Donilon has been in the middle of the Stuxnet leaks from last year--the leaks designed to make the Obama administration look tough against Iran. And although many Washington leaders, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein(D-CA) were forthright in expressing their concerns about the leaks, and in suggesting that the White House was involved, nothing happened to anyone in the White House--certainly not Donilon. So perhaps that’s how Donilon developed the hubristic arrogance to think that he could leak and spin anything, even Benghazi.
As an aside, to see Donilon in action, we might take another look at that famous Sit Room photo from May 1, 2011. Look closely at the picture: Who’s the dominant figure? It’s not Obama; he’s hunched down on the side. No, the alpha male in the shot is the bluff fellow in the blue-green shirt, his arms sternly folded across his chest--Tom Donilon. These things don’t happen by accident; it’s Donilon, not the others, who runs the Sit Room, and he is smart enough to know where to stand. Does that seem petty? Sure it does. Is it petty? Sure it is. Welcome to Washington.
However, Donilon’s skills seem to have stopped there, with his ability to look commanding in a photo. By contrast, his command of American foreign policy and national security is considerably weaker--more like atrocious.
Donilon could have gone to the President after Benghazi and suggested that course-correction. Donilon could have said, “Mr. President, the situation has changed. You must face up to the challenge of terror and confront it head on.” Once again, not only would such a new and resolute course of action have been the right thing to do, but it would have proven to be, as a residual result, good politics for Obama, as well. Yet Donilon, whom I have known for 35 years, isn’t that smart. If he ever knew that JFK had said, in the wake of the Bay of Pigs back in 1961, “I am the responsible officer,” he obviously failed to grasp the positive impact of forthright candor.
Lacking any larger vision of his own job, Donilon just defaulted to what he knew best--conniving and cover-upping. And conniving and cover-upping not only for Obama, but also for himself. Instead, he was the offstage orchestra conductor, and the maestro; he orchestrated a campaign to of minimize, marginalize, misdirect, and mislead the country.
Yet even Donilon could also see that the Benghazi cover-story effort was not going to be a particularly happy experience for anyone. And so Donilon himself went underground--a hard feat for a national security adviser. Yet Donilon, the “invisible man” when he wants to be--and with the help of a dependent and subservient press--has so far gotten away with it. Thus it’s Ben Rhodes getting kicked around, not his boss.
If the only issue were who is getting credit when things are good (Donilon and Bin Laden), and discredit when things bad (Rhodes and Benghazi), then West Wing power games would be, well, a somewhat amusing little game.
However, as we know, the stakes are much higher than any mere game, In fact, the echoes between Benghazi and Watergate are eerie, indeed. Yet the stakes are, in fact, much higher because they go to not only the credibility of the presidency, but also to the security of the country.
Yet as we learned in Watergate--or should have learned, anyway--a complicated cover-up conspiracy cannot succeed. So Tom Donilon and his tactics are not only a cancer on the presidency, but they are also, by now, a threat to Obama’s credibility and legacy.
Most of all, though, Donilon and his ways, now metastasized across the federal government, are a threat to the United States of
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/05/13/Don-t-Blow-It-on-Benghazi-The-Focus-Must-Be-Barack-Obama-NOT-Hillary%20Clinton
In Part One of this series, published on Monday, I used the word “Watergate” seven times, openly comparing the scandalous Obama administration to the scandalous Nixon administration.
I didn’t know the half of it.Just hours after Part One ran, we all learned the disturbing news of the rogue Justice Department wiretaps on the Associated Press. Now, even the liberals in the MSM are in an uproar, and the chief target is Attorney General Eric Holder. Former MSNBC anchor David Shuster tweeted, “I want him fired,” and even a veteran liberal such as Esquire’s Charles Pierce agreed: “Holder must go."
Speaking for the prognosticating pundits, Laura Rozen tweeted, “Hard to see how this ends without Holder leaving one way or other.”
Let’s hope, and the sooner the better. Those of us who can’t help thinking about Watergate redux will, of course, be forever comparing Holder to Nixon’s surveillance-crazed attorney general, the notorious and criminal John Mitchell.
Holder has his own long pedigree as a cover-upper, too. Back in the 90s, as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, Holder was in charge of shutting down the investigation of Clinton campaign finance violations. Who can forget all those Chinese agents, Indonesian bankers, and even Buddhist monks who were financing the Clinton re-election campaign with money that came from who-knows-where?
Holder squelched the suggestion of Charles G. LaBella, the leader of the Justice Department anti-corruption task force, to establish an independent counsel to further pursue those cases. LaBella resigned soon thereafter. And for the last four years, Holder has been a similar kind of praetorian guard for this President.
Yet once again, those who seek to know the full truth about what has happened to America during the Obama years need to keep their eye on the key figure. And that key figure is not Eric Holder, any more than it is Hillary Clinton. Instead, the key figure is Barack Obama.
As I put it in the sub-headline of Part One, “The Focus Must Be Obama, Not Clinton.” And so now, in Part Two, I will similarly declare, “The Focus Must Be Barack Obama, Not Eric Holder.” Holder may indeed be another John Mitchell; both Holder and Mitchell were older than the presidents they served--and indeed, Holder and Mitchell had been mentors, respectively, to Obama and Nixon in earlier days. By all accounts, Holder has a close relationship with the President; along with Valerie Jarrett he is in the first circle. And so Obama will miss Holder when he is gone. Of course, in his day, Nixon missed Mitchell, too, but that didn’t stop them from parting, as Mitchell went off to jail.
Yet even if Holder leaves, the problem will stay--because the problem is Obama. As I wrote in Part One, “the ultimate question” is “what did the President know?” And, we might add, when did he know it, and what did he do?
Those were the key questions of Watergate, and they are now the key question in the many facets of what must be called “Obamagate.”
So who is Obama? My answer is that his presence in the White House represents the triumph of Chicago politics. The real Obama found his true calling on the streets of Chicago; he might have said the politically correct words from time to time, but for the most part, his career has been characterized by one thing--ambition. And ambition of a hard-edged and ruthless kind; everyone but himself is expendable.
So the real Obama, is, indeed, a lot like Nixon, hiding his scandals behind the facade of his underlings. Each underling, of course, is a chess piece to be sacrificed as the game might require. Obama, like Nixon before him, has a lot of underlings. Others are starting to see the Nixon-Obama parallelism, too: Yesterday, Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith, a journalist who leans left, published a GIF--a tiny animation--showing Obama morphing into Nixon.
So what is Obamagate? What are its facets? Let’s look at the three main areas in turn:
First, the Associated Press story. Yes, the AP has been identified as the first victim of the Mitchell-ized Holder Justice Department, but it’s a safe bet that more journalistic victims will be identified. As The New York Times makes clear in its report, the fact that the Justice Department won’t answer queries as to whether or not other media outlets were tapped as well speaks volumes. After all, the Times was digging on the very same story, concerning the identification of a Yemeni plot in Spring 2012, aimed at blowing up US passenger jets.
Obviously it’s vital that the US Government maintain its counter-terror effectiveness, but it’s equally obvious that the executive branch must work closely with the coequal legislative branch. And that doesn’t seem to have happened at all; that’s why even Sen. Harry Reid, Obama’s leader in the Senate, would not defend the DOJ actions.
Even more important that Congress, of course, is the law itself. It’s devastatingly obvious that the administration has followed the law... only when it suits them.
Last spring, myriad leaks sprang from the administration; reporters in several publications were suddenly privileged to learn of the marvelous things the Obama administration had been doing to combat terror through drone strikes, to kill Bin Laden, and to stop Iran’s nuclear program. I believe, and have publicly asserted, that Tom Donilon, the national security adviser at the White House, was responsible for these leaks--the leak campaign totally fits his political modus operandi. And I was not alone in that belief.
Still, the leak-campaign seemed to going well for the Obama’s re-election campaign--every day the voters were being reminded that we had strong, effective, and resolute commander-in-chief. But then Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and others pointed out that all these leaks of classified information were endangering American lives and, in fact, undermining the effectiveness of the programs being trumpeted.
Confronted with a backlash against the leak-campaign, Obama called upon--you guessed it--Eric Holder to lead an “investigation” of the leaks. Predictably, nothing much happened with that investigation--at least not before the election.
Now we are learning, of course, that the Justice Department was investigating. But Justice wasn’t investigating, say, Donilon; it was instead investigating the AP. How ‘bout that? Don’t investigate the people dispensing the classified information; instead, investigate those who were receiving it. And the focus of the investigation, it appears, is not Stuxnet or the drones, but rather, the attempted plane-bombing from Yemen.
Indeed, as Fox News pointed out on Tuesday night, John Brennan--then the White House homeland security adviser, now Director of the CIA--was busily briefing reporters on the Yemen success.
In other words, the Obama administration was investigating reporters for digging on the Yemen matter, even as the Obama administration was busy taking credit for the Yemen matter. And they said Nixon was tricky.
Now that’s Nixonian.
Second, the IRS story. The revelation that the IRS has been malevolently targeting conservative groups violates the basic social contract of the country--that we are all treated equally, before the law, and before the tax collectors. Meanwhile The Washington Post reports that the investigation of conservative groups was spread across the agency. It wasn’t just a few bad apples in Cincinnati; Cincinnati is the hub of all these tax-status adjudications, and the work was shared with other offices in two locations in California and the headquarters in D.C. That’s, at least, what we know so far. (Even Jon Stewart can’t defend the Obama administration on this one.)
No doubt more is coming; on Tuesday, the left-leaning investigative group Pro Publica reported that it had been offered confidential tax documents for 31 different conservative groups.
Its seems likely that the IRS knew exactly what it was doing in aiming at the right; it was carrying out the clear wishes from the top of the executive branch. And the proof is in the disparate impact of the IRS investigations. It was groups with “Tea Party” and “Constitution” that were being investigated, not groups with “Green” or “Progressive.”
And while some might stubbornly insist that somehow this disparate impact was just a coincidence, the Obama administration itself argues that disparate impact, which is a legal term of art, is proof of discrimination. According to Eric Holder’s Department of Justice, the numbers themselves prove the case; that is, if the numbers on, say, jobs or contracts show that one group or another is getting less, well, then, case closed.
Yes, Holder & Co. have been pursuing a radical doctrine of numerically presumed guilt on discrimination cases, but who has time to worry about that now, amidst all these other scandals. We can simply say that the disparate impact of the IRS actions clearly shows a discriminatory effect on right-of-center groups.
Yet even as the Obamans pursue their doctrinaire numbers game, we can still think back to instances where they seem to have gone out of their way to hurt enemies and favor friends. For example, remember Frank VanderSloot? He’s the big Romney donor who was audited three times, and he says that he is not the only one.
By contrast, we can compare the VanderSloot case to that of Malik Obama, the President’s half brother. His application for a tax-exemption was approved--by the same Lois Lerner, the senior IRS official at the Cincinnati office in charge of tax-exempt groups--within a month; one observer called it “an unprecedented timeline that stands in stark contrast to conservative organizations who have been waiting for more than three years, in some cases, for approval."
Now that, too, is Nixonian.
To be sure, not everyone sees the IRS story as a big deal. Carl Bernstein was once the lesser half of the Woodward-Bernstein reporting team during Watergate, although he long ago sank into mere hackery. That hackery was on full display Monday, when he told--who else?--MSNBC that he “can’t imagine” that anyone in the White House was involved in the IRS scandal . That’s not exactly the reportorial instinct at work, is it? The old joke for reporters is, “If your mother tells you she’s your mother, double-check her.” Fortunately, Bernstein had the courage to hold the Nixon administration accountable; unfortunately, that courage has now been replaced by sloven sycophancy of Obama.
Third, the Benghazi story. On Monday, Obama declared the Benghazi investigation to be “a political circus” and, indeed, “a sideshow.” Piling on the derisive dismissiveness, he then added, “There’s no there, there.” Listening to Obama, and also to Jay Carney, I am reminded of Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler’s dismissal of Watergate as a “third-rate burglary.”
Benghazi is still the heart of Obamagate, because it reveals so much about the real Barack Obama. So let’s stop looking around at molehills and start staring straight ahead, to the mountains in front of us.
First mountain: Where did the idea that the Mohammed video on YouTube was the cause of Benghazi come from? Whose idea was that? The video is not mentioned in those dozen-times-rewritten talking points--so who put that idea into the mix? We know it didn’t fall from the sky--so who did it?
Second mountain: What was the president doing the night that Americans were dying? As I mentioned in Part One, the absence of any sort of documentation of the President’s whereabouts that night is truly chilling.
In the case of both mountains, we can see that the administration’s true goal seems to be political preservation--make things up if need be and drop them into the narrative; meanwhile, keep the President out of the narrative.
The President and his team clearly believe that they can defend themselves by simply recalling that they did, in fact, mention the “T” word, "terror," here and there in the wake of Benghazi. But that’s like saying that if a defendant in a case said one true thing, then everything he said was true. A single grain of truth in a vast field of mistruths does not make the field honest.
Everyone knows that the message of Susan Rice, et al. was that Benghazi was the unfortunate consequence of something bad, most likely the Mohammed video. As Hillary Clinton said on January 23 in her famous rant, “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?”
What difference does it make? Why does it matter? Why it matters is simple: The truth makes a difference. The truth matters.
So for Carney to keep harping on uses of the word “terror,” is, well, as we Irish say, blarney.
Yet also because I am Irish, I am haunted by tragedy and injustice. A few months ago, I sat in the green room at Fox with Charles Woods, the father of Tyrone Woods, one of the four slain Americans at Benghazi. The elder Mr. Woods recounted for me how at the September 14 service for the four dead at Dover Air Force Base, the President, the Vice President, and Secretary Clinton had all told him, “It’s terrible what happened, and how that terrible video caused it, and we’re gong to get that person who did it!” And now we know it was all invented. A fabricated cover story to get the President over his re-election hump.
Yet the President, Carney, and all their stooges continue to call the Benghazi investigation a “sideshow.”
Okay, so that’s the Obama story, and they’re sticking to it.
Yet others, normally supportive, begged to differ. On Tuesday, The Washington Post awarded the President the high dishonor of “Four Pinocchios” for his Benghazi statements on Monday.
And again, that is Nixonian.
Moreover, the cover-up of Benghazi--and that’s the right word for it--began on September 11, 2012. It was not until September 19, eight long days after Benghazi, that Matt Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center testified that Benghazi had, in fact, been a terrorist attack.
In the meantime, in those days after the 11th, the administration was feverishly writing and rewriting those talking points and doing everything else it could to cover up the truth about the death of Ambassador Stevens and his three heroic defenders.
Clearly, the Obamans were hoping that the furor over Benghazi would cool down. And that was their miscalculation. Even Tom Brokaw, no friend to conservatives, has been moved to observe:
You cannot explain away Susan Rice’s performance on those five Sunday talk shows on September 16, in which she said it was not a terrorist attack and grew out of a domestic demonstration of some kind. She completely underplayed it and rewrote the script.And that, of course, was the administration line: Benghazi was a murky incident, quite possibly caused by that evil Mohammed video on YouTube.
Indeed, everywhere the President went, even after Olsen’s September 19 admission, the President was still pushing the Mohammed video line. Before the whole wide world on September 25, 2012, the President spoke to the United Nations General Assembly and declared, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” In effect, the President was saying that whatever happened at Benghazi was not his fault, or the fault of his administration, but rather the fault of some guy with a camera in California.
Thus we come to a sordid sub-chapter of Benghazi, which is the most dishonorable and most dishonest in which we see that the Obamans were opportunistically eager to scapegoat the maker of that stupid video, one Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, an Egyptian-American Coptic Christian. The Copts, of course, having been oppressed by Islam for more than a thousand years, have plenty of reason to loathe Islam. And whether or not we agree with Nakoula’s views, he has a right to hold them. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote in 1929, “If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought--not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”
Yet of course, to those of a Nixonian cast of mind, First Amendment protections can easily be steamrollered. So the investigative furies descended on Nakoula; he was arrested on September 27, supposedly for violating the terms of his probation (the violation, we might note, was being on the Internet), although it’s fair to say that nobody worried about Nakoula’s digital violations before the video. Nakoula was ultimately sentenced to a year in jail; to this day, he sits in a federal correctional facility in Texas.
Indeed, Nakoula has been the only one punished for what happened in Benghazi that night. More than eight months later, none of the killers have been “brought to justice,” as the President promised.
At the time, many people thought that the Obama administration was simply trying to do everything it could to tamp down anti-American fervor in the Muslim world. Some might have shrugged and thought to themselves, “Well, something had to be done to keep more Americans from being killed. And if this fellow Nakoula is the sacrificial lamb for reasons of national security, so be it.”
Yet of course, no American should be treated that way, for any reason. And so it’s just one more obscene hypocrisy for Carney to prattle on about how the President loves the First Amendment and values an “unfettered media” when, in fact, Nakoula is in fetters for exercising his First Amendment rights.
National Review’s Rich Lowry recently summed up part of the situation in a piece entitled, “The Benghazi Patsy”: “Nakoula deserves a place in American history. He is the first person in this country jailed for violating Islamic anti-blasphemy laws.”
So yes, Nakoula was railroaded into jail for making a video. Yet now we can see that the “blasphemy” charge was a false flag. The assertion that Nakoula needed to be jailed to mollify Muslims was a ruthless diversion from the real mission; the false narrative had to be protected.
The real objective had nothing to do with the safety of Americans or the national security needs of the US, but, rather with the re-election needs of Barack Obama. It wasn’t the Mohammed video had led to the deaths of any Americans in Libya. Now we know that the attack was plotted by Al Qaeda, pure and simple, which had aimed all along to hit the US on the anniversary of 9-11.
As the pollster and strategist for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign which challenged Nixon, I suppose I have a special bias against morally corrupt incumbents who use their power to manipulate and bamboozle the voters. It was during this time last fall that it became clear that I was seeing a replay of the Nixon administration and what I lived through in 1972. Indeed, my own past brushes with the Nixon henchmen were more personal than just the McGovern campaign: It is with pride I can claim to be the youngest person to be named on Nixon’s fabled “enemies list.” That experience taught me to react strongly against anything like that, regardless of party or president.
Back on September 28, for example, I argued:
The administration is hoping that if it can put enough time between the actual events of 9/11/12 and the ultimate public understanding of those events, the impact of the realization--that the US was unprepared for terrorism on an obvious terrorism anniversary--will be thereby softened.And writing about Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, I continued:
Romney could turn this election around if he could go on the offensive on multiple fronts, against Obama supporters in the media, and--even more crucially--against Barack Obama on the Middle East.I further wrote on October 15:
We now know that within minutes of the Benghazi attacks, the Obama administration knew that the attacks were, in fact, acts of terrorism, and not at all mere mob violence. And that’s when the cover-up began; the goal was to kick the can of culpability past Election Day. Unfortunately for the Obamans, they needed a two-month cover-up to get them past November 6, and they got only a one-month cover-up.Despite a steady string of scoops, many of them from Fox News, in October, Romney pulled back in the third debate, letting Obama skate away from his culpability. Romney’s staffers had told him that he was going to win anyway, so why risk looking mean? And with Romney’s dismissal of the Benghazi issue, the mainstream media felt further justified to dismiss Benghazi, too.
Yes, Romney was regrettably craven, and for that, he not only lost an election he could have won, but earned himself permanent ignominy as someone who put political calculation--incorrect political calculation, at that--ahead of his patriotic duty to raise important concerns.
So yes, Obama won his re-election bid. Indeed, he won by a comfortable margin, as the myriad weaknesses of the Republican consultant class--which I detailed at CPAC in March--became glaringly evident. Yet as we can now see, it wasn’t just the incompetence of the Romneyites that was on display; it was also the malevolence of the Obamans--although that was mostly hidden. The administration had managed to keep a lid on three big scandals--wiretapping, IRS, and Benghazi--through Election Day. And so he won re-election, just as Nixon had won, four decades earlier.
Yet as Richard Nixon learned in the wake of his triumphant 1972 re-election--he carried 49 of 50 states that year--victory does not immunize an incumbent from ultimate accountability. Indeed, victory can addle the minds of the victors with hubris and arrogance, making them less able to defend themselves.
We are now seeing an encouraging reality about American politics: No matter how hard you try, no matter how ruthless you might be, you can’t keep a secret. The cover-up might work in the short term, but not for the long term. And that means, as Nixon learned, that even the greatest political victory can turn into ashes--and it can also prove lethal.
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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/05/15/Obamagate-the-Focus-is-Barack-Obama
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