Every day, new revelations come out about what happened at the American consulate in Benghazi on September 11. Each revelation makes the incident more troubling and paints the Obama Administration is an increasingly disturbing light.
We now know that, in the months before the September 11 attack, there were multiple warnings and incidents, at the consulate itself and elsewhere in Benghazi, that made it clear that the area was dangerous and that consulate lacked sufficient security. Why didn’t our government take steps to either significantly beef up security at the compound or remove our Ambassador and the consulate staff from the unsecure area? Given the turmoil in Libya, protecting the security of Americans serving there should have been a high priority, but it obviously wasn’t. The failure to act in response to repeated warnings and prior terrorist activity is astonishingly irresponsible. Why hasn’t anyone in our government been held responsible for the failure to protect our people against a painfully obvious threat?
In addition, the information that has been dribbling out about the incident makes the initial “spontaneous mob” explanation offered by the Obama Administration especially inexplicable. The people involved in the incident itself — from the State Department people who were following the incident in real time, to the people who received the frantic phone calls and messages from consulate personnel, to the military personnel and intelligence operatives who apparently tried to respond — understood that the incident was a planned and coordinated terrorist attack, not a reaction to a YouTube video about Mohammed. Indeed, there was no apparent factual basis for believing the attack was an angry response to an obscure video. So why did the YouTube video ever get blamed for the incident? Who pushed the YouTube video story, instead of telling us the truth?
Today Kish and I watched Meet the Press, and we shook our heads when the Obama Administration spokesman tried to reassure us that the investigation of the incident is proceeding. Really? It’s been two months since four Americans were murdered, apparently needlessly. Does it really take so long to figure out why warnings weren’t heeded, and who made the decision to ignore them? And how can it possibly take two months to determine who came up with the phony YouTube video explanation for the carnage? If our government can’t move more nimbly than this, what does it tell you about the capabilities of our government?
I hate to think that, with the election now only two days away, the Obama Administration is stonewalling and trying to run out the clock on a terrible failure that produced four dead Americans. However, I’ve heard no other reasonable explanation for the fact that the Administration has not moved aggressively and quickly to figure out what happened, tell the American people the truth, and take whatever steps are necessary to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. Is there another explanation?
Unfortunately, the situation that produced Akin’s Waterloo — where one public figure sits down with one reporter to answer questions — happens all too rarely these days. How often do political figures even appear on shows like Meet The Press? Rather than a Senator, foreign leader, or some other actual public servant, the guest often is a campaign manager or other unelected individual who is there to voice the talking points of a particular candidate, campaign, or party. Moreover, much of such shows is devoted to “roundtable discussions” where celebrity journalists who never have done much real reporting express their opinions about the “issues of the day.” No doubt the producers of those Sunday morning shows think the arguments that ensue make for “better television” than the Meet The Press format of the ’60s, where a panel of three serious, gray-suited reporters respectfully fired questions at that week’s guest.
To illustrate the point, consider the first Meet The Press that aired after Mitt Romney selected Paul Ryan as his running mate. The two “newsmaker” guests were Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Obama campaign guru David Axelrod, followed by a panel of journalists arguing about the impact of “Obamacare” and Ryan’s proposed budget on Medicare. Does anyone really expect much in the way of “news” (or enlightenment, for that matter) from such a lineup? Given the focus on Medicare, rather than featuring an ever-present hired gun like Axelrod or a tiresome panel of TV personalities, how about bringing in the chief actuary of the Medicare program, or one of the Medicare trustees, and have knowledgeable reporters who cover Medicare ask them some meaningful questions about the programs, its condition, and the expected impact of the competing proposals?
Of course, it’s too much to expect that any political debate these days could be done at a reasonable decibel level, without yelling or over-the-top metaphors. Nevertheless, I thought the discussion (if you can call it that) itself said something about the selection of Ryan. Rather than arguing about whether the pick would help Romney politically in this state or with that constituency, the commentators were talking about something of actual substance — the budget, our debt problems, and how we deal with them. How refreshing it would be if this election actually involved consideration of those crucial, meat-and-potatoes issues, rather than phony, grossly overheated topics like whether the evil Bain Capital caused a woman to die of cancer!
