Between President Obama and CNN’s Candy Crowley, Tuesday night’s debate seemed to “confirm” a blatant, provable falsehood — that Obama has always called the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others in Libya last month an act of terrorism.
Please.
Let’s review: After a brief statement deploring the loss of life on Sept. 12, Obama and his flunkies (Press Secretary Jay Carney, UN Ambassador Susan Rice) put on a prolonged full-court press to convince the American people that an obscure You Tube video, “Innocence of Muslims” — which had been out for months — was the cause of a wave of violence that swept the Islamic world on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, including the Benghazi attack.
Rice made a sweep of the Sunday shows a few days later to argue that an “insult” to Islam’s prophet was the cause of all the carnage across the region. Quoth she: “This is a response to a hateful and offensive video that was widely disseminated throughout the Arab and Muslim world.” Carney parroted similar nonsense.
Obama himself even went on the David Letterman show to retell the same falsehood, then doubled down with a speech at the United Nations in which he intoned: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”
But the video had nothing to do with the Benghazi attack, and everybody knew it, including the intelligence community and Hillary Clinton’s State Department.
The past couple of weeks have seen official Washington consumed by a blame game as Obama desperately tried to get the buck to stop anywhere but the Oval Office. Even Clinton’s consequence-free acceptance of “responsibility” for the lack of security at the Benghazi compound hasn’t stopped the bleeding.
So now, it seems, Obama has simply flushed the whole mess down the memory hole and — brazenly — is peddling the notion that he called it terrorism from the start.
True, near the end of his Rose Garden remarks, Obama said: “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.” But he said it in the context of praising all those who serve their country in dangerous spots abroad — not as a reference to the slaughter in Benghazi.
Far more germane is what Obama said before that: “Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others.” What could that possibly refer to except the video?
But in Democrat-Media land, all that matters is that the magic word “terror” came out of the president’s mouth. And Crowley couldn’t wait to choke off whatever response Romney was about to give by saying Obama was correct.
The final debate on Monday, moderated by CBS’s Bob Schieffer, will focus on foreign policy — which means that Benghazi and the administration’s inept handling of it will be back. And this time, Obama won’t have Candy Crowley to block for him.