Some of you have made mention of this, as have I, but let’s just see if we can’t crystalize our thoughts: The paper of record: 93 front page stories on Valerie Plame. 32 straight days of front page stories on Abu Ghraib. And yet, none as of yet on the Benghazi cover-up (post “blame the insensitive filmmaker for his hideous deployment of a dated First Amendment”). Just to put the Libya murders of 4 Americans, including two SEALs and an ambassador, into context.
As of this writing, Harvey Weinstein and Kat Bigalow have yet to announce a forthcoming fawning feature film on the incident. But that’s probably only because they haven’t yet figured out a way to spin it as a “gutsy call” on the part of Obama and Panetta to do the unpopular thing — unpopular, and yet right and gutsy — and let our property be overtaken and our diplomatic and security forces attacked and killed for the Greater Good.
Something about, say, the massive expenditure of lead bullets and the effect of such an ecological assault on a fragile ecosystem already besieged by global climate change might sell, for instance. Plus, by letting four die, Obama cut C02 production, as well!
I mean, do you like storms like Hurricane Sandy, which are no doubt a direct result of cow farts, lead bullets, spilled milk, coal mining, and giant 20+ ounce sodas?
Why, far from being a dereliction of duty, what we have here is a President willing to make the tough calls to save the earth itself. We should all be thankful, not indignant.
So. How dare you!
Lightbulb, Harvey. Let’s do lunch, whaddya say,?
Why, far from being a dereliction of duty, what we have here is a President willing to make the tough calls to save the earth itself. We should all be thankful, not indignant.
Bastard said he’d make the seas recede. Screw him.
Already linked in another post, but methinks Jonah doth protest too much.
I don’t understand your point, Jeff. When has Hollywood ever wanted to make a movie about the heroic, common man fighting against corrupt, power hungry “Fuck the eggs, bring on the omelets,” politicians?
Aren’t they usually busy making pro-Big oil movies?
Kevin Drum has (surprise!) written several articles for Mother Jones to the effect that this is a whole lot of nothing.
So far, Drum has spent a whole lot more time denying than reporting. It’s kind of…unseemly, even for someone who writes for Mother Jones.
Oh, and he conducts a reader poll. Which is always great.
Drumkopf is one of the reasons I stopped using my first name in the blogosphere.
McGehee, no worries there. Drum could never wear a cowboy hat correctly. He’d try to do it ironically and fail spectacularly.
People who save money on their car insurance with Geico are pretty happy.
How happy are they?
As happy as Paul Krugman after a major storm kills 30 people and does maybe $100 billion dollars in damage.
Well, he has advocated for such nonsense.
Leigh, the only way to wear a cowboy hat ironically is to wear it unironically.
Ironic, isn’t it?
Very. Drum would never understand, bless his heart.
– Maybe the word you’re looking for is juantily McGehee.
– Jauntily on a metrosawzual twit like Drum would project about the same level of manliness as a tutu and ballet slippers on a rodeo clown.
BBH, are you implying Drum is just a Coca-Cola cowboy?
Nope, nor even jauntily. There are a lot of ways to wear a cowboy hat jauntily, and many more ways to wear it unjauntily. Some are ironic and others are not. None of them would work for the Drumkopf, since none are appropriate for a ten-gallon hat on a three-teaspoon head.
The media’s combination of burying valuable news and over-hyping contrived/partisan news (Palin inspired the AZ shooter!1!1!) has gotten worse than I ever could have imagined. I now don’t think it can be changed, I think the NYT, NBC News, etc. will have to go the way of Newsweek.
As for Hollywood, they are similarly incapable of making a straight-forward movie about America’s military heroism (they can only get it right in sci-fi flicks like Serenity). Instead, it is left to outsiders like the guys that made “Act of Valor,” complete with actual SEALs as actors (as stiff as they were, they were a hell of a lot more believable than those tiny, pretty boys Hollywood keeps giving us). Marcus Luttrell’s “Lone Survivor” was an amazing book, but I’m concerned about how the movie version will twist it into another anti-war movie.
Anybody reckon that one day it will dawn on people that “rebuilding” the beach after every storm that passes by wrecking the beach isn’t a good use of public money? It’s hard to understand how the idea slips by unseen year after year.
I don’t care if they want to rebuild the beach as long as they don’t take my money to do it or force me to go into greater debt for their benefit and their benefit alone.
Especially since there aren’t alot of 47%ers what live on the beach.
bang the drum slowly
When we had our house in Stone Harbor, NJ, each year the shoreline was rebuilt a little bit by dredging the ocean floor and spreading the sand around. In fact, a fairly long spur of beach was made of dredged sand that you could practically sit and watch erode away.
A lot of Lower Manhattan is reclaimed ground from the sea, too. Looking at old maps of NYC, I was stunned at how much of the island is built on fills.
I’m somewhat ashamed of myself, but I’ve gone full tinfoil hat on this one. I’m starting to believe that the 30 who got rescued were _supposed_ to become hostages. So that there could be a quick arms for hostages deal and a pre-election bounce.
I clearly need a drink.
You need to read TheUlstermanReport.com. Tin-foilers abound.
In what parallel universe does an arms for hostages or a a blind sheik for a gay ambassador swap result in a pre-election bounce for Obama?
I think they were all supposed to be dead and we would have never heard of the annex. And our poor, poor ambassador, his young IT guy, their five security people, just overwhelmed by locals who were driven to fury by that horrible twisted film. We should pass some new laws to make sure things like that never happen again. The Chris Stevens Fairness in Speech and Thought Act of 2013. Because it’s the right thing to do.
Obama probably thought, Benghazi will be to the 1st as F&F is to the 2nd. What, you think these people ever have an original idea? Nah, like their Hollywood buddies they recycle, endlessly.
That only makes marginally more sense to me geoffb.
Frankly it’s nice to know we have a CIA presence somewhere in North Africa.
I still go with the simplest solution, the attack was totally unexpected and they were paralyzed by fear of doing something wrong.
To be a little more clear.
Going over things that I “know” as well as I can know at this time about the events in Benghazi I put the question to myself, “What if everyone obeyed the ‘order to stand down'”?
Around the consulate the Libyan 17th February militia was involved in a long range firefight with the Ansar al-Shariah militants but was not trying to retake the consulate but merely to contain the militants and perhaps cause them to disperse.
Only when the 6 man team from the annex showed up determined to enter did they attempt to rescue those within and even then they were the ones urging that the rescue be cut short before the Ambassador was found due to taking fire while doing the rescue attempt.
No criticism of the 17th group as they were not the ones with lives on the line as their guys got beaten bloody but were released and they did join in at both places when asked (shamed in) to.
Without that rescue run the militants would have stayed longer, they seemed to have faded away after the rescuers left, and inevitably all our people at the compound would have been killed or have been captured to be killed later on video. Even the Ambassador if he had been found alive by the attackers not the Military police guy and the looters later.
So at the consulate, all dead and what happened would have no one from our side to tell about it who wasn’t completely under control of the Obama administration except local Libyans who could be dismissed as sources. As to the annex…
One thing I notice is that the plane and the 8 Marines from Tripoli didn’t leave Tripoli until after the consulate rescue was complete and the rescuers had returned to the annex. That says to me that they might never have come been ordered to come at all unless that rescue team went out and came back with those from the consulate.
The rescuers came back around 11 pm and the Marines arrived at the Benghazi airport at 2 am from a plane trip that was about an hour and a half. This makes me think that the rescue success led to this action as why wouldn’t the embassy have sent them back when the attack started at 9:40 pm in which case they would have been there by 11 pm or so? My thinking is that the “stand down” order prevented it but was relaxed a bit, shamed into action?, when the rescue attempt was successful.
Without that what would have been the fate of the annex too? Where would they have gone? They had no airplane as that had been taken away months before. Without the rescue would the 17th group have even come to the annex as they didn’t know where it was? The Marines when they came had only a GPS coordinate not an address. Though the annex was more heavily defended against mortars it would have become a death trap too. One we would likely never have even heard of if both places were wiped out unless the militants decided to crow about killing those evil CIA people.
What I’m seeing is that that one action, one that was ordered to not happen, we likely would be in the dark about much of this and out of that ignorance the Obama administration could perhaps spin some tale, some lie, that made Obama out as having heroically worked to prevent this but he just couldn’t find a way against an overwhelming and unforeseen attack.
I think Weinstein/NatGeo’s OBL propaganda hit piece this weekend will back fire, big time, as people see what should/could have been done in #Benghazi.
Karma is a bitch.