Hey, He Lied...

...but Charles, he's getting away with it...

Translation: They were never really serious about Afghanistan. (Nor apparently about Iraq either. Gates recounts with some shock that Hillary Clinton admitted she opposed the Iraq surge for political reasons, and Obama conceded that much of the opposition had indeed been political.)

The Democratic mantra — Iraq War, bad; Afghan War, good — was simply a partisan device to ride anti-Bush, anti-Iraq War feeling without appearing squishy. Look, they could say: We’re just being tough and discriminating. Iraq is a dumb war, said Obama repeatedly. It’s a war of choice. Afghanistan is a war of necessity, the central front in the war on terror.

Having run on that, Obama had a need to at least make a show of trying to win the good war, the smart war. “If I had ever come to believe the military part of the strategy would not lead to success as I defined it,” writes Gates. “I could not have continued signing the deployment orders.” The commander in chief, Gates’s book makes clear, had no such scruples.

Yep, duh. And Secretary Gates comes off looking like he just fell off the turnip truck at 70 expressing shock that Obama would not feel any passion about Afghan.  Most of us in the blogosphere knew the liberals were playing politics with national security back in 2004 and would do or say anything when Dr. Dean started the "Bush lied" meme. Obama was just the culmination of the grand plan to grab back power.


And yes, Mr. Austin Bay, you write a very good expose about Benghazi, speculating in all the right areas...

From the get-go, many of us didn't buy this crock. For starters, it leveraged several shop-worn left-wing "blame America" tropes, including that Americans are anti-Muslim bigots. The hooey was also at odds with on-the-ground reports, which emerged immediately after the horror. Pro-U.S. Libyans had warned that a well-armed militant Islamist militia intended to launch attacks in Benghazi. Granular reports of an extended firefight between the militiamen and a U.S. security element proved to be very accurate.

History has substantiated the heroism of former U.S. Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty as fact. They resisted for over six hours before being killed by enemy mortar fire. Ah, yes, peaceful demonstrators impulsively employing heavy infantry weapons. According to the now-available congressional transcripts, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey (after speaking with AFRICOM commander General Carter Ham) informed President Barack Obama that the consulate had suffered a terror attack.

Panetta and Dempsey told the president within an hour after the first assault began. Yet Obama Administration officials continued to peddle the "video did it" canard for almost two weeks after the assault. Why peddle a blatant falsehood? Because "the video did it" narrative advanced a propaganda campaign supporting central Obama re-election political themes. Obama claimed his presidency would dramatically change Arab Muslim perceptions of America. Though he never equated killing Osama bin Laden with defeating al-Qaida, he implied al-Qaida was fading fast. The Benghazi disaster countered these touts. Obama had to leave the American public with the definite impression that the Benghazi assault was spontaneous. Why, that nasty video incited inexplicable anger!

All of which should be obvious to just about anyone with a political brain, including most MSM reporters. Which means they don't want to consider it because of the damage it could do.  Some are even reporting on how Fox is covering it wrong instead of actually digging for any stories.  Meanwhile the same reporters speculate wildly about Christie's Bridgegate. They couldn't telegraph their bias any better with a skywriter.  Oh, and yes, Fox News is biased to the right, but they owe their very existence to the mainstream bias.

Hey, how about Snoop-gate? NSA-gate? No, there will be no 'gates' for Obama except Professor Henry Gates, which was the first look into our social justice president's true mind after the election (Joe the Plumber was our first true glimpse beforehand and look what happened to him).  The constitutional scholar president who campaigned on Bush's trashing of the Constitution, in part due to NSA surveillance, actually made it worse in 2011 before anyone was looking:

What had not been previously acknowledged is that the court in 2008 imposed an explicit ban — at the government’s request — on those kinds of searches, that officials in 2011 got the court to lift the bar and that the search authority has been used.

Tomorrow he will do what he always does--give a speech. That will satisfy most of the media with the exception of Greenwald and maybe Fox News.  A real media might connect some dots between Robert Gates' revelations, Dr. Krauthammer's assessment of fighting the 'good war' along the 'central front in the War on Terror' in Afghanistan, and the New York Times' recent apologia explaining how becoming president steeled Obama's spine with each PDB, and maybe question what the hell is actually going on.

For instance, they could question why we need more NSA snooping to protect us from terrorists while the administration downplays the terror threat, saying we might leave Afghanistan if there's no deal with Karzai.  They could question why we have no intention of sending troops back to Iraq or Syria to fight affiliates of AQ, which we're being told are somehow different than  "core AQ", while at the same time sending troops to Africa to look for Joseph Kony.   But they already know the answers. 

Finally, Obamacare. Not only did he outright lie to the public about keeping their plans and doctors, now it appears he is lying about how many have signed up for Medicaid:

Essentially, then, it is ridiculous to suggest, as the @BarackObama tweet does, that the people who have selected a health plan in the exchanges are in anyway equivalent to the 3.9 to 4.2 million who were deemed eligible for Medicaid.

After all that, along with the IRS, AP and Rosen snooping issues, a competent media might be wondering if this president can be trusted on anything for the next three years. The polls would say maybe not.  Swap political affiliations and how would the coverage be going now?  But the media helped him get elected, twice, so there's no going back now.  Attacking him (as they would attack Christie) is in effect an attack on themselves.   So he's getting away with things.   But for most of them, if we could see their journolist communications, probably think things are going well right now.