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| Home Front: Politix |
| Belmont Club: Offscreen |
| 2014-04-30 |
| But the lie about Benghazi is actually the good news. The bad news is the ignorance it implies about our understanding of the entire direction of Obma's foreign policy. There must be a shadow policy from the fact that a cover legend exists. We are like British children before D-Day who climb into a field full of Sherman tanks to find they are actually rubber decoys. So where are the real tanks? Or are there any? The public still doesn't know what America's foreign policy has been these last five years, a situation analogous to a pilot tapping on the gauges of the instrument panel halfway through a transoceanic flight only to see the pointers line up limply with the ground. The passengers must now accept the dials aren't hooked up to anything. The hope is that Captain Obama and First Officer Biden actually have a backup set of dials somewhere. That they secretly know what they're doing. But the data shown on the dashboard is just dummy. What is worse, the second bit of really bad news is that the deceit was a conspiracy. The disinformation effort was intentional on order of the White House. Susan Rice was sent out, papers were shopped, talking points were broadcast in a concerted effort to mislead the public. And conspiracy adds up to malice. Up to this point it has been possible to argue that Obama was merely inept, blundering from one disaster to the other. But here is bad faith, pure and simple. He may still be inept, but the emails suggest he is also malicious. It's interesting to re-watch the Romney debate knowing what we know now. Obama knew at this point that the the misdirection program was in train. He was setting Romney in the debate up, with the willing or unwilling help of Candy Crowley, to push a lie. There he was smiling and triumphantly gloating, and all the time it was fake. These two factors taken together mean that the public may not simply be ignorant of the true purposes of the Libyan operation, but also potentially everything the president has been negotiating, including Ukraine, arms control or the war on terror. If the Libya narrative is crooked, what else is bent? How do you bound the liability? To steal a tagline from the 2014 Godzilla movie, we are like the Bryan Cranston character, who suspects something very horrible is out there in the Pacific deeps but unable to guess its true nature. You're not fooling anybody when you say that what happened was a natural disaster. You're lying! You're hiding something out there! It was not an earthquake, it wasn't a typhoon ... you have no idea what's coming ... and it is going to send us back to the stone age.The Obama administration's foreign policy is falling apart before the public in near real time. One by one the initiatives are winking out like lights on the same circuit, as if the secret infrastructure of the administration's policies are unraveling and pulling down each other. Just now US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt warned Russia that troop movements into Ukraine "would lead to tragic consequences." One again, another Red Line just waiting to get crossed has been indifferently drawn, this time in the heart of Europe. At first glance, this sounds like tough talk. In essence, Pyatt seems to be telling Moscow, "if you invade, U.S. troops will stop you." And certainly, with 600 U.S. troops already moved into Poland and the Baltic states, things could get ugly. But the statement was rather cryptic. How would the U.S. respond? With military force, more diplomatic maneuvers, or more sanctions? And invasion would lead to tragic consequences for whom?Nobody knows what Pyatt's warning means, possibly not even the Russians, for whom the message was meant. Possibly Pyatt doesn't know what it means either. Maybe it's just something Ben Rhodes told Pyatt to say. But if Glenn Reynolds is right, the American political system is helpless in the grip of these pilots with the fake readouts, like being in a nightmare where it is impossible to flee from the approaching danger. Whatever befall, nobody can impeach Obama nor it seems, can anyone persuade him to resign. The world -- or the US at least -- is condemned to be to chained to the spot while whatever horror is out there lurking in the deeps wades monstrously out of the water. Only when we see it come into the light will we know what we're facing and not before. I don't have time to embed all the links, but that's the core of the piece, in light of the earlier bit about imeachment. In order to do any good we'd have to impeach 60 million people. |
| Posted by:Thing From Snowy Mountain |
| #4 Dude,when it comes to the Obamination, it's question marks all the way down. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2014-04-30 14:57 |
| #3 "But the statement was rather cryptic." Diplomatic statements are supposed to be cryptic. Diplomats and like scoundrels ply their trade in ambiguity, smokescreens and mirrors. Mr. Kerry's recent attempt to force a Neville Chamberlain moment ignored the above, and the price has only begun to be paid. |
| Posted by: Uncle Phester 2014-04-30 14:57 |
| #2 The thing is most people knew it was fake and it still went forward and there will be no real repurcussions until the next election (if then). Shamless lies and brass balls were how Clinton defeated the impeachment. He taught his party well. The left rarely holds their own accountable, and when they do it is rarely for long. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2014-04-30 14:48 |
| #1 BTW, none of those question-mark symbols showed up when I did a preview before posting. |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2014-04-30 12:06 |