Summaries of the Benghazi incident... is this really Obama's doctrine?

If you get your news from CNN, Jon Stewart, the NY Times, or any other MSM media outlet, you probably don't know much about Benghazi... and, whatever you know, you're probably having a hard time figuring out why some people keep talking about it.

In case you need a bit of catching up, here are two relatively up to date summaries (one more sanitized than the other):

Benghazi: Obama's Actions Amount To A Shameful Dereliction Of Duty

Peter Ferrara, 10/25/2012 @ 9:19AM 

"Enough facts are in the public record about the Benghazi murders of Libyan Ambassador Chris Stevens and 3 others, including two Marines, that a final judgment can be rendered on President Obama’s handling of the affair.  Obama’s actions, or inactions, amounted to dereliction of duty, and worse."

Benghazi Timeline: The long road from "spontaneous protest" to premeditated terrorist attack

Eugene Kiely, October 26, 2012 at FactCheck.org


We cannot say whether the administration was intentionally misleading the public. We cannot prove intent. ... [But] we do know that Obama and others in the administration were quick to cite the anti-Muslim video as the underlying cause for the attack...[,] they were slow to acknowledge it was a premeditated terrorist attack, and they downplayed reports that it might have been.



Note that even FactCheck.org can't get the lipstick on this pig!

I've already commented on the fact that there were American assets in place that were refused permission to defend Ambassador Stevens and his team.  We still don't know exactly who the feckless coward is that couldn't authorize every available means to defend these Americans... and MSM sure isn't asking.

Now, though, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is digging the Obama team an even bigger hole.  Here's Panetta's summary of why no help was ordered:

"(The) basic principle is that you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on; without having some real-time information about what’s taking place,” Panetta told Pentagon reporters. “And as a result of not having that kind of information, the commander who was on the ground in that area, Gen. Ham, Gen. Dempsey and I felt very strongly that we could not put forces at risk in that situation." 

I have a feeling that the idea of sitting on our hands while allowing an attack to proceed until we know "what's taking place" would surprise most Marines, Rangers, and Special Forces.  But then, Jonah Goldberg has pretty well covered how utterly ridiculous this statement is...

But let's think about this for a moment... is this really Obama's doctrine?  Let people die while the administration and DOD struggle to get their glasses on straight?  Wait to order up a defense until we've got all the details on any attack?  If Obama's defense establishment was so parallelized by this Benghazi incident, what would they look like during a larger crisis?  No wonder they thought going after bin Laden was some kind of gutsy call!

October Surprise: Hurricane Sandy

Will Hurricane Sandy be Obama's "McCain and the financial crisis" moment... or Romney's?

In 2004, McCain, thinking that the financial crisis was a big deal (it was) and that being Presidential meant running around with your head cut off, suspended his campaign and rushed back to Washington to... basically do nothing.  Obama, by contrast, kept on keeping on with his attacks on McCain, and ultimately just parroted Congressional Dems on the crisis.

Real crises are difficult beasts for politicians in the middle of a major race, let alone right at the end.  My sense is that Romney's steady, focused approach (combined with Chris Christie's presence as Governor of the state about to be the coming ashore point of Sandy!) gives him a leg up on Obama.  Obama is already reportedly planning a visit to FEMA headquarters... I'm guessing this'll appear to be exactly what it is:  posturing by getting in the way of the people actually doing the work.

That said, both candidates better tread lightly.....

Which brings us to what people along the heavily populated east coast between Virginia and Long Island should do...  Sitting well in the heartland of America behind an entire mountain range, I can afford to prognosticate.  And the National Hurricane Center's website is great for prognosticating.

That said, my take is that the wind will definitely knock out lots of power.  The rain will result in plenty of local flooding.  But neither of these effects will be a huge deal.  The thing that I think deserves some looking at, is the NHC's storm surge predictions.  It's the storm surge that overwhelmed New Orleans, and it'll be the storm surge that will really inundate low-lying communities... e.g., like large portions of Manhattan.

Bloomberg has closed the subway, and ordered evacuations of the lowest areas of the NYC.  Only time will tell the ultimate outcome.  For the time being, if your on the east coast, get stuff to higher floors, get ready to be without power, and, if you're in a storm-surge susceptible area: get out. 

"Out of the Mainstream", Weekend reads II

In this edition:

• Romney's tax policy is actually great policy, and good politics... that's why Obama is struggling to take it down no matter what.
• The WSJ climbs on my Federalism band wagon!
• Another reason Obama's "Horses and bayonets" sneer is full of holes
• Can the philosophical origins of modern economic malaise be laid at the feet of modern consumerist narcissism?

WSJ: Romney's Tax Deduction Cap: Good Tax Policy, Better Politics

Linked 10/20/2012 by Paul L. Caron at TaxProf Blog

"[D]etails aside, the tax cap is a big idea, and potentially a very good one. The proposal makes economic sense to the extent that it helps to pay for lower marginal tax rates. ...

The idea may be even better politically."

Plenty of Debates, Not Much About States

Democrats regard federalism as quaint, Republicans at least pay lip service to it.

David B. Rivkin and Elizabeth Price Foley, October 23, 2012

"The idea that the Constitution grants only limited and enumerated powers and leaves the remainder to the states is foreign to those who believe that the national government should or even could address voters' every concern. But contrary to the view widely shared by the political class, Washington—in particular, Congress—does not have the power to pass any law it wants in the name of the 'general welfare.'"

Holes in the Hull 

Liberals confuse sneering for intellectual confidence.

By Jonah Goldberg, OCTOBER 26, 2012 12:00 A.M.

"This struck me as an example of how thoroughly liberalism has confused sneering for intellectual confidence. It shouldn't be surprising, given that comedy shows often substitute for news programs, particularly for younger liberals. That's probably why the president has been spending more time talking to DJs, entertainment shows, and comedians than to reporters. He desperately needs the support of low-information voters, who've replaced the old adage 'it’s funny because it's true' with 'if it's funny, it must be true.'"

Guest Post: Narcissism, Consumerism And The End Of Growth

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/20/2012 10:16 -0400 at ZeroHedge

"We need a third way that offers people work, resilience and authentic meaning. In my view, that cannot come from the Central State or the global corporate workplace: it can only come from a relocalized economy in revitalized communities."

We let them die, let the killers get away, then lied about what happened.

"What this means is that we have the forces in the air and on the ground to have stopped the attack at any point, eliminating the terrorists and saving American lives."

AC-130U Gunship was On-Scene in Benghazi, Obama Admin Refused to Let It Fire

Bob Owens - October 26, 2012 - 9:50 am


The AC-130U is a very effective third-generation fire-support aircraft, capable of continuous and extremely accurate fire onto multiple targets....

It was purpose-built for a select number of specific mission types, including point-defense against enemy attack. It was literally built for the kind of mission it could have engaged in over Benghazi, if the administration had let it fire. 

CIA operators were denied request for help during Benghazi attack, sources say

By Jennifer Griffin - October 26, 2012



"...an urgent request from the CIA annex for military back-up during the attack on the U.S. consulate and subsequent attack several hours later on the annex itself was denied by the CIA chain of command -- who also told the CIA operators twice to "stand down" rather than help the ambassador's team when shots were heard at approximately 9:40 p.m. in Benghazi on Sept. 11. "


Maybe there were military or diplomatic reasons to allow the attack to proceed unhindered.  But then why did Obama and his surrogates continue to claim that the problem was free speech??  This was an attack on America, entirely unrelated to some specific expression of free speech.

An American ambassador was murdered, American forces refused to intervene, and the American President went to the UN and told the world that he believes in free speech... unless it pisses off Muslims, and, therefore, though murder is terrible, the people who really need to change their ways are those that speak ill of Muhammed.

Amazing.

"Attacking me is not an agenda..."

The narrative has slipped away from Obama... which means the attacks are just going to get increasingly shrill and hysterical.

This is a pretty good line from Romney:



But more revealing is how far out of Obama's control the overall narrative has swung.  Reading through the static, it appears Team Obama is now desperately trying to build a "Romney as flip-flopper" narrative.  This is completely reactionary as Obama reels from the discovery by everyday Americans that Romney isn't the psychotic, "imprison-women-in-the-1950s", "Ebeenezer-Scrooge-what-are-the-poor-houses-full?" monster Obama and the MSM have been making him out to be.

The flip-flopper approach is also unlikely to hold water as Romney increasingly focuses past Obama and continues to lock in on actual ideas and policies.  Every day Romney spends talking about what he'll do when he's President while Obama shrilly (literally--have you listened to his voice when he gets himself worked up into attack-attack-attack mode?) and derisively attacks Romney (instead of talking about his own ideas) is a win for Romney.

E.J. Dionne captures the overall meme nicely.  This article is a complete mess--it's not even internally consistent (is the tea party dead, or is it just marching under a "false flag"?)--but it nicely demonstrates how the "flip-flopper" line boils down to the fact that Romney has never been what the lefties have claimed he is.  As this becomes clear to America, those ensconced in the liberal narrative are left spluttering "Romney has changed his stripes."  Hilariously enough, it was those same lefties, hoping to bring Romney down in the GOP primaries, that so relished exposing Mitt's moderate positions in an effort to scare off the same tea partiers that Dionne incoherently dismisses.

In any case, as the narrative continues to drift away from Obama, I can guarantee that the attacks will get more outlandish and shrill.  Should be a fun ride.

We interrupt this narrative...

Everybody loves a good zinger... right?

#Narrativefail.

Full version.

Regarding Federalism...

Will we be a free people, warts and all, or will we empower an over-class to force those who disagree with us to behave as we want?

A friend of mine commented on my recent abortion posting, saying, in part:

[Return control of abortion policy to s]tates and local communities? That would be the worst. At the federal level there is a much better chance that the extremes even out. The smaller the unit, the larger the outliers can get. Do I want politicians, such as Todd Akin and Paul Broun, or worse, the people who elect them, decide such important questions? No, thanks... We would still have segragation if it was up to some "local communities"…

So much of this is opposite my entire philosophy of government!  On the one hand, my friend says "Do I want politicians… decid[ing] such an important question? No[.]" But, paradoxically, he says this in support of an argument that the distant federal government should, in fact, decide such an important question!

For me, if government is going to decide an important and controversial issue, then the government deciding said issue should be the most responsive and most accessible to me.  By every metric, this means local government.  The proportional value of my vote, my contribution dollars, my time, and my actual voice are all orders of magnitude more important and influential in a local election than in even a state election.

We sometimes miss this point, that we truly have influence in local elections, because our media is almost entirely focused on national politics.  Often we do not even know the names of our local politicians.  But even today, they have immense influence on our everyday lives, and, by the way, they live in our very own communities and neighborhoods.  Unlike national- or even state-level politicians, we can actually talk with our local politicians.

Beyond this, note how my friend seeks to use government:  to "even out" extremes.  Do you understand what that means?  The idea is to use central control to achieve some kind of normalized universal outcome, and enforce that across the entire populace.  Such a result minimizes individual liberty, and maximizes government power and control by setting up some kind of arbiter, I assume majoritarianism (pure democracy), interpreted, presumably, by some all powerful professional bureaucracy.  This bureaucracy would necessarily be distant and deaf to anything I (or you) would have to say, and would be held in thrall (as national politics is today) to the large, organized special interests (labor, corporations, etc.).

In contrast, I hold as ideal a place where the patchwork of local personalities results in a patchwork of local law and conditions.  This maximizes individual freedom, ensuring that the most people possible would live under the policy they agreed with, and, most importantly, maximizing the influence and importance of individual citizens (you and me) in determining policy.

This difference is easily examined!  The central control vision seeks something akin to a strong centralized EU, where a patchwork of nations is subsumed into a bland and culture-less whole.  My friend, I must admit, argues this, in part from personal experience, as he has seen how allowing localities to do as they please can result in terrible outcomes for people locked in repressive enclaves.  But there is the crux of it.  In my ideal federal nation, ones ability to move and shift between localities is unfettered.  Unlike the Europe of old where national boundaries not only marked huge differences in policy, but also represented almost insurmountable barriers for the average citizen to move across, I envision a world in which a move to the next locality over would be trivial and common place.

Where as advocates of central control seek an authority to achieve normalized outcomes by fiat or dictate (on the basis of majoritarianism or not), I seek to allow free people to achieve normalized outcomes by free choice.  It's like gas stations.  Why don't you see individual gas stations charging crazy prices?  Because they know you can just go down the street to another gas station.  The same would be true of laws.  Would there be variation?  Yes.  Variation to things that you or I would find unacceptable?  Sure.  But this would be a good thing… because then both you and I, and those whom we disagree with on various issues could all live in maximum freedom--they under laws we cannot accept, and we under other laws.

This is not some utopian vision.  It is a real and present vision that has been operative in this country for generations.  True, since the founding, the lazy expedient of surrendering local control (and therefore local responsibility) to increasingly distant and faceless higher government has eviscerated entire swaths of federalism, we know that it works.  We live it (still) every day.

On the issue of abortion, we will never all agree. Any "normalized national outcome" will always be anathema to half (or more) of the population.  There is a better, freer way.  Stop trying to dictate the un-agreeable from distant and unresponsive Washington.  End the vitriol, and oppression by handing control back to people who you see in church or at the grocery store or the gym.

As for segregation, the suggestion is that "we" would still have it, if left to local communities.  I think this is probably true, official segregation would likely still exist in bigoted enclaves. But any community left in the US that would support official segregationist policies is already a community few would choose to live in.  That is, if a community would support official segregation, they're surely already bigots.  As things stand, it's just that there isn't a obvious public way to identify these communities.

But I don't think that quite addresses the point that was being made.  The point is that segregation is "bad".  But is democracy, then, just a tool for us to enforce our "enlightened" will on others?  I reject this…. and have written at length about this idea of using the power of government and democracy to enforce morality.  Here's the key passage--and note, the question of federalism itself is just a re-casting of this same question:

In truth, all of this reduces to a stark philosophical question: will we be a free people, warts and all, or will we empower an over-class to force those who disagree with us to behave as we want? This is not a new fight... it's an extension of all humanities struggle to wrest civilization from our world. It was the founders fight against England and amongst themselves. In Obama and the policy questions of today we only come to a kind of culmination... never in recent history has the division been so stark. I know my choice, and you can trace all of my policy positions directly to it... but have you made your choice? Have you considered the relation of your individual policy positions to this fundamental question?

It really is OK to support Mitt Romney...

Liberals and progressives have worked desperately to make it socially unacceptable to support Mitt Romney.  Thankfully those attempts are now falling apart.

You are not a social pariah for believing in individual liberty, and for supporting freedom over central government control.  You're not racist/anti-women/anti-immigrant/anti-environment/anti-"middle class" if you support Romney.  He isn't going to occupy your vagina, or enslave you to Exxon-Mobil, or do whatever the progressive lefty meme of the moment claims.  You, and a lot of other people, just believe that Obama's redistributionist, class warfare, government-centered policies are wrong for America.  And I agree with you.

Remember a few weeks ago when the MSM was already conducting pre-election autopsies on the Romney campaign.  They struggled manfully to be the fork stuck in the Romney effort.  Lot's of wishful thinking there, apparently:

Gallup shows durable 7-point lead for Romney among likely voters
10/21/2012

The problem isn't Obama's presentation, or that he's not aggressive enough.  The problem is his policies.  And Americans are seeing this increasingly clearly.

See the numbers and trends at right on the linked page.

I tend to believe the subtle shift underlying the evolution in these numbers is because people in the middle are taking a few seconds to actual hear Romney speak himself, or are taking a look at what he actually says, e.g., on his website.  As more of us come out supporting Romney, and make rational, reasoned, positive cases for doing so, the crumbling facade of the liberal narratives against Romney, will continue to fall.

It'll be interesting to see how shrill the progressives and the MSM get... Nobody keys your car for supporting Obama.  Now that he is down in the polls, what tactics do you think we'll see?  The final outcome will be all about turnout.  The Republicans are pretty motivated.  But the MSM , big labor, and all the usual suspects will be doing everything in power to disrupt and influence the final outcome.

It's going to be an interesting ride!

On the subject of abortion, or "reproductive rights", or whatever...

It's interesting to me how exercised people get over abortion.  Not because it isn't an issue deserving of passion and intensity, but because of how well it illustrates the brilliance of our political system... and how desperately both sides of the issue struggle to pervert that brilliance.

You see, the true believers are certain that human life begins at conception, or that until the moment of live birth pregnancy is just an infection with a parasitic clump of cells. How can we reconcile these views--that abortion is necessarily murder, and that without abortion women are slaves?

The point is, we can't reconcile them.  These views are fundamentally incompatible.

So... what then do we do?  Do we allow routine murder or enslave half the population?  Well, if we listen the rabid foot soldiers of the pro-this or pro-that armies, we MUST absolutely adopt one position or the other, and simply dictate to those who don't agree with us.

But this is a ridiculous perversion of our nation! There is no way we must absolutely dictate our position to those who disagree. We have a solution to this problem at our fingertips!  It's called federalism.

You see, the world is full of unknowable, unanswerable questions and judgments.  We are all different, and all reach different conclusions.  But our system of government has been intentionally designed to accommodate this! Under our system, only the most broadly agreed policies are to be enacted at the federal level.  For any policy so enacted dictates to all citizens, and there is no recourse but submission to any that disagree.  In contrast, more controversial or less agreed issues should be handled by the states, or even local communities.  In this way, those that agree can establish their governments as they see fit, and not impinge on those who disagree!

Even democratically enacted policies (which the current Federal policy on abortion is not) are subject to the "tyranny of the masses" flaw--that democracy allows 50.1% of the population to dictate to the other 49.9%.  Hence the fundamental importance of federalism in enabling democracy.  Remember that at the time of the founding, no human democracy had ever succeeded.  It is the combination of representative government and federalism with democracy that make democratic government viable. Why have we forgotten this?  Why do the zealots of the abortion debate so often reject this?

The federal government should have no say in the legality or illegality of abortion.  There is no way that we can broadly agree on this issue.  It must be left to the states and local governments.

...And why shouldn't it be?  Why would it be wrong for abortion to be legal some places and not others?  The only argument I can come up with is that if state's made it illegal to cross state lines to get an abortion.  But this is clearly wrong, and clearly unconstitutional, no matter what the history of the issue is.  Interstate commerce, which surely includes services, can not be controlled by the states.

It is so simple.  Allow federalism to do what it was designed to do... allow us to live together though we fundamentally disagree!

Now, of course, we come to the election of the moment.  And here, we all know, the supporters of Barack Obama have been vehemently, desperately painting Mitt Romney as "anti-woman"... why?  Because he personally opposes abortion, and politically believes.... what?...

Quoting directly from Romney's campaign website:

Mitt believes that life begins at conception and wishes that the laws of our nation reflected that view. But while the nation remains so divided, he believes that the right next step is for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade – a case of blatant judicial activism that took a decision that should be left to the people and placed it in the hands of unelected judges. With Roe overturned, states will be empowered through the democratic process to determine their own abortion laws and not have them dictated by judicial mandate.

There it is... federalism!

Mitt Romney does not want to dictate abortion policy to you.  He simply wants to empower you and your neighbors to decide for yourselves.  This is freedom.  Yes, some places will likely outlaw abortion.  But we are clearly a divided nation, and many places will not.

Do not succumb to the irrational and wasted anger of the true zealots.  You may firmly believe that legal abortion is murder, or that making abortion illegal is enslavement of women, but do you also believe you have the right to dictate your moral views to the entire nation?  Return power over this controversial issue to where it belongs:  the states and local communities.

Not only is the whole abortion debate completely inappropriate at the federal level, but to attack Mitt Romney for living the essence of our federal democracy--by holding strong personal beliefs, but acknowledging the primacy of democratic self-government--is ridiculous.