Saturday, September 15, 2012

Disgrace in Benghazi

Disgrace in Benghazi - Mark Steyn - National Review Online
But no, that would be an utterly fantastical America.
In the real America, the president is too busy to attend the security briefing on the morning after a national debacle, but he does have time to do Letterman and appear on a hip-hop radio show hosted by “The Pimp with a Limp.”
In the real State Department, the U.S. embassy in Cairo is guarded by Marines with no ammunition, but they do enjoy the soft-power muscle of a Foreign Service officer, one Lloyd Schwartz, tweeting frenziedly into cyberspace..... about how America deplores insensitive people who are so insensitively insensitive that they don’t respectfully respect all religions equally respectfully and sensitively, even as the raging mob is pouring through the gates.
.....The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the embassy in Tripoli.
How did that happen?
They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a “safe house,” and switched their attentions accordingly.
How did that happen?
The United States government lost track of its ambassador for ten hours.
How did that happen?
Perhaps, when they’ve investigated Mitt Romney’s press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press.
.....For whatever reason, Secretary Clinton chose to double down on misleading the American people. “Libyans carried Chris’s body to the hospital,” said Mrs. Clinton.
That’s one way of putting it.
The photographs at the Arab TV network al-Mayadeen show Chris Stevens’s body being dragged through the streets, while the locals take souvenir photographs on their cell phones.
A man in a red striped shirt photographs the dead-eyed ambassador from above; another immediately behind his head moves the splayed arm and holds his cell-phone camera an inch from the ambassador’s nose.
Some years ago, I had occasion to assist in moving the body of a dead man:
We did not stop to take photographs en route.
Even allowing for cultural differences, this looks less like “carrying Chris’s body to the hospital” and more like barbarians gleefully feasting on the spoils of savagery.

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