http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/09/15/is-this-a-first/?singlepage=true
“…..Bold statements like this (which were naturally condemned by the left-wing media) increase my confidence. As Andy put it in his comments on Romney’s statement, “It will be remembered as the moment the race for president finally became about the real job of a president. It will be remembered as the moment Romney won.”
When the motor of history gets revved up (as it surely is now), it becomes more than commonly difficult to discriminate between the mere static of events rubbing against one another and that appoggiatura that announces the main theme of the moment. You’d have to be pretty thick not to sense that something big is happening in the world. Just yesterday, the Evening Standard published a column of mine in which I reprised James Carville’s famous taunt, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Carville was right, except when he wasn’t, e.g., at about 10:00 a.m. on September 11, 2001, or, as we see all about us, in the aftermath of September 11, 2012, when some representatives of the “Arab Spring” stormed the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and murdered U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other diplomats.
What was the most extraordinary statement to come out of that outrage, or the successive and still unfolding attacks on U.S. and other Western interests by Islamists across the world?
Advertisement
First prize for naïveté must surely go to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had this to say about the murder of those four Americans:
Today, many Americans are asking – indeed, I asked myself – how could this happen? How could this happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction? This question reflects just how complicated and, at times, how confounding the world can be.
I have to say, those were not among the questions I asked myself. Leave aside the laughable trope that what we did in Libya was liberate the country. What we really did was exchange one malign dictator for the dictatorship of a malign, freedom-denying ideology, radical Islam. What I chiefly wanted to know was, Why was security so lax at our consulate, especially on the anniversary of the terrorists attacks of 9/11?
First prize for cringe-making appeasement also goes to the State Department, even if it wasn’t issued by HRC herself. Six hours before an Islamist mob stormed our embassy in Cairo, the embassy condemned “the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.”
It’s perfectly OK to “hurt the religious feelings” of anyone else — just ask Terrence McNally, whose play Corpus Christie depicts Jesus having sex with Judas Iscariot. Perhaps you do not like Corpus Christie. I think it a loathsome work, but I do not propose to burn down and embassy or murder anyone because of it. But Muslims apparently deserve a special dispensation. The First Amendment protects Mr. McNally. But does it protect the author of The Innocence of Muslims, the silly 13-minute anti-Muslim film by Nakoula Basseley Nakoula (not, as was first reported, “Sam Bacile”)? We’ll see. Mr. Nakoula has been detained for questioning by federal probation agents. What do you bet he is found to have violated probation?
