RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204712904578090612465153472.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

“Mr. Obama has made the defeat of al Qaeda a core part of his case for re-election. Yet in Benghazi an al Qaeda affiliate killed four U.S. officials in U.S. buildings, contradicting that political narrative.”

The Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were murdered September 11 in Benghazi. That we know. But too little else about what took place before, during and after the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission is clear.

The White House says Republicans are “politicizing” a tragedy. Politicians politicize, yes, but part of their job is to hold other politicians accountable. The Administration has made that difficult by offering evasive, inconsistent and conflicting accounts about one of the most serious American overseas defeats in recent years. Unresolved questions about Benghazi loom over this election because the White House has failed to resolve them.

• Why did the U.S. not heed warnings about a growing Islamist presence in Benghazi and better protect the diplomatic mission and CIA annex?

From the start of the Libyan uprising in early 2011, the Central Intelligence Agency built up an unusually large presence in Benghazi. By this September, two dozen or so operatives and contractors monitored Ansar al-Shariah and other militant groups. Deteriorating security after the war was no secret. U.S. intelligence noted militant camps in the mountains near Benghazi, including “al Qaeda leaning” fighters, according to Tuesday’s New York Times.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203335504578089871882358196.html?mod=hp_opinion A Romney-Ryan administration will confront the problems that politicians have avoided for a decade. After more than a year of campaigning, endless political advertisements, two conventions and four debates, the presidential election is almost over. The big decision of 2012 will soon be in the hands of the voters. The choice Americans make will […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/332382

The case for climate change, formerly the case for global warming, entails a series of propositions that begin with the unobjectionable and escalate to the absurd: that the climate is changing, that these changes are likely to be dangerous and destructive, that these changes are in the main the result of human action, that carbon-dioxide emissions are the major factor, that these changes can be forestalled or reversed by political means, that such political actions are likely to be on the right side of the cost-benefit analysis, etc. The least plausible claims are those holding that specific events, such as the horrific damage inflicted by Hurricane Sandy, are attributable to specific U.S. public-policy decisions. That this lattermost claim is absurd and stands in contravention of the best scientific analysis has not stopped the most hysterical climate alarmists from making it, but then it is the nature of hysterical alarmists to exceed the bounds of reason.

Among others, Chris Mooney of Mother Jones was sure enough of himself to declare categorically of Sandy: “Climate change, a topic embarrassingly ignored in the three recent presidential debates, made it worse.” Bill McKibben of Democracy Now and others on the left made similar statements, while Businessweek practically wet itself. There is little or no evidence that this claim is true in any meaningful sense, and many climate scientists believe that warming has resulted in fewer powerful hurricanes striking the United States. As usual, the science is complex while the politics are unfortunately simpleminded.

The conventional climate-change argument holds that warmer oceans will lead to more intense hurricanes and other extreme weather events. But Sandy was not an unprecedentedly powerful hurricane — it inflicted such remarkable damage because it arrived at the confluence of a nor’easter and a high-pressure system, and plowed into densely populated urban areas at high tide. In fact, the arrival of powerful hurricanes on our shores is somewhat diminished of late: The last Category 3 hurricane to make landfall was seven years ago, the longest such interval in a century. As Professor Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado points out, 1954–55 saw three back-to-back hurricanes — two in the same month — more destructive than Sandy crashing onto our shores.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/332371/tale-two-crises-mark-steyn

In political terms, Hurricane Sandy and the Benghazi-consulate debacle exemplify at home and abroad the fundamental unseriousness of the United States in the Obama era. In the days after Sandy hit, Barack Obama was generally agreed to have performed well. He had himself photographed in the White House Situation Room nodding thoughtfully to bureaucrats (“John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; Tony Blinken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; David Agnew, Director for Intergovernmental Affairs”) and tweeted it to his 3.2 million followers. He appeared in New Jersey wearing a bomber jacket rather than a suit to demonstrate that when the going gets tough the tough get out a monogrammed Air Force One bomber jacket. He announced that he’d instructed his officials to answer all calls within 15 minutes because in America “we leave nobody behind.” By doing all this, the president “shows” he “cares” — which is true in the sense that in Benghazi he was willing to leave the entire consulate staff behind, and nobody had their calls answered within seven hours, because presumably he didn’t care. So John Brennan, the Counterterrorism guy, and Tony Blinken, the National Security honcho, briefed the president on the stiff breeze, but on September 11, 2012, when a little counterterrorism was called for, nobody bothered calling the Counterterrorism Security Group, the senior U.S. counterterrorism bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, FEMA rumbles on, the “emergency-management agency” that manages emergencies, very expensively, rather than preventing them. Late on the night Sandy made landfall, I heard on the local news that my state’s governor had asked the president to declare a federal emergency in every New Hampshire county so that federal funds could be “unlocked.” A quarter-million people in the Granite State were out of power. It was reported that, beyond our borders, 8 million people in a dozen states were out of power.

But that’s not an “emergency.” No hurricane hit my county. Indeed, no hurricane hit New Hampshire. No hurricane hit “17 states,” the number of states supposedly “affected” by Sandy at its peak. A hurricane hit a few coastal counties of New Jersey, New York and a couple of other states, and that’s it. Everyone else had slightly windier-than-usual wind — and yet they were out of power for days. In a county entirely untouched by Sandy, my office manager had no electricity for a week. Not because of an “emergency” but because of a decrepit and vulnerable above-the-ground electrical-distribution system that ought to be a national embarrassment to any developed society. A few weeks ago, I chanced to be in Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a French colony of 6,000 people on a couple of treeless rocks in the North Atlantic. Every electric line is underground. Indeed, the droll demoiselle who leads tours of the islands makes a point of amusingly drawing American visitors’ attention to this local feature.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/332373/next-great-awakening-interview

‘If we want to have our First Amendment rights tomorrow, we must defend them today, wherever they may be threatened.” Carl Anderson, the head of the Knights of Columbus, is the author of your pre-election weekend reading, the new e-book: Proclaim Liberty: Notes on the Next Great Awakening in America, which puts this moment for Catholics and freedom in America in perspective. He discusses the book with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: You write, “Whether we will continue to live in a country blessed with the freedom to practice our religion free of government interference, or whether constitutional liberties will be subordinated to the demands of the state, remains to be seen.” How much does this one election mean in determining the answer to this question?

CARL ANDERSON: I think that over the past year and a half, we have seen an increasing coalition of people of faith defending the First Amendment. We have a conflict in this country between a small, militant group of secularists, and the vast majority of Americans, who, our polling has shown, broadly support the First Amendment right to religious freedom. They also support exemptions based on conscience and religious belief from objectionable laws. Obviously the HHS mandate is a very high-profile battle in this larger context. Governor Romney has promised to repeal Obamacare — which includes the mandate. President Obama has promised to keep the mandate in place. The issue of the federal government pursuing an agenda at odds with the First Amendment could end with this election, but regardless of who wins the election, we aren’t likely see an end to secularist attacks on religious liberty — at the state and local level, in the courts, etc. If we want to have our First Amendment rights tomorrow, we must defend them today, wherever they may be threatened.

LOPEZ: You write about “the ways in which Catholics — and all people of faith — ought to approach politics in order to live out their faith in public as well as in private, and to transform the divisiveness and hostility in politics we see today into a society in which every person is respected and valued — a society that Pope John Paul II has called a “Civilization of Love.” Politics can build a civilization of love? Surely you jest?

ANDERSON: Actually, if Catholics and other Christians take the lead in bringing charity to politics, if we build a more civil discourse, that would be a first step. We can’t expect politics to help further a civilization of love unless we bring love and charity to our political discussions. A civilization of love must be created across the board. It can’t exclude politics, nor can it focus on politics alone. It must transform all of society. The commandment to love our neighbor doesn’t have an exemption clause for politics. It may sound idealistic, but realistically we can begin by insisting that candidates stop the obvious misstatements of facts and character assassination that have become the trademark of certain campaigns.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/332366/sandy-s-wrath-andrew-c-mccarthy

The bough was thick and wet, and his mouth a tense rictus as he trembled under its weight. But my ten-year-old steadied his hockey-stud legs and carted it off the driveway, then another 30 yards down the street. It landed with a thud in the first space he found along a growing curbside forest.

Hurricane Sandy had visited her wrath on our comfortable New Jersey town the night before, her sheets of rain a blinding afterthought in the teeth of sustained winds that gusted near a hundred miles per hour — blasts that seemed to go on forever. They had already been fierce in the late afternoon, worse than anything we’re used to in these parts, when someone hopefully said that maybe we’d dodged a bullet. Sandy, the local newscast told us, was picking up speed, approaching landfall ahead of schedule. She might outrun the full moon and the high tide. She might choose not to be the proverbial “perfect storm” — maybe lash us without wounding us.

Pollyanna’s pipe dream. No, the worst had not even begun. It waited for the black, unforgiving night. In its wake, the devastation here is epic.

Ruinous weather is not unknown to the Garden State. The shore takes a battering of sorts once or twice a year, the tail tropical-storm end of a hurricane that already spent itself in Florida or the Carolinas. Last year was peculiarly bad. First, in late summer, Hurricane Irene’s bounce up the East Coast smacked Little Egg Harbor before careening up into Brooklyn. The brunt, however, was felt upstate. The Hudson, the Passaic, and nine other rivers — saturated by an unusually rain-soaked summer — gushed over. Seven people died, homes and businesses were badly damaged, and well over a million people lost power — just a few hours for most, but several days for some.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/deadly-statecraft

It took nearly four years into the Barack Obama presidency to know what he would do when confronted with an unexpected international crisis demanding immediate action to save American lives. Americans got their answer when al Qaeda-inspired terrorists overran and torched the U.S. consulate and intelligence annex in Benghazi, Libya killing the U.S. ambassador, a foreign service officer, two former Navy SEALs and breaching a facility housing sensitive U.S. secrets.

Americans under assault in Libya urgently asked their superiors in DC for U.S. military support. Their requests were denied, presumably by President Obama who has the final say in such matters. It will surely go down as one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history, especially since the most sacred duty of a president is to protect U.S. citizens.

Terrorists armed with AK-47s, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades began the attack about 3:30 PM EST (9:30 PM in Libya) on the 9-11 Anniversary as President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Defense Secretary Panetta gathered in the Oval Office for a pre-scheduled meeting. The attack lasted approximately 7 hours, and was undoubtedly watched in its entirety by top White House, State Department, Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agency officials on live video fed by ground-based infrared cameras and imagery from at least one unmanned drone.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/obamas-foreign-policy-amateur-hour-at-the-white-house/?singlepage=true

During the 2008 Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton’s most famous ad was about Obama failing to answer the 3 a.m. phone call. It played on the idea that he was completely inexperienced in foreign affairs, and that it would be too risky to have a rookie in there managing things.

The problem was that Hillary herself was hardly more experienced in that realm, unless you count being the spouse of a two-term president — which is ordinarily considered no experience at all.

But it’s really not all that unusual for first-term presidents to lack knowledge of foreign affairs. After all, where would they get it? On a senate committee, perhaps, or as a member of something like the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is where Hillary got her own modest amount of pre-2008-campaign experience.

Governors don’t tend to deal with foreign affairs, either; it is widely forgotten that the context for Sarah Palin’s statement about Russia and Alaska (“You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska”) was an interview with Charles Gibson, who was questioning her foreign policy credentials and who specifically asked her about Alaska and Russia (“What insight into Russian actions particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of this state give you?”).

So Obama’s lack of foreign policy chops was hardly unusual; his experience was limited to short stints on a few committees. But much more importantly, unlike so many of his inexperienced predecessors, he didn’t have the humility to understand that he was deficient in that area, and to compensate for it by choosing a knowledgeable secretary of State. Instead, he appointed Hillary Clinton to the post, so now there were two foreign policy naifs in charge of the whole shebang.

Obama’s predecessor Bush II lacked such experience as well — although, like Hillary, he was a close family member of someone who did have it. But Bush knew enough to know what he didn’t know, and appointed actual experts to man (and woman) the job, such as Condoleezza Rice. Obama’s arrogance led him to believe that a few years of childhood spent in Indonesia, and some visits to Pakistan in early adulthood, would be enough — or actually, more than enough:

Ironically, this is an area — foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Senator Clinton or Senator McCain.

It’s ironic because this is supposedly the place where experience is most needed to be Commander-in-Chief. Experience in Washington is not knowledge of the world. This I know. When Senator Clinton brags “I’ve met leaders from eighty countries” — I know what those trips are like! I’ve been on them….

Islamophobia Is the Underlying Cause of Benghazi Richard Butrick
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/11/islamophobia_is_the_underlying_cause_of_benghazi.html

So sayeth Ambassador Pickering, Hillary Clinton’s appointee to head the “Accountability Review Board.” Ambassador Pickering is tasked with getting the facts straight (after the election) about what happened in Benghazi and where accountability resides.

According to Ambassador Pickering, in remarks he made during an Oct. 23 panel discussion at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., America is a seething hotbed of “Islamophobia,” filled with ignorant racist rubes who irrationally fear the benign Muslim religion. Of course, he couched his message in diplomatese. “Ignorant rubes,” in diplomatese, becomes “[d]ata shows that those Americans who do not know Muslims, who do not know much about Islam, are the ones who harbor the greatest feelings of prejudice.”

So we can see that Hillary appointed a man who comes into the investigation with an open mind and without preconceived scapegoats.

The real stupefying bafflement in all this is how someone with the experience and acumen of an ambassador can believe such suicidal pap. It is like battered wife syndrome, in which the wife believes that it is somehow her fault. The brutal behavior of her husband is really love gone awry because of her failings. For Pickering, Islam is a religion of peace, and all the hate, outrage, and violence rained down upon us just proves that it is our fault. It is a strange, malignant, suicidal idée fixe that controls his mind (and Hillary’s and Obama’s?) no matter what transpires.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/the_obama_doctrine_american_lives_are_expendable.html

The Obama White House, the Clinton State Department, and Panetta’s Department of Defense have guiding principles in Afghanistan that, if applied to Benghazi, explain the administration’s decision to deny air support to the Americans fighting for their lives on 9/11/12. The denial of air support to our troops in battle is normal operating procedure for this commander in chief. He doesn’t have to give special orders to do it. It is the Obama Doctrine on the War on Terror: do not kill Muslim civilians. Let American soldiers die instead. That is how Obama thinks he will win the hearts and minds of the Islamic world.

In Afghanistan, the military is required to deny air support, even in the midst of battle, if it could possibly result in civilian casualties. Under Obama, it is required that the military sacrifice the lives of our soldiers when jihadis are firing from population areas. The Benghazi safe house where Tyrone Woods, Sean Smith, and the others were defending themselves against al-Qaeda was in a neighborhood. Therefore, if the Afghanistan rules of engagement were applied, no air support and no reinforcements would be sent.

Following the same mindset, the Clinton State Department’s main diplomatic principle is to show how much we respect Muslim sensibilities. Ambassador Stevens’ repeated requests to not withdraw his U.S. Marine security detail were denied by the State Department on those grounds. Just a few weeks before 9/11, Stevens was reduced to relying on local Libyan militia for his safety and the safety of his staff. He was scared for his life, and on 9/11, he gave his life. He was sacrificed to the Obama administration’s diplomatic doctrine.

Testimony from Eric Allan Nordstrom, Regional Security Officer, Tripoli, at Congressman Issa’s hearings into Benghazi:

Our long term security plan in Libya was to recruit and deploy an armed, locally hired Libyan bodyguard unit. However, because of Libyan political sensitivities, armed private security companies were not allowed to operate in Libya. Therefore, our existing, uniformed static local guard force, both in Tripoli and Benghazi were unarmed … armed security in Libya was still a new and sensitive concept to the Libyan Government. Abuses of Qaddafi foreign mercenaries were still fresh in the minds of the Libya people.

Under the Obama administration, the lives and safety of American diplomats and military personnel come third after respecting Muslim lives and sensibilities. This is the Obama idea of how to win what his predecessor called the War on Terror.

Benghazi, September 11, 2012: The White House is alerted at 1:00 in the afternoon that the consulate is under hostile surveillance, and at 4:00 p.m. that the consulate is under attack. According to FBI and National Counterterrorism Center briefings to Congress, our intelligence services intercept real-time e-mails from Al Qaeda fighters celebrating their attack.

Our military is instructed to send an unarmed drone to monitor the battle raging in Benghazi.

From all reports, it seems that President Obama chose not to go to the Situation Room in the White House to monitor the battle as it was streamed on live video from two sources: the consulate building and the drone. He didn’t follow the radioed messages for help as they arrived in real time.

This is how Obama described his actions on 9/11, during the second presidential debate:

I know these folks, and I know their families. So nobody’s more concerned about their safety and security than I am. So as soon as we found out that the Benghazi consulate was being overrun, I was on the phone with my national security team, and I gave them three instructions. Number one, beef up our security and – and – and procedures not just in Libya but every embassy and consulate in the region.