The Media, Politics, and Dead Americans

I was in Panera’s over this past weekend enjoying a cup of hazelnut coffee and a bear’s claw with a friend of mine. We were discussing the political topics of the day mostly focusing on Libya and the Benghazi debacle. My friend is a well informed individual, but mostly gets his news from NBC. That made the conversation difficult because as I made references to various things, he just looked at me like I didn’t know what I was talking about. He knew that something had happened there. He knew the ambassador plus three members of his support staff were killed. The immediate topic was that live streams from the drone flying above the event…watching…were being fed in the White House situation room along with real time emails from those poor souls directly involved in the attack. He didn’t know that. He also didn’t know that America had air bases in Italy with rapid response planes on stand-by which could have given support to the embattled Benghazi staff within an hour.

Sitting at the table across from our booth was a very nice almost senior lady drinking coffee solo. She looked over to us and said she couldn’t help overhearing some of our conversation and just had to speak up. The pain in her eyes was visible. She said she was in the navy when she was young, and then worked at Boeing on the west coast. She went on to say that the events in Libya had deeply disturbed her and repeated some of what I said and wondered aloud, tears swelling in her eyes, why America just sat by and let those folks die. My friend just looked at her with a blank expression. It wasn’t computing.

My friend and I joke around a lot about political issues, but lately I have come to the conclusion he is just plain uninformed and can’t draw conclusions because he doesn’t know the facts. I don’t joke around about dead Americans killed in the line of duty. He wouldn’t either, but he just doesn’t know the facts.  He gets his news from NBC and AOL online blurbs from the Huffington Post and cannot admit that Matt Lauer would tilt the news.

As the Benghazi story unfolds, it becomes more and more disturbing. The latest is downright chilling. As the Ambassador and staff were under attack, urgent requests, in real time, were sent to the CIA for assistance. CIA agents a mile from the initial attack were told to “stand down”. They ignored the order and went to the consulate and rescued survivors and retrieved the body of Sean Smith, a member of the diplomatic corps. They could not find the Ambassador. When they returned to the CIA annex, the wired Washington for military assistance as the CIA annex itself came under attack. It was also denied. They were then killed by a mortar hitting the CIA annex about 4:00 AM.  Those poor dead people requested assistance three times that night, and were denied.

While this was going on, the Situation Room in the White House was monitoring the attacks on live video from the drone, as well as the live correspondence between the folks under attack and their DC superiors. President Obama then went to Las Vegas for a fundraiser…and his staff for the next two weeks blamed an obscure video for the Benghazi attacks.

Barack Obama is who he is and will do as he pleases. It's the press that has provided cover for him in ways that are almost culpable. But for Fox News continuing to investigate the story, those watching any other news outlet would not know that anything had happened. The information was readily available to those who looked or asked. Instead, the main stream media lambasted Mitt Romney for speaking the truth right after the attacks occurred, and CNN in the form of Candy Crowley gave Obama cover in the second debate notwithstanding that we all heard the video excuse story from his UN Ambassador, his Secretary of State, his Press Secretary, and from himself both on the View and in his speech to the United Nations.

America should be outraged at the President and his tactics, but should be livid about a suppliant press that has abandoned its repsonsiblity to report the news in a fair fashion in favor of becoming a propoganda machine for an incumbant office holder.

The truth about what happened in Benghazi is ugly. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that Obama decisions were political, and not in the best interests of this country or its overseas representatives. He is a liar.  In response to the latest revelations, he said the death of the those four Americans have nothing to do with this election, and he shut down a local TV interview. In the meantime, the headline on CNN’s online service this morning is a huge deified picture of Obama. The story: How the Presidency Change Obama’s Faith. Not even a major hurricane can pull CNN’s, and NBC, CBS and ABC’s noses out of his ass.

This makes Watergate look like a walk in the park. The question now, as then, is what did the President know, and when did he know it.