The Necropolitan Sentinel

If you look at the President's Rose Garden statements after the Benghazi assassinations, there is indeed a statement that America will never bow to terror, but Obama's claim that he called the attack in Benghazi an "act of terror" is untrue. Reading the transcript of the Rose Garden statements, it's clear that they are much more deliberately ambiguous than other statements by Obama and his spokespeople, referring to the "despicable" video that "sparked" the unrest. Obama lauds the dead Ambassador, other non-military US personnel living overseas, states that his administration is against anyone offending others' religious sensibilities, references the original 9-11 attacks, and then says that America will never bow to terror. But in saying so, he doesn't characterize the specific attack in Benghazi as an "act of terror." 

A casual listener to Obama's speech, then, might have been surprised to learn that the President was characterizing the attack as terrorism, when he and his mouthpieces continued to trot out the line for a couple of weeks that the embassy attack was "sparked" by outrage at the "despicable" video. At the time the President and others began actually characterizing the Benghazi embassy attack as an act of terror, they were actually called out on the change in their narrative, and then countered by saying that that change was prompted by new information that they were just receiving.

When Romney called Obama on his claim that he had called the Benghazi attack an "act of terror" in his speech, Obama smugly challenged Romney to "go on" and complete his accusation that that was not what the President had said, and then urged him to "check the transcript," which moderator Candy Crowley conveniently had on hand, and which she conned in a nanosecond, before jumping in to back up the President's claim. Later, Crowley would say that Romney was right in the main, but that he had "used the wrong word." However, it was Obama's original statement which was vaporous, and the reference to "acts of terror" doesn't clearly connect with the specific act of terror in Benghazi. Given the President's earlier invocation of the original 9-11, and the subsequent mischaracterizations of his spokescreatures and himself, that seems like a matter of contrived interpretation after the fact placed on a deliberately vague statement. 

At Mediaite, Noah Rothman states (rather generously) that Obama could not possibly have known what a gift Crowley was going to give him. But when you consider Crowley's rather convenient role in helping to rewrite the matter in the President's favor, that seems to me naive. When Crowley lunged to protect Obama, she moved beyond moderating. It's not that Obama didn't say "acts of terror," rather than "an act of terror," as he claimed (and got the word wrong); it's that given the transcript it's a stretch to conclude that when Obama said it, he meant anyone to connect it at the time he made the statement to what had transpired in Benghazi, which he and his administration were still characterizing as a spontaneous demonstration against a YouTube film trailer that got out of hand. Nobody in the MSM at all, including Crowley, took the President's Rose Garden remarks as an clear enunciation of the position that what had characterized the Benghazi atrocity as an "act of terror."

And another thing: many in the audience of "undecided voters" chosen to attend actually began to applaud at that point. Some accounts say that it was the First Lady who started the applause, which was not supposed to be permitted during the debate, but for what were they applauding? Here are a bunch of undecided voters who cheer Candy Crowley for jumping in on the President's side . . . because they alone among the American electorate recalled exactly what it was that Obama said in his Rose Garden address? I don't think so.

Yeah, I'm going there. I think Crowley and some of the audience were complicit in a scheme hatched by the President and his team to try to discredit Romney regarding Libya. Obama was fulminating against his political opponents questioning the honesty of him and his mouthpieces regarding what happened in Benghazi, but the Rose Garden statement was never meant to convey the impression that Obama believed that the attack was an act of terror, no matter what Obama may have believed or not at the time he made the statement. It was artfully contrived not to give that impression. Jay Carney's statements that the attacks were "sparked" by the anti-Muslim film were also supposed to give him some cover, until very belatedly, even after Obama himself had begun to characterize it as a terrorist attack, it was learned that there was no demonstration—copycatting that in Cairo or elsewhere—at all. Obama did not intend to convey the truth; he intended to cover his ass. But the administration went right ahead and tried to find out whether the press and public would swallow the story about the film—"which we had nothing to do with"—being the cause of, or later providing the "spontaneous uprising" cover for, the attack. Obama and company intended to deceive, and they calculated that the MSM would come to their aid and quash the story more effectively than they did, but they were also desperate enough to hang onto their fiction that they stuck to it much longer than they should have.

Candy Crowley was deliberately deployed to help them cover their lies with yet another one. She, and at least some of the audience members, were in on the caper.

There's another debate, and it's on foreign policy.

UPDATE: Many thanks to Bob Belvedere for the link in his excellent round-up of debate reax.

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