You see things; and you say, "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
George Bernard Shaw
Don't Tell Me Words Don't Matter...
Kessler, fact-checker for the Washington Post, has an interesting recent post debunking Obama's false claim that he called the 9/11 Benghazi attacks terrorism from the get-go. Reading him parse the difference between an 'act of terror' and 'act of terrorism'., I thought, "The law is too important to be left to lawyers." I double-checked Google and found I'm not the first to come up with the quote
Obama wants to have his cake and eat it, too. Let us go back go just before the election:
President Barack Obama has described al Qaeda as having been “decimated,” “on the path to defeat” or some other variation at least 32 times since the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, according to White House transcripts.Obama can try to put up a sophistic claim that even though CIA intelligence agents had confirmed the presence of al Qaeda affiliates in Libya and Qaddafi himself made such claims, and the fact the attack occurred on 9/11, a symbolic anniversary for al-Qaeda, he hadn't yet seen the smoking gun/bomb/whatever. The salient observation is that Obama and his campaign had made the point that Obama crippled al Qaeda probably hundreds of times before Benghazi. The fact that al Qaeda affiliates had managed to kill the US ambassador and 3 other Americans would directly challenge Obama's credibility and effectiveness on the War on Terror. I think Obama was trying to run out the clock on Romney; he was being deliberately ambiguous: he needed a fallback position if the facts came out but not too specific to maintain his talking point on have waged an unrelenting war on terrorists leaving them crushed and ineffective.
In a prior post I examined the 9/12 Rose Garden speech in detail. Early in the speech he's talking about religious sensibilities, i.e., a not-that-subtle reference to the video, and then he's talking about unjustified killings in the context of that video. This is entirely consistent with Susan Rice's subsequent, discredited comments about a populist uprising gone rogue on the Sunday talk shows. When he organizes drone kill lists, he probably doesn't ask whether the suspect was agitating against a provocative video clip.
The act of terror? Kessler makes a similar comment in this regard... We normally don't think of mobs as terrorists; terrorists try to manipulate fear of the masses. This attack was made specifically because it was considered a soft US government target--an act of war, if you will, but not aimed at Benghazi residents. Certainly for US government employees and contractors, the experience was terrifying.
The Rose Garden address does NOT say or imply the Benghazi attacks were acts of terror;; Kessler also quotes 'act of terror' 3 times at campaign appearances, also without mentioning Benghazi directly (I really think this was his way of indirectly referencing the successful UBL operation). He makes specific reference to the original 9/11 attacks. Furthermore, I'm not the only one noticing Obama was playing word games. Kessler notes this subsequent exchange on 60 Minutes:
KROFT: “Mr. President, this morning you went out of your way to avoid the use of the word ‘terrorism’ in connection with the Libya attack.”
OBAMA: “Right.”
KROFT: “Do you believe that this was a terrorist attack?”
OBAMA: “Well, it’s too early to know exactly how this came about, what group was involved, but obviously it was an attack on Americans. And we are going to be working with the Libyan government to make sure that we bring these folks to justice, one way or the other.”
It's too bad Romney wasn't aware of this exchange when Crowley incompetently dropped the flag on Romney and apparently wasn't familiar of this exchange (that's due diligence for you). Outside of the fact Obama sidesteps a direct question on the point, it was more of an attack on the US than on Americans. It was symbolic; if there's one thing Obama understands, it's symbolism. And what group declared war on the US back in the 1990's? Al Qaeda. But going back to the Crowley intervention on Obama's half, if I had been Romney, I would have shot back at Obama, "Well, if you called it a terrorist act, why did Susan Rice on behalf of the Administration call it a protest rally gone rogue? Why didn't the Egyptian protest go rogue, using military weapons?"
From a political standing the Romney campaign jumped the gun on Benghazi; it has to be one of the most politically dumb things I've seen in my lifetime. To many people, it looked like Romney was trying to exploit a tragedy. What should have been done is to express sympathy for the victims and their families, that we have one President, and he has our support in resolving the issue. Because the Romney campaign botched its response, the Obama campaign could counter-attack, suggesting that Romney is an impulsive decision maker and try to reprise the infamous daisy ad in the 1964 campaign. (If I had been Romney, I would have run against 12 years of Bush/Obama economic and interventionist foreign policy;.)
Gosnell is Not Alone
As of this post's original date, the embedded video below is available; the reason I mention that is because a longer 15-minute video was withdrawn before I could view it on Youtube; it may still be available here.
The three women [Deborah Edge, Krystal Rodriguez and Gigi Aguilar] used to work in an abortion clinic that specifically was left unidentified in the video.
“I thought, well, it’s an abortion you know, that’s what he does, but I wasn’t aware that it was illegal … Most of the time we would see him where the fetus would come completely out and of course, the fetus would still be alive,” said Edge.
“He does a lot of huge abortions. A lot of the times, we would bring the big fetus[es] that were over age, we would re-open the bag and just look at it and be like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s so big!’”
When the baby survived the abortion procedure, Edge reported, sometimes the abortionist would plunge a surgical instrument through the soft spot on the baby’s skull into the brain. Other times it happened by “twisting the head off the neck with his own bare hands.”
A surgical instrument into the torso also was used to end lives, she said.Obviously the abortionist sees no difference between killing a baby, inside or outside the womb. I believe the clinic and doctor's name are being withheld in the event that Texas decides to put the doctor on trial.
On the post-conviction Gosnell front, he has agreed to a life sentence and to waive an appeal in exchange for the state's agreement not to seek capital punishment. Just a brief retrospective:
A 2011 grand jury investigation into Gosnell's alleged prescription drug trafficking led to the gruesome findings about his abortion clinic. An FBI raid had turned up 47 aborted fetuses stored in clinic freezers, jars of tiny severed feet, bloodstained furniture and dirty medical instruments, along with cats roaming the premises.
Prosecution experts said one teen was nearly 30 weeks pregnant when Gosnell aborted her fetus, and then allegedly joked the baby was so big it could "walk to the bus." A second baby was said to be alive for about 20 minutes before a clinic worker snipped the neck. A third was born in a toilet and was moving before another clinic employee severed the spinal cord, according to testimony.
A fourth baby let out a whimper before Gosnell cut the neck, prosecutors alleged. Gosnell was acquitted in that baby's death, the only one of the four in which no one testified to seeing the baby killed.
Gosnell was also convicted of infanticide, racketeering and more than 200 counts of violating Pennsylvania's abortion laws by performing third-term abortions or failing to counsel women 24 hours in advance.I'm not happy with the acquittal on the fourth charge; there must have a witness whom heard baby cry. The baby was killed behind the witness's back? How can there reasonable doubt under the circumstances? Maybe one of his unlicensed staffers did it? He was still morally and legally responsible for what happened to that baby. Still, stopping the madness of Gosnell killing third trimester babies is a key first step and a key warning to other unethical like-minded physicians out there.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Robert Ariail and Townhall |
Bruce Springsteen & the E-Street Band, "Cover Me"
