Under the Hammer

The most amazing aspect of the tragedy in Benghazi and President Barack Hussein Obama's response is how well it worked for him. Here he was on 9/11 in the middle of an election caught unprepared by al Qaeda. In a country with known al Qaeda activity the Obama administration had refused to give the US ambassador the security forces he needed, which left him vulnerable on 9/11.

No doubt when the situation was first presented to Obama on the afternoon of 9/11, all they knew was that the consulate was under heavy attack and Ambassador Chris Stevens was thought to be in the safe room of the consulate but was out of contact.

Perhaps Obama bet, that the safe room in the consulate would protect Stevens and other State Department employees and that the terrorists would get tired of banging on a locked door and go away. It's a little like betting a small fire will burn itself out before it becomes a raging forest fire. It does happen, but most people don't want to take that chance.

For whatever reason Obama decided to not to risk sending in air support or ground troops. He decided not to send any help and to use "Hope" as his strategy. Hope didn't work and not only did Stevens die, but Sean Smith died with him at the consulate and two CIA operatives, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, both former Navy Seals, also died in the fighting hours later at the CIA compound.

Obama was in the midst of an election. He could hardly go out and tell the American people that he hoped everything would work out, so he didn't send troops or security forces of any kind to aid an ambassador under siege at an American consulate. So the White House came up with what seemed to be a plausible lie ń that this attack, just like the one in Cairo, was the result of a spontaneous protest over a stupid video and it got out of hand. Why you should not send help to a consulate under attack by a spontaneous mob is still a mystery, but the mainstream media bought it and Obama was reelected.

To give the cover story validity Obama sent out UN Ambassador Susan Rice to explain that the attack had been a spontaneous outburst as a result of the video. Rice was perfect for the job for two reasons.

One, as Obama has now said, she had nothing to do with it. She was just a good soldier and went out and said what she was told to say. She had no information on her own. Rice was completely out of the chain of command on this one.

Two, and more importantly, Rice is a black woman, so anyone who criticizes her is by definition racist and sexist. Obama never hesitates to use the race card if it is to his advantage. And his supporters followed through with the accusations of racism and sexism as soon as people were critical of Rice for going on five different shows and telling huge whopping lies on each one.

So Obama and his White House team came up with a story that really doesn't make any sense and which everyone who knows anything knows is made up. And they found a dupe to sell it to the mainstream media. It helped tremendously that the mainstream media were willing to do everything in their power to get Obama reelected.

The plan worked to perfection because the whole point was simply to push the controversy out past the election. One of the stories that the Obama campaign was trying to sell to the American people was that Osama bin Laden had been killed and the war against terrorism had been won by Obama. That story doesn't work if al Qaeda attacks and destroys a US consulate, gets in a seven-hour gun battle with personnel at the consulate and at the CIA safe house nearby, and kills four Americans including the American ambassador. The truth makes Obama look weak on fighting terrorism, which of course he is. But it doesn't matter because it all got pushed past Nov. 6 and now it doesn't matter what he says. Obama is president for four more years.

Now if Obama wanted to come clean he could go before the American people and says something like, "I made the wrong call. I didn't want things to escalate just before the election so I was too cautious and I should have sent troops in, or at the very least a fighter jet or an attack helicopter to rescue Chris Stevens and Sean Smith. Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty should not have died because troops should have been there to support them long before they were killed by terrorists." It wouldn't matter because people can't take back their votes.

Obama is president. Mitt Romney had a chance to make Benghazi the issue of the foreign affairs debate and he did not. When he tried to make a point about the Benghazi debacle in an earlier debate Obama was rescued by the moderator who corrected Romney, but was wrong herself. It's why they call the Republican Party the Stupid Party. They allowed Candy Crowley to moderate the debate even after she said she planned to insert herself into the debate and she did, rescuing the president. But from the comments she made before the debate it was obvious that she was a big Obama supporter, so the Republicans have no one but themselves to blame.

With the help of Crowley and Romney the Obama team pushed Benghazi out past the election, and in politics there is no video review or do-overs. However, cover-ups have not worked out well for presidents.

President Richard Milhous Nixon pushed Watergate out past the election, but it caught up with him and he was forced to resign. For a long time only one newspaper in the entire country was interested in Watergate. It happened to be The Washington Post, with its vast resources, and without The Washington Post the truth about Watergate might never have been known.

President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton pushed the Monica Lewinsky affair out past the election and eventually was impeached for perjury. But look at him now ń he is the revered elder statesman of the Democratic Party. But if it hadn't been for Lewinsky's friend Linda Tripp and Lewinsky's incredible foresight in hiding the blue dress, the American people would have never known that Clinton had been having an affair with a 21-year-old White House intern.

The key for Obama was not to let the mistake of refusing to provide sufficient security for an embassy under attack by al Qaeda on 9/11 keep him from being reelected and it did not.

Now is the time for some brave American to step forward and tell the truth. It looks like they scared the pants off Gen. David Petraeus and he is not going to be the one to tell the story of what really happened. Petraeus did refuse to go along with the huge lies, but he evidently didn't break any new ground in his testimony. A former general can hardly testify under oath that he looked at a well-planned and coordinated terrorist attack and thought it was a mob protesting a video. Obama, however, who knows nothing about the military can get away with that and he has.

In the Watergate break-in, which resulted in Nixon resigning, felonies were committed, but no one was injured much less killed. For a president to take advantage of a young White House intern is in no way admirable, but no one was injured or killed during Clinton's affair with Lewinsky.

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In the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, four Americans were killed and any number were injured. The Democrats have no interest in what happened, but the Republicans should insist that an investigation be launched and continued until the American people know exactly how and why those Americans died.

Obama has already told so many lies about what happened and his involvement that nothing he says can be trusted. Originally Obama said that he found out about the attack at night. It was no later than 5 p.m. with the sun still shining brightly in Washington, DC, and there is no way that is night. If he can't even tell the truth about when he found out about the attack, how can the American people believe anything he says about it?

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Four years ago I was disappointed when Obama was elected president. I didn't agree with much he stood for politically and was also concerned about his lack of experience. But I was hopeful that he would do a good job and get the economy cranked up again.

This year I am worried for the country. Obama certainly has the experience, there is no question about that, but his apparent lack of concern about the country and the world is shocking.

There is nothing wrong with traveling to Thailand, Burma and Cambodia. Maybe when he planned the trip he thought he might lose and wanted to get in one more long trip on Air Force One. But Obama didn't lose, he won, and he has two huge crises coming to a head. One is the fiscal cliff. Maybe he thinks he can solve that with a couple of telephone calls to Republicans in Congress, but that seems really unlikely.

The other is the escalating war between Hamas and Israel. Obama is no friend of Israel so maybe Israel will be better off if he is in some foreign capital. Right now it is a missile and air war, but Israel is not going to allow Hamas to pepper its country with missiles. Hamas has fired hundreds of rockets at Israel, even targeting Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Think about this. Hamas has rockets but cannot aim them well enough to hit Tel Aviv, a city of 400,000 about 40 miles away. The US by comparison can launch a rocket from a Kansas cornfield and hit a telephone booth in China. We have drone pilots sitting in Las Vegas blowing up vehicles on mountain roads in Afghanistan. It is an incredible technology gap.

Israel gets criticized because Hamas launches hundreds of rockets and kills three people and Israel launches one air strike and kills 11 people/. So the liberals who support Hamas say it's unfair. But Israel has air raid sirens and gets as many people as possible to safety before the rockets land. Hamas, as noted, is terrible at aiming rockets.

But Hamas also does the opposite of Israel. Hamas uses its people as shields around its missile sites. So even if Israel launches a surgical strike against a missile installation there are likely to be civilian casualties because civilians are all over the place. Israel gets the blame of the mainstream media even though it is Hamas who is using their own people to gain a public relations advantage. If Israel simply knocked out all the missile sites and didn't kill anybody then Hamas wouldn't have much to complain about, so the leadership of Hamas makes certain that if a missile site is hit civilians will be killed.

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One of the reasons for his trip besides visiting dictators was to visit one of the world's most renowned human rights activists, Aung San Suu Kyi, yet Obama repeatedly mispronounced her name.

He also made a mistake when referring to Burma President Thein Sein. Obama called him President Sein, which is similar to calling Obama President Barack.

It would appear that President Barack is phoning it in on this trip, which once again raises the question of the purpose of this trip. Did he just want to be the first president to visit a couple of countries?

The gaffes are also interesting because they are so little reported in the American mainstream media. The world press, however, is not quite so nice to Obama, and with the magic of the internet all the newspapers of the world are at one's fingertips.

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So what has Obama done for the immigration situation? He has deported more illegal immigrants than President George W. Bush and tightened the regulations on employers who hire illegal immigrants. If immigration reform was high on Obama's list and he has a plan, why didn't he pass that plan during his first year in office when he could have passed anything he wanted? It wasn't until Republican Sen. Scott Brown took office in February 2010 that Obama lost his filibuster-proof majority in the US Senate. He basically had a year when Republicans couldn't do anything to stop him, but he didn't do much except work at pushing through Obamacare. He didn't pass any comprehensive immigration reform.

Obama has been president for four years. Everyone agrees that some immigration reform is needed, but he really hasn't done anything. Yet Obama gets the Hispanic vote because he keeps saying he is going to help the illegal immigrants.

The ones who are really losing out in all of this are the legal immigrants. We have made it nearly impossible for good people who want to follow the laws to immigrate, but if you enter the country illegally and live here without paying taxes for 10 years then you are supposed to have earned the right to become a citizen.

There is no doubt that we need a much better program for people to come into this country and work as laborers, but that doesn't mean that we have to ignore the fact that people have come here illegally and worked illegally ignoring the laws of this country.

I have been trying to help a couple legally immigrate to the US, and at this point it appears impossible. She has a doctorate from UNCG and he is a graduate of the UNC-Asheville. They are professionals who could live anywhere in the world but want to live, work and raise their children in Greensboro, North Carolina. What a compliment to our city. But the US immigration services so far has made it impossible for them to move to the US.

It is an insane system that we have now and Obama has done nothing to fix it, yet because of what he said, not what he has done, he was the favorite for those who consider immigration a major issue.