Gbaji wrote:
Except that The money had nothing to do with security for our embassy or consulate in Libya. This is so relevant I had to say it twice.
And complaining about the situation is counterproductive i.e., contradictory. That's equivalent to a mayor cutting the police force and criticizing another mayor for not caring for the security of his city because a crime occurred. That doesn't make any sense.
The point being is that Republicans made it EASIER and MORE likely for those same outcomes to occur. So, if Republicans really cared that much, they wouldn't have voted as such. They would have voted to maintain that money. You can't vote to cut it, then criticize the Democrats as "Not listening and/or not caring" because something happened. At a minimum, the Republicans did exactly what they are accusing the Dems for.
Gbaji wrote:
Count as what? An excuse for the Obama administration to blame the deaths of our embassy personnel on a film rather than a planned attack by existing terrorist organizations? No. It doesn't count.
Count as being at minimum equivalent.
Gbaji wrote:
If it was so irrelevant, then why lie about it? Why change the language in the intelligence reports to match one while downplaying the other? Why then send Rice out on the Sunday shows to say directly that it was one and not the other? Clearly someone in the Obama administration thought it mattered a great deal.
No one lied about the deaths of those people, which is what is important.
You're intertwining truth with conspiracy. Just because the information was incorrect, doesn't mean it was a huge cover up. You don't have to be a politician to understand crowd control. "Everything is under control" means "If I told you what really were going on, you would freak out". That's true in EVERY case. That doesn't excuse lying, you just have to smart enough to differentiate "the need to know" vs "lying". Anyone with a clearance understands "need to know".
Gbaji wrote:
The decision to try to claim this was an outgrowth of protests over a film was politically driven as well. Obviously, any response to that will also be politically driven. I'm not sure how that somehow nullifies the accusations present though. So the Obama administration can lie to the American people for political reasons, and we should dismiss any criticism of this on the grounds that the criticism is political? You've just justified our government getting away with anything it wants. You get that any criticism of actions taken by the government can be called political, right?
Read above. Were you this outraged about WMD and the two previous wars?
Gbaji wrote:
That's a monumentally stupid reason to dismiss something like this. Argue that it didn't happen. Or that the decisions that were made were not as bad as they seemed. Or that they honestly thought it was what they said. Anything like that is legitimate. Saying "it's politically driven" isn't a good counter argument at all. Show that it's *only* driven by politics, and you might have a point.
That's not the reason. Either address the point that matters or drop it. It's really that simple. Republicans are taking a valid concern and spinning it for their political gain. That's the problem.
Gbaji wrote:
Wait? So it's a conspiracy to say that somewhere between the intelligence reports from the field to the official intelligence briefing, key information was removed which resulted in downplaying the planned nature of the attack? It's not. It's a fact. It's also a fact that several drafts were written and rejected until said changes were made. This is not some "what if" scenario here. The intelligence was "fixed" to match the agenda of the Obama administration. They wanted to sell the whole "We killed OBL and Al Queda is on the run" story to the American people for the election. The attack in Libya made that difficult to do. Surely you can see how if they could convince people that it wasn't a planned terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11, but just a protest that got out of hand, then they could protect their foreign policy narrative.
There was a clear and obvious political motivation for lying. What's so strange is how many people are insisting there's nothing to this even with all the facts that are present now. At this point, it's not really a question of whether someone lied, or even why they did. It's a question of who lied, and how far up the chain it goes. Was it just some mid level folks at State acting on their own? Was Clinton involved directly? Was someone on Obama's staff involved? Someone told someone else to downplay the "planned terrorist attack" side of this. Who?
There was a clear and obvious political motivation for lying. What's so strange is how many people are insisting there's nothing to this even with all the facts that are present now. At this point, it's not really a question of whether someone lied, or even why they did. It's a question of who lied, and how far up the chain it goes. Was it just some mid level folks at State acting on their own? Was Clinton involved directly? Was someone on Obama's staff involved? Someone told someone else to downplay the "planned terrorist attack" side of this. Who?
Read above.
Gbaji wrote:
Except that it wasn't that the information was wrong. The information was correct. Someone changed the information which ended out in the official briefing so that it said something different. That was not an accident. It's not like every intelligence report from the field said X, but it turned out to be Y instead. In this case, every intelligence report said Y, the briefing draft said Y, but then it was changed to say X instead. And X just happened to be more beneficial to a president engaged in a re-election campaign at the time than Y.
Is it really so hard to connect those dots?
Is it really so hard to connect those dots?
Again. It's a legitimate concern, but when you focus on the aftermath instead on the prevention, it becomes blatantly obvious that you are playing on the deaths of innocent people to push your political gain. The same exact claim Republicans made on the President with Newtown. The difference being that the President focused on PREVENTION and not just the aftermath. Until Republicans admit fault in the overall failure of security, then it is purely political.