someproteinguy wrote:
Democratic take:
1) Terrorists launched a surprise attack and killed some of our people.
Yup. Like one week after Obama launched his whole "Al Queda is defeated" campaign. Surely you can see how there might be some motivation within the Obama administration to downplay the global terrorism angle and perhaps upsell the idea that this was an isolated incident arising from a protest in response to a video?
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2) In the confusion immediately following the attack inaccurate information got conveyed, and were sorry about that.
Even if we accept the idea that this was just an honest mistake that happened to blame the whole thing on a filmmaker rather than any sort of increase in terrorist activity in the region, that does not explain why the white house was still trying to sell that false narrative 5 days later. And even if we accept that this was also just an honest mistake, it does not explain why the president himself continued to try to sell this story a week or so after the general "WTF?" response to Rice's media blub.
I'd say it was less "confusion" and more "wishful thinking" on the part of the Obama administration. They wanted it to be about a protest, so they pushed that narrative far far after it was abundantly obvious that this wasn't remotely true.
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3) We're working with our allies to hold the terrorists responsible for their actions.
Yeah. Really not the point though. As I've said in the past, the big killer for Clinton is (and will be) her on camera diatribe about "why does it matter?!" in response to the issue of why our embassy was attacked. Regardless of what sequence of events occurred which lead to the attack, and the response after wards, one should hope that determining what actually happened and why should be a principle job requirement for someone in the position of Secretary of State. Failing to learn why it happened would seem to be a job failure. Yet she basically told a congressional hearing that her job didn't really matter to her.
That's a big deal for someone trying to be president, right? It should matter whether those who attacked our embassy did so as a result of a planned campaign against us, or a random spur of the moment thing. For her to question why it matters tells us that she either doesn't understand the job she was doing, or didn't care about the job she was doing. So why the hell should we reward her with an even more important job?