Sowell article...

From David P. in S.C.

Verbatim Post

Read the original article here. 

Libya and Lies

Oct 23, 2012

It was a little much when President Barack Obama said that he was "offended" by 
the suggestion that his administration would try to deceive the public about 
what happened in Benghazi. What has this man not deceived the public about?

Remember his pledge to cut the deficit in half in his first term in office? This 
was followed by the first trillion dollar deficit ever, under any President of 
the United States -- followed by trillion dollar deficits in every year of the 
Obama administration.

Remember his pledge to have a "transparent" government that would post its 
legislative proposals on the Internet several days before Congress was to vote 
on them, so that everybody would know what was happening? This was followed by 
an ObamaCare bill so huge and passed so fast that even members of Congress did 
not have time to read it.

Remember his claims that previous administrations had arrogantly interfered in 
the internal affairs of other nations -- and then his demands that Israel stop 
building settlements and give away land outside its 1967 borders, as a 
precondition to peace talks with the Palestinians, on whom there were no 
preconditions?

As for what happened in Libya, the Obama administration says that there is an 
"investigation" under way. An "on-going investigation" sounds so much better 
than "stonewalling" to get past election day. But you can bet the rent money 
that this "investigation" will not be completed before election day. And 
whatever the investigation says after the election will be irrelevant.

The events unfolding in Benghazi on the tragic night of September 11th were 
being relayed to the State Department as the attacks were going on, "in real 
time," as they say. So the idea that the Obama administration now has to carry 
out a time-consuming "investigation" to find out what those events were, when 
the information was immediately available at the time, is a little much.

The full story of what happened in Libya, down to the last detail, may never be 
known. But, as someone once said, you don't need to eat a whole egg to know that 
it is rotten. And you don't need to know every detail of the events before, 
during and after the attacks to know that the story put out by the Obama 
administration was a fraud.

The administration's initial story that what happened in Benghazi began as a 
protest against an anti-Islamic video in America was a very convenient theory. 
The most obvious alternative explanation would have been devastating to Barack 
Obama's much heralded attempts to mollify and pacify Islamic nations in the 
Middle East.

To have helped overthrow pro-Western governments in Egypt and Libya, only to 
bring anti-Western Islamic extremists to power would have been revealed as a 
foreign policy disaster of the first magnitude. To have been celebrating 
President Obama's supposedly heroic role in the killing of Osama bin Laden, with 
the implication that Al Qaeda was crippled, would have been revealed as a farce.

Osama bin Laden was by no means the first man to plan a surprise attack on 
America and later be killed. Japan's Admiral Yamamoto planned the attack on 
Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II, and he was later 
tracked down and shot down in a plane that was carrying him.

Nobody tried to depict President Franklin D. Roosevelt as some kind of hero for 
having simply authorized the killing of Yamamoto. In that case, the only hero 
who was publicized was the man who shot down the plane that Yamamoto was in.

Yet the killing of Osama bin Laden has been depicted as some kind of act of 
courage by President Obama. After bin Laden was located, why would any President 
not give the go-ahead to get him?

That took no courage at all. It would have been far more dangerous politically 
for Obama not to have given the go-ahead. Moreover, Obama hedged his bets by 
authorizing the admiral in charge of the operation to proceed only under various 
conditions.

This meant that success would be credited to Obama and failure could be blamed 
on the admiral -- who would join George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton and other 
scapegoats for Obama's failures. 

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Stay safe.