An Open And Shut Case To An Open And Shut Mind



In his 2010 book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, Mitt Romney accused President Obama of continually apologizing for the nation.  Now shamelessly exploiting the recent attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Romney on September 11 told reporters "I think it's a terrible course for America to stand in apology for our values, that instead when our grounds are being attacked and being breached, that the first response of the United States must be outrage at the breach of the sovereignty of our nation.  An apology for America's values is never the right course." At the second presidential debate, the Repub candidate claimed "the president's policies throughout the Middle East began with an apology tour and pursue a strategy of leading from behind, and this strategy is unraveling before our very eyes."

Romney's claim at Hofstra that "it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror," as well as the "apology tour" he imagines, have been thoroughly debunked, the latter even by Politifact.   His contention, however, that "the administration indicated this was a reaction to a video and was a spontaneous reaction," is not completely ludicrous, given that there were conflicting statements from administration officials in the weeks following the attack.

But the charges that all the violence there was assiduously planned, and that the Administration therefore did not with one voice immediately and consistently label it as nothing more than a terrorist plot for nefarious political purposes, are way over the top.      David D. Kirkpatrick of The New York Times reports

To Libyans who witnessed the assault and know the attackers, there is little doubt what occurred: a well-known group of local Islamist militants struck the United States Mission without any warning or protest, and they did it in retaliation for the video. That is what the fighters said at the time, speaking emotionally of their anger at the video without mentioning Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or the terrorist strikes of 11 years earlier. And it is an explanation that tracks with their history as members of a local militant group determined to protect Libya from Western influence.

“It was the Ansar al-Shariah people,” said Mohamed Bishari, 20, a neighbor of the compound who watched the assault and described the brigade he saw leading the attack. “There was no protest or anything of that sort.”

To the simplistic Republican mind (but I repeat myself), angry Muslims were involved, and any suggestion of spontaneity is tantamount to apologizing for America.   But the Muslim world- especially- Islamists but including the 'Arab street'- have complaints (legitimate or otherwise) against the U.S.A., including the Iraq War, U.S. support for Israel, and the Administration's extensive use of drone attacks, causes Mitt Romney is hardly critical of.

Arguably, the attack was of a terrorist nature but precipitated by the video; unarguably, intelligence was imperfect. Initial intelligence reports suggested the likelihood that the militants had reacted to the distasteful and offensive anti-Muslim video.  But counter-terrorism veteran extraordinaire Richard Clarke cautions

I dealt with scores of incidents and military operations over 30 years in the Pentagon, State Department and White House. I never saw a case where there was initial and accurate clarity about what happened.

In the case of TWA 800, the FBI thought for months that it had been shot down by a missile, only to learn much later that it was a maintenance problem that caused the fuel tank to explode. When the destroyer Cole was attacked in Yemen, it took the CIA director weeks to decide that the attackers were from Al Qaeda . The Iranian hand in the attack on the U.S. Air Force barracks at Khobar, Saudi Arabia, did not emerge for months.

News media and members of Congress may want instant answers when something explodes, when Americans die, but national security professionals know that “first reports are always wrong.” That is why, when pressed by reporters to say what had happened, UN Ambassador Susan Rice qualified her response by saying that the investigation was ongoing. She then said what the intelligence community had reported to her at that time.

The Washington Post's David Ignatius writes

“Talking points” prepared by the CIA on Sept. 15, the same day that Rice taped three television appearances, support her description of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate as a reaction to Arab anger about an anti-Muslim video prepared in the United States. According to the CIA account, “The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate and subsequently its annex. There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.”

It would never occur to Mitt Romney, who blasts the Administration for not definitively and consistently laying the blame entirely on "terrorism," to question the nation's primary agency responsible for gathering intelligence, upon which the Administration relied.   Its head, tellingly, is David Petraeus, and one never is to question the sainted General.

The Times' Kirkpatrick concludes

United States intelligence officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, have said they intercepted boastful phone calls after the fact from attackers at the mission to individuals affiliated with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. But they have also said that so far they had found no evidence of planning or instigation by the group. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, described the participation of individuals “linked to groups affiliated with or sympathetic with Al Qaeda” — acknowledging, at best, a tenuous or indirect link.

“It is a promiscuous use of ‘Al Qaeda,’ ” Michael Hanna, a researcher at the Century Foundation, said of those charging that Al Qaeda was behind this attack. “It can mean anything or nothing at all.”

The Cold War, with the United States on one side and the Soviet Union, is over, a situation little understood by Mitt Romney, who maintains that Russia and not terrorism, Iran, or nuclear proliferation is the greatest threat to world peace.    Contemporary world affairs is complicated and confusing to a lot of us, but we don't have the temerity to present ourselves as fit to be leader of the Free World.





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The Republican Media:  No. 36

Can a couple of otherwise fine institutions at least be a little less obviously biased? The following is one of the exchanges, pertaining to Libya, during which Barack Obama sliced and diced Mitt Romney at the debate at Hofstra University in Long Island:

Obama: "The day after the attack, governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people in the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened -- that this was an act of terror -- and I also said that we're going to hunt down those who committed this crime."

Romney: "I think interesting the president just said something, which is that on the day after the attack he went into the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror."

Obama: "That's what I said."

Romney: "You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, it was an act of terror. It was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you're saying?"

Obama: "Please proceed, governor."

Romney: "I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror."

Obama: "Get the transcript."

Politifact (Tampa Bay Times) and FactCheck.org (Annenberg Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania), inarguably two of the leading fact checkers in the political world, took a curious approach to assessing the veracity of Romney's claim.   They noted (as Obama did on Tuesday) that the day after the attack on the American consulate in Libya, the President stood in the Rose Garden and declared "No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation."

The two fact-checkers concede Obama the following two days again  used the word "terror" to describe the incident.  On September 13 he asserted in Colorado "I want people around the world to hear me:  To all those who would do us harm, no act of terror will go unpunished. It will not dim the light of the values that we proudly present to the rest of the world.  No act of violence shakes the resolve of the United States of America."At a fundraiser in Nevada the following day he declared "And we want to send a message all around the world -- anybody who would do us harm:  No act of terror will dim the light of the values that we proudly shine on the rest of the world, and no act of violence will shake the resolve of the United States of America."

In a bizarre turn of events, FactCheck then argues "Romney isn't entirely wrong. Romney claimed Obama refused for two weeks after the Benghazi attack to call it a terrorist attack and, instead, blamed it on a spontaneous demonstration in response to an anti-Muslim video that earlier that day triggered a violent protest in Egypt."  Politifact rates Romney's claim "half true."

Politifact reasons that after September 12, "neither (Obama) nor all the members of his administration spoke consistently on the subject. There were many suggestions that the attack was part of demonstrations over an American-made video that disparaged Islam."  FactCheck maintains "We cannot say if there was a deliberate attempt to mislead the public or whether, as the administration says, the conflicting statements in the weeks after the attack were the result of an evolving investigation. We’ll leave that for readers to decide."

Mitt Romney did not say "there were conflicting statements by the Administration following its original acknowledgement that a terrorist attack had taken place."  Nor did he say "the confusion exhibited by the Administration reflected reluctance by the President to identify the act clearly as one of terrorism."    If he had, those claims could have been evaluated on their own merits.  Or Romney might have argued that greater security had been requested for the consulate, and dared the President to blame the congressional Republicans for having blocked additional security funding and now undergoing a deathbed conversion.

Instead, the former governor said this: "it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror."   The attack began on September 11.  On September 12, in a statement which addressed the situation in Libya and only Libya, the President said "no acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation."   Twelve (9/12) minus eleven (9/11) equals one- not 14- except, apparently in the land of some fact-checkers.

In language Politifact would recognize:  "we rate" the claim of Mitt Romney, and of those who believe he was not grossly inaccurate, as "pants on fire."

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A Waste Of Valuable Time



Reacting after the second presidential debate, Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution tweeted "We've had 4 hrs of debates and criminal justice & prison reform hasn't been mentioned once.  Think that says a lot abt our nat'l debate."

Yes, it does, as well as about the insufficiency of six hours of debates among the presidential and vice-presidential nominees.   But this from Barack Obama says more about our national debate:

The most important thing we can do is to make sure we control our own energy. So here’s what I’ve done since I’ve been president. We have increased oil production to the highest levels in 16 years.

Natural gas production is the highest it’s been in decades. We have seen increases in coal production and coal employment. But what I’ve also said is we can’t just produce traditional source of energy. We’ve also got to look to the future. That’s why we doubled fuel efficiency standards on cars. That means that in the middle of the next decade, any car you buy, you’re going to end up going twice as far on a gallon of gas. That’s why we doubled clean — clean energy production like wind and solar and biofuels.

And all these things have contributed to us lowering our oil imports to the lowest levels in 16 years. Now, I want to build on that. And that means, yes, we still continue to open up new areas for drilling. We continue to make it a priority for us to go after natural gas. We’ve got potentially 600,000 jobs and 100 years worth of energy right beneath our feet with natural gas...

The President, at least, gave a nod to "environmentally sound" policies and reducing demand.  Mitt Romney, informed that fossil fuel production has been rising, wasn't satisfied that the pace of global warming has been sufficiently rapid:

Well, let’s look at the president’s policies, all right, as opposed to the rhetoric, because we’ve had four years of policies being played out. And the president’s right in terms of the additional oil production, but none of it came on federal land. As a matter of fact, oil production is down 14 percent this year on federal land, and gas production was down 9 percent. Why? Because the president cut in half the number of licenses and permits for drilling on federal lands, and in federal waters.

So where’d the increase come from? Well a lot of it came from the Bakken Range in North Dakota. What was his participation there? The administration brought a criminal action against the people drilling up there for oil, this massive new resource we have. And what was the cost? 20 or 25 birds were killed and brought out a migratory bird act to go after them on a criminal basis.

Look, I want to make sure we use our oil, our coal, our gas, our nuclear, our renewables. I believe very much in our renewable capabilities; ethanol, wind, solar will be an important part of our energy mix.

But what we don’t need is to have the president keeping us from taking advantage of oil, coal and gas. This has not been Mr. Oil, or Mr. Gas, or Mr. Coal. Talk to the people that are working in those industries. I was in coal country. People grabbed my arms and said, “Please save my job.” The head of the EPA said, “You can’t build a coal plant. You’ll virtually — it’s virtually impossible given our regulations.” When the president ran for office, he said if you build a coal plant, you can go ahead, but you’ll go bankrupt. That’s not the right course for America.

Let’s take advantage of the energy resources we have, as well as the energy sources for the future. And if we do that, if we do what I’m planning on doing, which is getting us energy independent, North America energy independence within eight years, you’re going to see manufacturing jobs come back. Because our energy is low cost, that are already beginning to come back because of our abundant energy. I’ll get America and North America energy independent. I’ll do it by more drilling, more permits and licenses.

We’re going to bring that pipeline in from Canada. How in the world the president said no to that pipeline? I will never know...

Perhaps because tar sands oil is particularly destructive to the environment, the pipeline would eliminate more jobs in tourism, ranching and agriculture than it would create in construction, the pipeline probably will raise oil prices in the Midwest, and most of the oil is slated to go to the same mainland China Romney gets so hot and bothered about otherwise.

No matter.   Even as the two candidates vie to outduel each other to prove he can make the bigger carbon footprint, one can only imagine how they would have handled prison reform.The American people- in the abstract- want all criminals put, as the late George Wallace put it, "under the jail."   No penalty can be so severe, in the collective mind of voters, and many (mistakenly) believe prisoners enjoy all manner of luxuries.   Overlay that with an economic slump and any discussion of criminal justice would be punctuated by weeping and gnashing of teeth over criminals having it so easy while unemployment is so high (as is true) and the budget deficit is crushing the nation (which is not true).

Criminal justice and prison reform?   No presidential or vice-presidential nominee, nor any candidate from either major political party for either position with a credible chance of being nominated, ever has advocated the end of the drug war, the legalization of marijuana, or even decriminalization of marijuana possession.    And a candidate who has never mentioned "inner city" or "poverty" and one who believes workers who earn a meager salary are freeloaders dependent on government who don't take responsibility for their lives will have anything sensible to say about convicted criminals?
  
Sure they would, and tomorrow it will snow in Miami.



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The Pro-Crime NRA On Board With Romney


There are few issues- maybe one or two, maybe not- which more clearly demonstrate the extremist nature of the modern Republican Party than gun control.

A right-wing blogger  at the Washington Examiner writes that National Rifle Association president David

Keene said that Obama's statement was a "strategic error on his part" because it blew up the president's pro-Second Amendment rhetoric. "He knows it's politically dangerous to take on the Second Amendment," said Keene.

"We have credibility when we say that Barack Obama is a threat to your rights. But that credibility is obviously enhanced 10-fold when Barack Obama, in a moment of weakness, says, 'Yeah, as a matter of fact I am.' And that's what he did," said Keene. "This is going to help us."

The NRA is blanketing Ohio, Virginia, Florida and Wisconsin with advocacy mailings and ads, hopeful of persuading the vast majority of pro-gun, non-NRA members to vote for Romney. They made a similar effort during the recent Wisconsin gubernatorial recall effort and several analysts credited the NRA with helping to save Gov. Scott Walker.

Evidently, Barack Obama had brazenly torched the United States Constitution and threatened the very foundations of the Republic when at the second presidential debate he stated

But there have been too many instances during the course of my presidency, where I’ve had to comfort families who have lost somebody. Most recently out in Aurora. You know, just a couple of weeks ago, actually, probably about a month, I saw a mother, who I had met at the bedside of her son, who had been shot in that theater.

And her son had been shot through the head. And we spent some time, and we said a prayer and, remarkably, about two months later, this young man and his mom showed up, and he looked unbelievable, good as new.

But there were a lot of families who didn’t have that good fortune and whose sons or daughters or husbands didn’t survive.

So my belief is that, (A), we have to enforce the laws we’ve already got, make sure that we’re keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, those who are mentally ill. We’ve done a much better job in terms of background checks, but we’ve got more to do when it comes to enforcement

But I also share your belief that weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theaters don’t belong on our streets. And so what I’m trying to do is to get a broader conversation about how do we reduce the violence generally. Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced. But part of it is also looking at other sources of the violence. Because frankly, in my home town of Chicago, there’s an awful lot of violence and they’re not using AK-47s. They’re using cheap hand guns.

And so what can we do to intervene, to make sure that young people have opportunity; that our schools are working; that if there’s violence on the streets, that working with faith groups and law enforcement, we can catch it before it gets out of control.

And so what I want is a — is a comprehensive strategy. Part of it is seeing if we can get automatic weapons that kill folks in amazing numbers out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. But part of it is also going deeper and seeing if we can get into these communities and making sure we catch violent impulses before they occur.

The NRA is not newly panicked at the President's rhetoric.  Rather, in ads and mailings to pro-gun voters, Keene says, "the president has ratified what we have been saying... see, he peeked out and finally said what he wants."

An impertinent Barack Obama wants "to enforce the laws we've already got, make sure that we're keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, those who are mentally ill" and better enforce mandatory background checks.

Oh, the humanity of it all!  The President of the United States doesn't want criminals and mentally ill individuals to possess firearms, nor anyone to possess cheap handguns, hardly the weapon of choice for the hunters the NRA claims to advocate for. Moreover, President Obama had begun his statement maintaining "We’re a nation that believes in the Second Amendment, and I believe in the Second Amendment. We've got a long tradition of hunting and sportsmen and people who want to make sure they can protect themselves."    Obama thus implied that the Second Amendment assures an individual right to bear firearms, a widely held position of persons poorly versed in English grammar, but a view he had affirmed in April of 2008.   He expressed support for not only hunters and sportsmen, but also "people who want to make sure they can protect themselves."

Nonetheless, the NRA is hot on the trail of Barack Obama and determined to elect Mitt Romney, with Keene boasting "we can move the race a couple of points."   Their newest heartthrob should be asked why he specifically opposes reimposing the ban on weapons with high-capacity amunition magazines, such as the one which killed six individuals in a Tucson, Arizona parking lot two years ago.  Or why he opposes the effort of many of the survivors of that incident to close the "gun show loophole."
  
Mitt Romney has staked out a radical position on gun control or, as the pro-crime community terms it, "gun rights,"  and so has gained powerful support from the National Rifle Association, whose members know whom to vote for.   Getting a free ride, the GOP candidate is garnering from the nation's most powerful merchant of death active support largely hidden from voters unaware that he is being embraced by the nation's most powerful merchant of death.


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No Rules



Here is the money quote:

And — and so we — we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.

I went to a number of women’s groups and said, “Can you help us find folks,” and they brought us whole binders full of women.

I was proud of the fact that after I staffed my Cabinet and my senior staff, that the University of New York in Albany did a survey of all 50 states, and concluded that mine had more women in senior leadership positions than any other state in America.

Here is Atrios' response:

Jokes aside, the binders of women comment was basically the core of all of the mostly mythical affirmative action in this country. It's about recognizing that if you're a product of a good old white boy network, it's a good idea to make the effort to read those binders, to make the extra effort to look at qualified women and minorities.

This isn't a comment on what actually happened when Mitt was in office, just pointing out that if you embrace that story you embrace affirmative action, because aside from a teeny bit of minority business contracting and civil service hiring provisions, that's what affirmative action actually means in this country.

And here, after approvingly quoting the above passage from Atrios, is Digby:

Romney made a great case for affirmative action, something his party adamantly opposes. But it's so common sense that he could say it in the debate and nobody even noticed. Not even Fox.

Maybe it's because I'm a white male and, unlike the crew at GOP TV, not a corporate flunky,  but I noticed.   And I noticed that it came from a guy who couldn't even concede in a nationwide, widely watched debate, that he supports a requirement of equal pay for equal work.
 
Despite appearances, this is no contradiction.  Mitt Romney had no problem hiring qualified women because it is the thing that is done in a modern society- and, well, this was Massachusetts, after all. As a corporation in a suit, Romney has no problem with businesses, small or large, hiring women as well as men. Nor would he object to those enterprises paying women as much as men- or less, or twice as much.  He simply doesn't want them to be required to do so, or to do anything they don't want to do.

This applies to all businesses from the "mom 'n pop" the wealthy typically laud (but rarely patronize- except in the sense of condescending toward) to Exxon Mobil, for which the GOP toils.  Not surprisingly, even Eschaton and Digby apparently didn't notice

Now one of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort. But number two, because I recognized that if you’re going to have women in the workforce that sometimes you need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school.

She said, I can’t be here until 7 or 8 o’clock at night. I need to be able to get home at 5 o’clock so I can be there for making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said fine. Let’s have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.

Here, Romney inadvertently, casually and without notice, distinguishes between those mom 'n pop stores and Exxon Mobil.   It is primarily the latter which are capable of altering the workplace to accommodate employees with special needs.   Small businesses will do so when pressed against the wall, when they have an employee essential to the success of the outfit.  They are displeased but have no choice because survival of the business may be at stake.

Large corporations have the capability of surviving fairly large numbers of employees whom they accommodate.  They may even have a division assigned to work out arrangements for their workers.   They have a luxury small employers do not.  And if it means giving the employee "a flexible schedule," they may be able to squeeze more hours of work or lower pay from that worker. It's a corporate victory, one many progressives find exquisitely progressive.

So don't get too excited about the Republican nominee's nod to affirmative action. Obviously, he is sufficiently condescending that he believes he he has to go out of his way to find qualified women.  But he knows also that any modern executive, private sector or public sector, can't automatically exclude 50% of the population from consideration, and that there are enough right-wing women devoted to the cause of the 1% to stock a Romney administration.



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Unforced Error



It has been over a week- a week!- since I last used my favorite word, "ironic."

It has been long enough, and so it was ironic that both Mitt Romney's most effective statement and biggest unforced error came in response to the worst question at Tuesday night's clash in Hempstead, NY.  

We shouldn't have been surprised.   Closing statements, a waste of valuable time, have become almost mandatory.   There were two-minute closing statements in this year's first presidential debate, hosted by Jim Lehrer, and a closing statement in the vice-presidential debate.

Last night, there was no closing statement- technically.   There was, in fact, a call by Candy Crowley for closing statements, though not acknowledged as such by the moderator.   Crowley chose the questions- and order of the questions- from among those submitted by allegedly undecided voters.   And the last one was nearly predictable.   "What do you believe," a guy named Barry Green asked, "is the biggest misperception "that the American people have about you as a man and a candidate? Using specific examples, can you take this opportunity to debunk that misperception and set us straight?"

When a politician hears a vague question about feelings or what people think of him or her, it looks like a big, fat fastball over the heart of the plate.    And when the questioner asks to be "set straight," that fastball is coming over at about 80-85 miles per hour.  (Sports analogies are so tedious, aren't they?)   It is a request for a closing statement by any other name.

In part, Romney didn't disappoint, claiming, in the manner of a closing argument to a campaign

I understand that I can get this country on track again. We don’t have to settle for what we’re going through. We don’t have to settle for gasoline at four bucks. We don’t have to settle for unemployment at a chronically high level. We don’t have to settle for 47 million people on food stamps. We don’t have to settle for 50 percent of kids coming out of college not able to get work. We don’t have to settle for 23 million people struggling to find a good job.

Sure, a President has virtually no effect on the price of gasoline in the short-term (which was the issue in play here); unemployment is coming down and is .4% higher than when incumbent President Ronald Reagan ran on the highly successful "Morning in America" theme; food stamp rolls are very high because of the economic slump Barack Obama inherited and liberalization of eligibility rules enacted under President Bush; and Romney wants to raise the eligibility age for both Medicare and Social Security, which would deter elderly people from retiring, hence foreclosing those positions from young people looking for a job.

Still, those comments from the challenger would have been effective- had they not been overshadowed, justifiably, by a comment Romney made earlier in the same response:  "I care about 100 percent of the American people. I want 100 percent of the American people to have a bright and prosperous future. "

Uh, no.  No, he doesn't.   Mitt Romney does not care about 100 percent of the American people, nor does he particularly want 100 percent of the American people to have a bright and prosperous future.   He hardly is rooting for individuals "who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it."  He believes "they will vote for the president no matter what" and that he will "never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

Let's go over it:  in the formulation of the ex-governor, 47% of Americans are crybabies, leach off the (federal income tax) taxpayers, and will vote for his opponent, anyway.   But he cares about them and wants them "to have a bright and prosperous future."

Resisting the temptation explicitly to accuse his opponent of "chutzpah," Barack Obama nevertheless pounced, asserting, in part

I believe Governor Romney is a good man. Loves his family, cares about his faith. But I also believe that when he said behind closed doors that 47 percent of the country considered themselves victims who refuse personal responsibility, think about who he was talking about

Folks on Social Security who’ve worked all their lives. Veterans who’ve sacrificed for this country. Students who are out there trying to hopefully advance their own dreams, but also this country’s dreams. Soldiers who are overseas fighting for us right now. People who are working hard every day, paying payroll tax, gas taxes, but don’t make enough income.

And I want to fight for them. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last four years. Because if they succeed, I believe the country succeeds.

By bringing up "100%," Romney obviously laid the predicate for Obama's remark.   The President ought to spend the remaining three weeks of the campaign reminding voters that his opponent dismisses both soldiers and the elderly, and is targeting the latter with his plans for Medicare and Social Security (not primarily individuals already elderly, but it is a status almost all of us aspire to).  In his response to an audience member who wanted him to "debunk" a "misperception" and "set us straight," Romney could have helped Obama more only if he had quipped "Barry, I didn't realize you needed to be set straight."



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The Answer Is Obvious, Megyn


According to the Center for American Progress, 32 seconds after last night's presidential debate ended, GOP TV's Megyn Kelly maintained

And the questions! 11 questions asked in all, and some of which will certainly be discussed tomorrow. Topics that we haven’t heard at all in this campaign — equal pay for women, in fact there were a lot of women’s issues discussed…abortion, contraception, women’s pay as I mentioned. Some might argue it was obvious pandering to women because the female vote is so important in this election. Apart from equal pay for women, we heard a discussion about assault weapons ban, a question to Mitt Romney about how are you different from President Bush, and then a question to President Obama, what have you done to earn my vote? The one question on foreign policy by my count was about Libya, and seemed to cover ground that we already knew the answer to: it was who denied the request for increased security. Well, we heard great testimony about that last week, there were State department officials who answered that question. So there will be some questions about those selections, Bret.

CAP's Zake Beauchamp interprets this as "spinning the debate as biased as a consequence of the questions asked by the undecided voters."  There is an element of that, certainly, as one would expect of Fox News.  When Kelly argues "we already knew the answer to (sic): it was who denied the request for increased security," she simplifies a complex situation, one which includes the GOP House's decision to cut security funding requested by the Administration.

But Fox News is not only slanted as the communications arm of the Republican Party; it is ill-informed. If the remarks by Kelly- who refers to "the one question on foreign policy"- weren't taken out of context, she was perturbed that foreign policy was de-emphasized.

Gee, why might that have been?  What might the sole topic of the upcoming, third and final, debate?

Monday October 22, 2012

Topic: Foreign policy Air Time: 9:00-10:30 p.m. Eastern Time Location: Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida (Tickets) Sponsor: Commission on Presidential Debates Participants: President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney Moderator: Bob Schieffer (Host of Face the Nation on CBS) The format for the debate will be identical to the first presidential debate and will focus on foreign policy.

When considering GOP spin, sometimes it just gets too difficult to differentiate between bad ideology and basic ignorance.

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