Words, just words:

Last night Mr Cameron cut short his trip to Paris and described the assassination as ‘absolutely sickening’, insisting Britain will ‘never buckle’ in the face of terrorist attacks.

– The Prime Minister, as quoted by the Daily Mail,  in their initial report on the horrific Islamic terrorist attack on an unarmed British soldier in London yesterday.

Well at least Britain won’t be buckling its uniforms: “British troops told not to wear uniforms outside bases after yesterday’s attack in London,” Allahpundit reports today:

Hard to imagine a more demoralizing order for a soldier than to tell him to take off the uniform and hide after an enemy’s attack. And the powers that be know it: They’re stressing that the order’s temporary in order to blunt public indignation over their decision.

The twisted punchline here is that the victim yesterday wasn’t wearing a uniform. The two degenerates who murdered him apparently targeted him because they saw him entering or exiting a barracks. There’s the next move, presumably — evacuate the barracks nationwide until they’re safe. For soldiers.

Read the whole thing. Just as appeasement-oriented leftists created the perfect environment for Hitler to exploit in the 1930s, beginning in the 1980s, Jesse Jackson and other leftists began shouting “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ Has Got to Go.”  And gone it just about has; multiculturalism and leftwing self-hatred and self-doubt has created the perfect opening for radical Islam to finish the job. And they’re well on their way.

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Time-Warner-CNN-HBO spokesman Morton Downey Morgan pretends to be shocked that someone from a foreign country is attempting to score points for their political ideology immediately after a grisly murder and shooting incident.  Much needed hilarity in the wake of a truly heinous act of terrorism occurs; Morgan loses last remaining viewer.

But who will teach Morgan how to purchase a tank, now?

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“Two attackers armed with meat cleavers filmed their deadly assault on a man in London, according to [Sky News] sources,” in an article linked to by Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit:

A man reported to be a serving soldier died and two people have been shot in Woolwich, after what Sky sources understand is being treated as a terrorist attack.

Senior Whitehall sources said the two attackers asked passers-by to film them, and they shouted “Allahu Akbar” (Allah is great).

In footage that has emerged, one of the attackers wields a bloodied meat cleaver and says: “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you.”

The black man, dressed in a grey hooded jacket and black woolly hat, apologises to members of the public who witnessed the horrific scenes before making a number of political statements.

In the footage, he is heard to say: “We must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

“I apologise that women have had to witness this today, but in our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe.

“Remove your government, they don’t care about you.”

Witnesses also described seeing the “crazed” Woolwich attackers “hacking” at their victim and posing for pictures before charging at police wielding meat cleavers.

Naturally, most of the details, including the report that it was a beheading(!) was airbrushed out by the BBC, which is in full Orwellian Ministry of Truth mode in an attempt to keep this story on ice.

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POTUS deploys Marines for rain in Rose Garden with Turkish PM Erdogan. twitter.com/MajorCBS/statu…

— Major Garrett(@MajorCBS) May 16, 2013

Mr. Obama started off his second term without noticing that Jon Favreau, his misogynistic departing lead speechwriter left him uttering “Peace in our time” on his way out the White House door writing for lesser celebrities in Hollywood. Today Obama channels Neville Chamberlain once again, only this time, he uses American Marines as props to hold umbrellas for himself and Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan at a joint press conference. Or as Twitchy quips, “Out: I support the troops. In: The troops support my umbrella.”

But as the scandals continue to hit the ‘Bam, it looks like he’s going to need a bigger umbrella. And who knows — perhaps not even the Marines can save him.

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“The burglary occurred in 1972, the climax came in 1974, but 40 years ago this week — May 17, 1973 — the Senate Watergate hearings began exploring the nature of Richard Nixon’s administration,” George Will writes in the Washington Post, appropriately enough:

Now the nature of Barack Obama’s administration is being clarified as revelations about IRS targeting of conservative groups merge with myriad Benghazi mendacities.

This administration aggressively hawked the fiction that the Benghazi attack was just an excessively boisterous movie review. Now we are told that a few wayward souls in Cincinnati, with nary a trace of political purpose, targeted for harassment political groups with “tea party” and “patriot” in their titles. The Post has reported that the IRS also targeted groups that “criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution .” Credit the IRS operatives with understanding who and what threatens the current regime. The Post also reports that harassing inquiries have come from other IRS offices, including Washington.

Jay Carney, whose unenviable job is not to explain but to explain away what his employers say, calls the IRS’s behavior “inappropriate.” No, using the salad fork for the entree is inappropriate. Using the Internal Revenue Service for political purposes is a criminal offense.

At his Campaign Spot this week, Jim Geraghty writes, “The Mask Is Ripped Off of ‘Hope and Change,’” an open letter to the MSM:

SCANDAL ONE: Dear Media: Obama’s Indignant Benghazi Response Revealed a Lot Yesterday!

Dear friends in the media.

Come on.

I mean, come on.

You and I know what’s going with the Benghazi thing. Let me share something that I first put into play during the “was Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account hacked” debate, but that comes from watching the Lewinsky scandal, the where-did –Mark-Sanford-go scandal, the why-is-David-Wu-dressed-in-a-tiger-suit scandal, and a wide variety of wrongdoing committed by politicians:

When there is evidence of scandalous or bizarre behavior on the part of a political figure, and no reasonable explanation is revealed within 24 to 48 hours, then the truth is probably as bad as everyone suspects.

Nobody withholds exculpatory information. Nobody who’s been accused of something wrong waits for “just the right moment” to unveil information that proves the charge baseless. Political figures never choose to deliberately let themselves twist in the wind. It’s not the instinctive psychological reaction to being falsely accused, it’s not what any public communications professional would recommend, and to use one of our president’s favorite justifications, it’s just common sense.

So…

You and I both know, in our guts, and based upon everything we’ve seen in Washington since we started our careers, that there’s no innocent explanation for the Obama administration’s actions before, during, and after the Benghazi attacks.

That’s just one of three scandals Jim breaks down in his post.

Regarding another, the Obama Administration tapping the AP’s phone records, Ace of Spades’ co-blogger Drew M writes that it’s the least of the Jokers in the ever-growing Obama scandal deck (to mix playing card references)…

Keep in mind, it doesn’t appear that the AP is the subject of the investigation. What the DoJ knows is someone leaked information to the AP. The number of people who had access to that information may be relatively large but it’s not infinite. By taking the AP’s phone records and matching them to the list of people who called them with the list of people who had access to the information, you can develop a universe of potential suspects.

The AP says it’s a “roadmap” to their reporting operations. I’m more worried about people who leak a “road map” to intelligence operations.

Politically this could be a loser. People tend to not like the press and they do like catching terrorists. When people find out this is about getting to the bottom of who leaked damaging national security information to the press, I think most people we say, “go get the bastards”.

One caveat…we know this administration is power hungry and doesn’t recognize any legal or traditional limits on its powers. Might they have abused the information they gathered? Obviously. So this could turn out to be a bigger deal. But based on what we know now, it’s only a big deal because the press loves to protect themselves and their assumed privileges more than anything. Even more than they love Obama.

….But if it’s the one that p.o.’s the MSM the most, to the point where the scales fall from their eyes — even temporarily — so be it:

One of the more tense and interesting exchanges during Tuesday’s White House briefing occurred when NBC’s Chuck Todd exposed White House spokesman Jay Carney as not exactly being honest regarding a talking point involving a piece of legislation that might have protected the Associated Press from the Department of Justice seizing the phone records of 20 reporters.

Throughout the briefing, Carney kept reminding reporters that, as a United State senator, President Obama had been in favor of this “press protection” legislation, but Republicans had killed it.

Todd, who had obviously done his homework, then dropped a nuke on Carney by revealing that, in 2009 as president, Obama changed his mind and “killed” the legislation, even though at the time it likely would have easily passed through both chambers of Congress, which were then controlled by Democrats.

The video at the link is pretty astonishing to watch, as Todd, smelling blood in the water, continually lays into Carney, considering that Todd worked for the 1992 presidential bid of fellow Democrat Tom Harkin (he of the phony Vietnam combat record), and works for DNC house organs NBC and MSNBC.

But then, Carney’s been having quite a rough patch all around:

Carney insisted, was his claim that there were anti-video demonstrations outside the Benghazi compound on September 11 last year. Besides, he continued, Republicans are wrong to accuse the White House of “playing down an act of terror and an attack on the embassy,” because “the president himself” took to the Rose Garden on September 12 and told the country that the attack was an “act of terror.”

This was quite an astonishing thing for Carney to repeat, not just because the CBS transcript is available to anyone who cares to look it up but also because Carney himself claimed on September 14 that the attack “was a response to a YouTube video.” Worse, five days after that, he told the press:

Our belief based on the information we have is it was the video that caused the unrest in Cairo, and the video and the unrest in Cairo that helped — that precipitated some of the unrest in Benghazi and elsewhere. What other factors were involved is a matter of investigation.

This line was repeated at least once by Hillary Clinton, many times by Susan Rice, and, on September 26, by President Obama in his speech to the United Nations. We are thus supposed to believe that the government was so concerned about “the integrity of the investigation,” to use Carney’s peculiar words, that it removed all the suspects from public discussion while simultaneously blaming the attack on a video.

Among their many claimed sins, Republicans also drew Carney’s ire for “leaking” information “for political reasons.” “That’s their prerogative,” he sniffed. But this disgust at leaks struck a false note, given that the White House had held a secret meeting just a few minutes earlier in which it passed — “for political reasons”? — unattributable information to reporters. Just a few minutes before Carney’s on-air press conference, Politico’s Dylan Byers reported:

The White House held a “deep background” briefing with reporters on Friday afternoon to discuss recent revelations about the Benghazi investigation, sources familiar with the meeting tell POLITICO. . . . I asked [White House spokesman] Earnest to explain the meaning of “deep background,” as defined by the White House, for my readers. He emails: “Deep background means that the info presented by the briefers can be used in reporting but the briefers can’t be quoted.”

And we all know there are serious consequences when this White House is angered:

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The new film’s resident villain, that’s who:

Will the new Star Trek sequel boldly go where much of Hollywood has gone before–bashing President George W. Bush?

Benedict Cumberbatch, the British actor who plays the mysterious villain in Star Trek Into Darkness, told BBC America that the new film’s futuristic setting didn’t stop it from reflecting on recent global events.

In the film there’s a debate among Starfleet personnel over how best to extract an enemy in a distant part of the galaxy — and whether that enemy should be subjected to due process.

The British actor says: “It’s no spoiler I think to say that there’s a huge backbone in this film that’s a comment on recent U.S. interventionist overseas policy from the Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld era.”

Gee, wait’ll Cumberbatch finds out that James T. Kirk was inspired by John F. Kennedy, and the United Federation of Planets by JFK and LBJ’s New Frontier/Great Society interventionist overseas policy. Or that the Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld era of foreign policy flowed directly from the previous Clinton, Gore and Madeleine Albright era?

The trick to good sci-fi is to bury the politicization deep in the subtext, which is made much easier when the layer on top of that contains spaceships, phaser pistols, and the distaff half of the crew in miniskirts. The writers know that — even if the actors hired to speak their lines give the game away far too often.

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In 2006, Boston University professor (and PJM contributor) Richard Landes brought you “Pallywood,” which illustrated how Palestinians are experts at faking news on a Hollywood-style assembly line basis for a gullible western media that wants to believe:

Later that same year, Reuters was busted for its heavily Photoshopped image of Beirut under attack, in which Reuters’ Mideast stringer and ace Photoshop user Adnan Hajj was busted for criminal image assault with a Photoshop clone tool. An embarrassed Reuters grudgingly issued a “Picture Kill” update to the papers that rely on the wire service for its content:

And over the past decade, there have been numerous other examples of bad Photoshoppery from the Mideast region; sometimes from freelance stringers such as Hajj, sometimes from Mideast government propaganda shops.

Today, the ExtremeTech.com Website explores how, in their estimation, “the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year was faked with Photoshop:”

The photo, dubbed Gaza Burial, was purportedly captured on November 20, 2012 by Paul Hansen. Hansen was in Gaza City when Israeli forces retaliated in response to rocket fire from Palestinian rocket fire. The photo shows two of the casualties of the Israeli attack, carried to their funeral by their uncles. Now, the event itself isn’t a fake — there are lots of other photos online that show the children being carried through the streets of Gaza — but the photo itself is almost certainly a composite of three different photos, with various limbs spliced together from each of the images, and then further manipulation to illuminate the mourners’ faces.

Just looking at the photo, you can tell there’s something off. The perspective of the buildings looks weird; it seems like there’s so much unsharp mask or a similar Photoshop filter on the bald men in the front that he looks painted in, and the focus seems off on the other men in the photo:

After some extensive and (given the name of the Website) appropriately technical background on how the photo was assembled, ExtremeTech notes:

Basically, Hansen took a series of photos — and then later, realizing that his most dramatically situated photo was too dark and shadowy, decided to splice a bunch of images together and apply a liberal amount of dodging (brightening) to the shadowy regions. For what it’s worth, Hansen claims that the light in the alley was natural — and to be fair, sometimes magical lighting does occur. I think most of you will agree, though, that the photo simply feels fake — there’s just something about the lighting that sets off a warning alarm in your brain. As for why World Press Photo didn’t forensically analyze the photo using freely available, advanced, accurate analysis tools such as FourMatch or FotoForensics… who knows.

Oh, I forgot to mention the best bit: Hansen was meant to provide the Raw file for his winning photo, as proof that he didn’t significantly modify the final image — but so far, he hasn’t.

Because, as we mentioned at the top of the post, so many leftwing western news agencies want to believe. But then, modern wars — and especially postmodern wars — are fought not just on the battlefield, but inside the TV screen and Web monitor as well.

Update: Speaking of postmodern, ABC News ventures into the murky realm of “even better than the real thing” at the conclusion of their analysis of Hansen’s controversial photograph:

Ironically, the magic of Photoshop makes it possible to edit photos to look as if they had not been edited with Photoshop. Palmisano believes that in the future photographers will increasingly emphasize authenticity by using post-processing to make their images look less perfect than if they had been taken with a digital camera. The worse a spectacular photo looks, the more genuine it feels. [Ironically, this is the sort of thing that Hollywood CGI artists have been doing for the last 20 years. They frequently add simulated lens flares, camera shakes, artificial smoke elements and other techniques all designed to deliberately "dirty up" a digital special effects shot, to add verisimilitude. -- Ed]

When Paul Hansen took his picture in the Gaza Strip, another photographer was nearby. His photo must have been taken in almost the same location and at almost the same time, but it is an ordinary-looking news photo. It lacks the perfect cropping, the magical light and the debate over authenticity, but it also lacks the resonance and sympathy of Hansen’s image.

Hansen says that he wants to achieve good things with his work. Perhaps an ordinary news photo wouldn’t have been enough for that.

So the House of Stephanopoulos is entering further into “fake but accurate” territory? I thought Dan Rather and the New York Times had the lock on that defense.

Here’s an interesting Der Spiegel video (in German, but with English subtitles) with some further thoughts on how the above photo was manipulated:

And in a 2011 blog post titled “Is This Photo Ethical?” A photographer examines a 2010 image taken by Hanson of young girl shot by police after the Haiti earthquake. While Photoshop trickery isn’t discussed, photographer Eric Kim writes:

Looking at the image [of the young dead Haitian girl], it is a very emotional image that does bring great amounts of awareness to this horrible issue. However when looking at the photo below shot by photographer Nathan Weber, I feel that the story changes. Rather than having the image being a positive political tool, it looks like the photographers below are more like vultures– all trying to get the best version of the image and exploiting this horrible crime.

Yes, it’s always disconcerting to see the MSM’s sausage being made.

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That’s what the Hollywood Reporter is claiming tonight, with the caveat that she’ll remain on The View for one more year:

After more than half a century in broadcast journalism and nearly 40 years at ABC News, Barbara Walters is officially ready to retire. Walters will make the announcement herself on Monday’s edition of The View – the ABC daytime program she co-created and has hosted since 1997.

Walters, who will turn 84 in September, intends to remain on The View through next season and will step down after the season wraps in summer 2014. She’ll continue to be a co-executive producer of the show and will be involved in selecting new co-hosts to replace Joy Behar and Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Behar announced in March that she’ll depart after the current season. Hasselbeck has yet to confirm that she’s leaving the show.

As I wrote in March at Instapundit when the news first broke (either as a scoop, or an ambush from ABC to set her retirement in motion), the decade worth of train wrecks on The View — not the least of which were Rosie’s 9/11 Trutherisms and Whoopi’s Moon Landing Truther moment — will certainly tarnish Walters’ legacy when her career is ultimate assessed.

Update: “Didn’t Barbara Walters leave journalism years ago when she started on The View?” Well, yes.

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In Orwell’s 1984, there’s a moment when Winston Smith, newly imprisoned in the sinister “Ministry of Love” sees O’Brien, his former conspirator entering his cell. Thinking he had be been arrested like himself, Winston says, “They got you, too!”

“Oh, they got me a long time ago, Winston,” O’Brien replies, revealing that it was he, an ambitious cog in the Inner Party, who had Smith arrested. (I’m writing this from memory; the effect is even more dramatic in the movie, when Richard Burton speaks the line in his sonorous baritone.)

The only torture that Jay Carney performs are his daily waterboard-like press conferences, and increasingly as the Obama administration spins out of control, they’ve become as agonizing for the performance artist as they are to the rest of us, his audience. But keep O’Brien’s phrase in mind, when reading Peter Wehner’s look at “The Corruption of Jay Carney” at Commentary:

So Mr. Carney obviously misled the public in November; the only question is whether he did so willfully. Yet rather than admit to his multiple misleading statements in the past, Carney blamed Mitt Romney and Republicans. The spin Carney used was transparently dishonest. He constructed a false reality to defend himself and the administration. In the process, he has merely further damaged his credibility. You can watch the whole painful press briefing here.

Once upon a time, Jay Carney was a journalist who wanted to search for truth. Now he is an Obama White House official awkwardly attempting to hide it. He is now part of a cover-up. The questions are just how wide and deep the cover-up extends, how many more falsehoods the Obama White House will employ in its defense, and whether being played for fools by a liberal administration will bother the elite media and White House press corps.

We’re about to find out.

It’s a great post, but the idea that “Once upon a time, Jay Carney was a journalist who wanted to search for truth,” rings rather falsely. Or, if it’s true, the idea of truthful journalistic searching was bled out of Carney’s reporting a very long time ago. Astride the White House podium, Carney looks like a smarmy teenager wearing hipster nerd glasses and his first grown-up suit; I was astonished to discover that he’s 47 years old, when I looked up his age before writing this post. But it makes sense, considering he was a Time-Warner-CNN-HBO employee dating back to the beginning of the 1990s, when he was writing liberal hack work such as these examples:

“In towns like Pushkino (pop. 90,000), many Russians view the tumult sweeping Moscow with more anxiety and skepticism than do their big-city compatriots…they wonder if the destruction of Soviet communism will bring them anything more than uncertainty and hardship.” — Time reporter James Carney, September 9, 1991.

“The fear that continues to fester about Bush — as we read about his periodic foreign-policy gaffes and then hear him blithely assert that what he doesn’t know he can learn from his advisers–is that at 53 he has the same cavalier attitude toward knowledge that he had at 21: he could learn what he needs to know, but he doesn’t seem to think it’s worth his time….There was something else jarring about what Bush said [about Israel]. There is no such thing as an ‘inter’-ballistic missile. These mistakes may seem minor, but taken together they suggest that Bush is still under water when grappling with foreign- and defense-policy basics.” — Time reporter James Carney playing up Bush gaffes, November 15, 1999.

“As he unveiled his new-look campaign in South Carolina last week, including Oprah-style sessions with citizens and banners heralding him as A REFORMER WITH RESULTS,  Bush tore into McCain like a pit bull let loose in a slaughterhouse.” — Time reporter James Carney describing “My Jog With George,” February 21, 2000.

“If it sounds as if George Bush is protesting too much, that’s because he’s got a credibility problem. It’s hard enough being the leader of a party that has made headlines by shutting down the government and refusing to add a few quarters to the minimum wage. The Texas Governor also has his own recent past to overcome, including a bruising primary fight that featured him cozying up to the religious right and running a singularly uncompassionate campaign against his opponent, John McCain.” — Time’s James Carney and John F. Dickerson, April 24. 2000.

In April of 2001, Dickerson and Carney would co-author a profile of Karl Rove for Time with this infamous passage:

Setting priorities and delivering bad news to friends is just a sliver of what Rove does as Bush’s top political gun. It was Rove who shaped the agenda, message and strategy that got Bush–the least experienced presidential nominee of modern times–into the White House. Now it is Rove’s job to keep him there through 2008.

Did Carney really believe what he wrote in that last passage — that a man who had previously been governor of Texas, toppling Democrat Ann Richards in the process, really was “the least experienced presidential nominee of modern times”? If so, how could he have taken such a high-profile job with a president who had infinitely less experience — and virtually none outside the leftwing political-academic bubble he spent his entire adult life marinating in, and no business experience, unlike Bush, before running for the job?

Which brings us to David Gerstman’s look at the Legal Insurrection blog, at how the Benghazi debacle punctures the Obama administration’s “team of rivals” myth. The “team of rivals” line was promoted in the summer of 2008 by Joe Klein, another Time-Warner-CNN-HBO-paid hack, as a way to add Lincoln-esque spin to describe the brain trust the otherwise woefully unprepared presidential candidate imagined he’d surround himself with. As with many of the early Obama myths processed in the JournoList vegan tofu sausage factory, it sounded nice on paper. But once he took office, the real Obama, as blogger Neo-Neocon notes in Gerstman’s post, “seems to prefer to have people around him with even less experience and expertise than he has, which is saying something.”

Or as Gerstman concludes:

Barry Rubin observes that the problem wasn’t just with Obama’s team either:

Benghazi is the perfect symbolism of the president of the United States going to sleep in the face of a crisis, the living embodiment of a 2008 election ad by his opponent about whether he would deal with a crisis that erupted at 3:00 a.m.

In order to “prove” that Obama was ready for the presidency despite his marked lack of relevant experience the MSM created a number of myths to help him evade the scrutiny they would have cast on any other candidate. One of them was that he’d surround himself with the best people. After the Benghazi hearings that myth has been effectively shattered.

If old media journalists continue to turn on Obama, it may because they’ve invested so much time and their own credibility (such as it is) building up their fantasy candidate and president, beginning around 2007. But if any of them really began their careers as “objective” journalists passionately in search of the truth, their lust for Inner Party status overtook their desire to report long ago.

Update: Moments after I hit the “Publish” button on this post, I came across an article by Brett Arends in the Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch column, on five ways why “The news media is even worse than you think,” which includes this passage:

Do you want to know what kind of person makes the best reporter? I’ll tell you. A borderline sociopath. Someone smart, inquisitive, stubborn, disorganized, chaotic, and in a perpetual state of simmering rage at the failings of the world. Once upon a time you saw people like this in every newsroom in the country. They often had chaotic personal lives and they died early of cirrhosis or a heart attack. But they were tough, angry SOBs and they produced great stories.

Do you want to know what kind of people get promoted and succeed in the modern news organization? Social climbers. Networkers. People who are gregarious, who “buy in” to the dominant consensus, who go along to get along and don’t ask too many really awkward questions.

Which sums up the JournoList crowd rather perfectly, no?

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Things Conservatives Have Been Proven Right About Lately: ☑ Benghazi; ☑ Pigford;☑ Obamacare; ☑ IRS. Next up: The immigration reform scam.

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) May 10, 2013

“I suspect that list will grow longer,” Joel B. Pollack adds at the Breitbart.com “Conversation” group blog. give that “Obama Is Every Bit as Bad as We Warned You.”

Speaking of which, say, what did Gen. Petraeus, then still the head of the CIA, think about the Benghazi talking points before Susan Rice made the rounds on five Sunday talk shows back in September?

And Moe Lane asks, “…So, Pat Smith would have the same ‘absolute moral authority’ as Cindy Sheehan, right?”

Update: DaTechGuy on “MSM Conventional Wisdom Circa May 5th 2013 vs This Morning.”

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#JayCarneyExcuses My dog ate my talking points. And The President ate my dog.

— Hugo Hackenbush (@MangyLover) May 10, 2013

Heh, indeed.™

Related: “Picture perfect: Jay Carney gets caught ‘white washing’ during press briefing.”

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In between some thoughts on a gibberish tweet from Media Matters (aren’t they all?), at the Breitbart.com Conversation, John Hayward speculates on who might go under the bus first:

The groundwork is now laid for a big coordinated push by Democrat operatives in the media to portray Clinton as a rogue loose cannon who cooked up these phony talking points with the assistance of protocol droids like Victoria Nuland, while poor helpless Barack Obama was completely out of the loop.  Why, he and Biden were probably as shocked as the rest of us to hear Gregory Hicks’ testimony yesterday!

The bus will roll over Nuland first – she’s going to be painted as a loose cannon who spent days doctoring intelligence reports without the knowledge of poor, helpless Hillary Clinton.  If that doesn’t work, Hillary will be the next deer frozen in the headlights… except the Clintons don’t do that deer-in-the-headlights stuff.  They fight back.  That will make things interesting, especially as people like Boehlert find their in-boxes filling up with conflicting talking points from Team Obama and Team Clinton.

Jay Carney was so spooked today that he’s blaming it all on Mitt Romney.

As Paul Brandus of The Week writes that “The dam bursts on Benghazi — Thanks to a bombshell report from ABC News, GOP accusations that the White House politicized a tragedy no longer seem so unsubstantiated:”

There’s a meatpacking-like quality to all this. You don’t really want to know how your hamburger is processed, do you? The administration’s defense — and it’s looking thinner than ice on a late spring pond — is that government bureaucracy is messy and multi-layered and that’s a big part of why Rice said what she did.

Benghazi occurred seven weeks before election day. The administration’s strategy was simple: Downplay the terror attack, change the narrative, and run out the clock. And that’s what it did.

But now the dam has burst. Carney’s “here at the White House” comment has essentially thrown Clinton under the bus. Republicans, who leaked the edited emails to Karl and Hayes, have succeeded on two fronts: They’ve got the administration on the defensive over Benghazi, and they’ve weakened the Democrat’s most formidable 2016 candidate.

It seems that after all that digging, Republicans have found their pony at last.

Faster, please:

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James Taranto on “The New Nixon,” only this time around, “the press cheered as the IRS investigated the president’s opponents,” he adds:

Last year, the Post notes, “Tea Party groups complained . . . that they were receiving dozens of questionnaires from the IRS with regard to their applications for nonprofit tax status, probing their political leanings and activities.”

That prompted an editorial from the New York Times cheering on the IRS: “Taxpayers should be encouraged by complaints from Tea Party chapters applying for nonprofit tax status at being asked by the Internal Revenue Service to prove they are ‘social welfare’ organizations and not the political activists they so obviously are.” The Times did say the rules “should be applied across the board,” and the list of groups it wanted investigated included Priorities USA, a pro-Obama group, as well as a couple of conservative groups and Americans Elect, the failed third-party effort.

But the IRS now acknowledges that Tea Party people were right: The agency was investigating them because of their political profile. Viewpoint-based selective enforcement of IRS regulations would be a First Amendment violation even if the regulations themselves are constitutional. It is difficult to credit Lois Lerner’s claim that this was merely an error and not politically motivated. Imagine if the NAACP and the United Negro College Fund got hit with this sort of treatment and the IRS denied a racial motive while acknowledging it had deliberately chosen groups whose names contained synonyms for “black.”

Read the whole thing.

Regarding the Watergate flashbacks caused by Benghazi, in a guest post at Power Line, David Gelernter writes:

It is the Democratic Party that’s on trial today; and to a lesser extent, America’s mainstream media.  For Democrats (and especially Democratic senators) it is put-up-or-shut-up time: are they Democrats or Americans first?  Obviously their first instinct was to defend the Democratic administration.  Republicans would have done the same.  But starting with the Hayes story on the Rice propaganda points (and the neo-Soviet process that turned them from truth to lies), and then the Issa hearing Wednesday (and a recent ABC news piece focusing again on the phonied-up talking points), no honest observer can fail to suspect this administration of doing unspeakable things.  It is Congress’s duty to find out the truth.

How would Republicans act if a GOP administration were under this sort of cloud?  We know exactly how.  It was the radically partisan Edward Kennedy who proposed that a senate select committee investigate Watergate—but in February 1973, the Senate voted unanimously to create that committee.  Republican Senator Howard Baker was vice chairman, and asked the key question: ”What did the president know and when did he know it?”  Which Democratic senator will ask that question today, now that the issue isn’t breaking-and-entering but lying about four murders, including the murder of an American ambassador?  Which cabinet member will be Eliot Richardson and resign rather than continuing to be part of a coverup?  Will John Kerry rise to the challenge?

To ask the question is to answer it.

But speaking of All the President’s Men…

Update: Also at Power Line, John Hinderaker adds, “Come to think of it, this may be one more reason why Obama is so single-mindedly devoted to winning back the House in 2014: the way his administration’s scandals are multiplying, an all-Democrat Congress provides insurance against having to leave office via helicopter.”

And via the comments section:

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“ABC Finds Benghazi Talking Points Extensively Edited by State Dept,” Jim Geraghty’s writes at NRO’s Campaign Spot blog:

The final Morning Jolt of the week features trouble in Syria, Kerry getting static from Russia, an argument against the immigration bill from an unexpected source, more worries from . . . but the lead item is the morning’s breaking news:

BREAKING: Jay Carney Lied About the Benghazi Talking Points

Breaking this morning, from ABC News’ Jonathan Karl:

When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story.

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department. The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.

Also breaking: apparently ABC, aka, the House of Stephanopoulos, is temporarily at least, toying with the idea of getting back into the news business.

(As opposed to NBC: Lisa Myers said this morning on TV that Democrats have been calling her to attempt to undermine the testimony of Benghazi whistleblower Gregory Hicks,” the Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper notes today. What a shock.)

Also from Geraghty: “Stop Seeing Benghazi Through the 2016 Campaign Lens;” in other words, it’s as much about the man who holds himself out as Commander in Chief, as it is his former Secretary of State:

Today Andrew Malcolm asserts that “the big Benghazi mystery” was “where was Obama while four Americans perished?” The answer has always been pretty clear: at the White House. He was informed at the beginning of the evening by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey, and then informed of the aftermath the following morning. As far as he and his administration were concerned, his staff was on it.

* * * * * *

For now, one of yesterday’s most stunning revelations was the news that at no point did the U.S. ask the Libyans for permission to fly into their airspace for a rescue operation, presumably one of the first steps in putting together an operation like that. In other words, at no point during the seven hours did the ball get rolling on an effort to rescue them.

As James Lileks noted yesterday on the Ricochet podcast with Byron York, the administration was likely so terrified of a botched Jimmy Carter-style rescue mission less than two months before the election, that it never sought to mount one.

Which brings us to Allahpundit at Hot Air, with sneak previews of “Coming soon to a congressional subpoena near you.”

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Just as the NFL’s Hall of Fame celebrates both the NFL and the AFL, this museum has multiple wings as well. Reason’s Matt Welch, whose post’s title inspired ours, has what is likely a (very) incomplete list of “the officials and commentators who inaccurately blamed a murderous attack at least in part on an obscure YouTube trailer.”

Meanwhile, Red Alert Politics lists “8 journalists who downplayed the Benghazi scandal.” Which again, is likely a very incomplete list, particularly given that it occurred as old media was getting ready to go all-in to get their candidate over the finish line. And while the Red Alert post lists individual journalists, there are also those institutions that downplayed the scandal.

QED:

And finally, Rich Lowry pens a reminder of “The Benghazi patsy,” who is still rotting in jail:

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula deserves a place in American history. He is the first person in this country jailed for violating Islamic anti-blasphemy laws.

You won’t find that anywhere in the charges against him, of course. As a practical matter, though, everyone knows that Nakoula wouldn’t be in jail today if he hadn’t produced a video crudely lampooning the prophet Muhammad.

Having run afoul of America’s de facto state religion, Nakoula likely won’t be the last.

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“So if anyone wants to know what difference does it make, anyone wants to ask what difference does it make, it always matters whether or not you can trust your government. And to the families, we’re gonna find out what happened in Benghazi, and I don’t give a damn whose career is impacted. We’re going to find out what happened.”

– Rep Trey Gowdy (R-SC), yesterday.

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“Bribery? Rep. Jackie Speier asks Gregory Hicks where he’d most like to be posted,” the Right Scoop notes. The California Democrat did so, while he in the middle of testifying.

To Congress.

Does Hicks have a long estranged brother living in Sicily that Obama’s palace guard can fly into DC to sit in the audience of the hearings on short notice?

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“By the way, does everyone remember the full text of Hillary Clinton’s infamous quote?”, John Hayward asks at the Breitbart.com group blog:

“Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they’d go kill some Americans?  At this point, what difference does it make?”

Well, after today’s testimony, it’s clear that Hillary Clinton knew it was neither a protest, nor guys out for a walk with their droogies, looking for a bit of the old ultraviolence after a night of partying at the milk bar.  She was still lying through her teeth when she had her little “what difference does it make?” outburst, still pretending that when she quite literally had the 2 AM phone call she talked about in her campaign against Obama, the planned and organized nature of the attack was not made clear to her.  If American voters knew about that 2 AM phone call the day after the attack, things could have gotten very tense for the Obama re-election effort.  I doubt Hillary would have been willing to quietly resign in disgrace to save Obama’s bacon.  The 24 and 72-hour cycles after a politically dangerous event are crucial.

Now Obama and Clinton just need their media buddies to exile these new hearings to the ghetto of truth for a few news cycles, until the subject can be changed again.

Still though, it will be fun in 2016 watching the left Memory Hole not just Hillary’s incompetence and lying during Benghazi, but their Progracist demonization of both Hillary and Bill during the 2007/2008 campaign.

Roll over George Orwell, and tell Saul Alinsky the news:

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To understand how America — and much of the world — began to go off the rails in the 20th century, it’s worth flashing back to the tremendous opening shot of Paul Johnson’s opus Modern Times:

At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.

No one was more distressed than Einstein by this public misapprehension. He was bewildered by the relentless publicity and error which his work seemed to promote. He wrote to his colleague Max Born on 9 September 1920: ‘Like the man in the fairy-tale who turned everything he touched into gold, so with me everything turns into a fuss in the newspapers.’ Einstein was not a practicing Jew, but he acknowledged a God. He believed passionately in absolute standards of right and wrong.

He lived to see moral relativism, to him a disease, become a social pandemic, just as he lived to see his fatal equation bring into existence nuclear warfare. There were times, he said at the end of his life, when he wished he had been a simple watchmaker.

The public response to relativity was one of the principal formative influences on the course of twentieth-century history. It formed a knife, inadvertently wielded by its author, to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings in the faith and morals of Judeo-Christian culture.

Flash-forward to today; many view Stephen Hawking at Einstein’s scientific heir; Hawking’s full embrace of moral relativity has led him to signing on to an academic boycott of Israel, as Ben Cohen writes at Commentary:

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has a track record of lying about its successes. Over the last few years, many of their claims about individuals and companies endorsing the boycott–including PGGM, the largest pension fund in the Netherlands, Hampshire College, Harvard University, the academic retirement fund TIAA-CREF, and telecoms giant Motorola–were quickly exposed as false. Additionally, the signal failure of the movement’s academic arm to enlist any prominent, respected scholar to its cause naturally sowed doubts about Hawking’s apparent endorsement. Finally, it seemed difficult to believe that Hawking, whose own achievements owe a great deal to the Israeli physicist Jacob Bekenstein, would approve something as crude and as ugly as a boycott.

* * * * * *

In plain speaking, then, the ultimate aim of the boycott movement is to dismantle the State of Israel in its entirety, not simply to secure its withdrawal from disputed territories. We are not talking here about, in the words of the Associated Press, a strategy “designed to bring pressure on the Israeli government,” but the wholesale rejection of anything or anyone associated with Israel. It is for this reason, and rightly, that the boycott movement can credibly be described as anti-Semitic, for it seeks to deny only the Jewish people the right of self-determination, and viciously caricatures the Jewish state as a carbon copy of the old apartheid regime in South Africa.

I make this point in anticipation of the coming tussle over whether Stephen Hawking is or isn’t anti-Semitic. His supporters will certainly portray him as a fearless opponent of colonialism, a man who nobly condemned the war that ousted Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq as a war crime, and who is now being “smeared”–the favored word of anti-Zionists everywhere–as a Jew-hater. Detractors will doubtless point out that Hawking’s thinking is riddled with moral idiocy (why pick on Israel while remaining silent on serial human rights violators like North Korea and Iran?) and hypocrisy (major advances in combating Lou Gehrig’s disease, which Hawking has suffered from for more than 40 years, have been made in Israel).

The overriding consideration is that, regardless of Hawking’s personal attitudes toward Jews–which no one bar his closest confidantes could credibly claim knowledge of–he has associated himself with a movement that seeks to eliminate, in the form of the State of Israel, the one guarantee Jews have against a repeat of the genocidal persecutions of the last century. That same consideration should govern any assessment of his decision to withdraw from the Jerusalem conference.

Or as Ben Shapiro tweets regarding Hawking’s decision: “Proof positive that high intelligence is no substitute for moral wisdom.”

Update: Tim Blair has some fun with his headline — Howard Wolowitz would certainly approve.

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“Attkisson’s Willingness to Investigate Obama Earns Washington Post Profile,” John Nolte writes at Big Journalism:

The Washington Post found CBS News investigative reporter worthy of a profile Tuesday. Why? Well, her willingness to actually investigate the Obama White House makes her unique outside of Fox News and right-leaning media. A sad commentary on the overall media to be sure, but the Post points this fact out without irony in a piece titled: “Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News, a persistent voice of media skepticism on Benghazi.”

Believe it or not, Children, there was a time when a “persistent voice of media skepticism” towards those in power regarding an incident that involved something like the death of four Americans wasn’t unique. In fact, a long, long time ago, The Washington Post itself was pretty famous for its willingness to hold power accountable.

But all that changed over the last couple of decades, which means we have arrived at a dangerous time in our country when a reporter actually doing her job is enough of an outlier to become news itself.

But not entirely surprising, when this is the attitude that the Post itself takes in regards to today’s hearings:

To understand how the Post transformed itself from a journalistic powerhouse to its current feeble state as Obama’s palace guard, here’s a timeline of events from 2004 through 2010: Through a Gimlet Eye: Studying the Washington Post Kremlinologist-Style.

And to understand why Attkisson’s current employers are getting a bit uncomfortable that she’s actually doing her job — or at least, the job we like to think that journalists used to do — check out this post by Allahpundit at Hot Air:

For the same reason, the left takes greater exception to the Koch brothers’ interest in buying the LA Times than it would to the Kochs setting out to build their own right-wing paper from the ground up. They can’t stop conservative media from existing, but they can ghettoize it as illegitimate and “partisan” in a way that their own partisan garbage isn’t. The problem with the Kochs buying the Times is that the paper already has a reputation among wider media for being respectable and impartial (giggle). That reputation can and will be retracted by the rest of the press if/when the Kochs take it over, but it’ll take more work to delegitimize it than it would some new Koch start-up. Same with Attkisson: Skepticism about Benghazi is fine for the wingnuts at Fox, but bringing such unhelpful nonsense into an “impartial,” i.e. pro-Obama, outlet like CBS risks lending credence to the GOP’s accusations. The proper line to take on Benghazi is to dismiss the new hearings with a sneer, a la Joe Klein, or, in the case of “impartial” news coverage, to dismiss them more lightly by referencing Hillary’s long-ago whining about a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to discredit the Clintons. “Going where the story leads” is unhelpful to liberalism in this case, ergo it’s advocacy by definition.

As Allahpundit quips, “CBS’s loss will, undoubtedly, eventually be Fox News’s gain.” And if Roger Ailes calls offering freedom to go wherever the news is and a fat paycheck, I can’t blame her for taking it, but it will be unfortunate to see old media continue to defenestrate itself.

But it does answer “Why consumers are fleeing the media” — a topic explored by Howard Kurtz(!) at CNN(!!) in March.

Update: “Greg Gutfeld wins quote of the day: ‘The media is Obama’s scandal condom.’” Heh.™

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