Should Barack Obama Resign Tonight?

I won’t hear what I’d like to hear at the presidential foreign policy debate Monday.

What I’d like to hear is Barack Obama resigning over Benghazi, the most extreme public mishandling of an attack on American personnel ever, certainly in my lifetime. If I (or most people) had been president and something like that happened on my (our) watch — and then I had lied about it myself while urging others to cover up — I would be so ashamed of myself I wouldn’t be able to come out in public.

But that’s not what happened. In fact, the reverse occurred. The president acted as if it was Mitt Romney’s fault for ever bringing the subject up. And he had a willing co-conspirator in the morally stunted Candy Crowley.

Obama’s outrage during the second debate even at being questioned on his response to the terrorist killings is one of the ugliest displays of narcissism I have ever witnessed from a politician and certainly the ugliest if you consider the ramifications of his behavior.

That the mainstream media ignored this reaction is a testament to their enduring pathology. Or perhaps to a secret longing for the divine right of kings.

But it doesn’t matter. If Barack Obama does not resign on Monday, his reputation will be destroyed forever, even if he wins a second term, because Benghazi will not go away.

This is not just because of the seemingly insoluble conundrums described so thoroughly by Watergate author (among other things) James Rosen in his Wall Street Journal oped — “The Three Benghazi Timelines We Need Answers About” — but for a reason yet more disturbing.

Only a man with a leftover undergraduate ambivalence about Western civilization would have dealt with the Benghazi catastrophe in such a fashion in the first place. Barack Obama responded to the terrorism like a Columbia junior stoned on a reefer, particularly one from his era. He took another toke and moved on. And then when he was told he couldn’t do that, he got angry at the people telling him.

How that will play out in Monday night’s debate, I have no idea (beyond my wish that he would resign and spare us any more of this). But Mitt Romney would be well advised to remember his opponent is a man who has not fully grown up. He doesn’t know how to take responsibility in an adult manner, so the chances that he will lash out are strong. He also may be aided and abetted in that enterprise by Bob Schieffer who, of the three debate moderators, is the longest card-carrying member of legacy media. In fact, he is one of the most long-standing around. You can count on his bias to shine through, overtly and covertly, because this could be the last hurrah of that clique (and they know it). Given public response to the debates and the moderators, it’s hard to believe we will see the same dumb show in 2016. If we do, shame on us.

And one final thing I would like to hear in the foreign policy debate but will not: It’s time to name our enemy. And by that I don’t mean al-Qaeda. That’s just the joker in the pack, the villain with a thousand faces, able to reappear in any mask imaginable and in any location. No, the real enemy is the pack of cards itself — Islamism. But Obama’s administration never mentions it. They don’t even use the word “terrorism.” It would be really interesting if Mitt Romney asked Obama what motivated Major Hasan’s mass murder of his fellow soldiers at Ft. Hood. I bet the answer wouldn’t even be worthy of an undergraduate.

More: Prevention: The Primary Goal, Neglected by Obama’s Foreign Policy