Jeff Greenfield doesn’t like the signs and portents:
[L]ook at the response of the late-night comedians—one of Obama’s securest bases—skewering his debate performance. From David Letterman to Jon Stewart to Bill Maher to the folks on “Saturday Night Live,” they have subjected Obama to something he experienced in the past only from his most zealous foes: ridicule. It is precisely the last thing the Obama campaign needs right now, as it works to gin up excitement among the president’s supporters, especially among the younger voters, for whom 2008 was a time of passionate engagement.
“Come on,” the reply might be. “These are trivial, insignificant items—nothing of real heft.”
So turn instead to one of the more remarkable pronouncements I have seen in recent years from a prominent American journalist: the remarks of CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan.
In a speech last week to Chicago’s Better Government Association, Logan, who was brutalized by a mob in Cairo’s Tahrir Square last year, painted a frightening picture of the terrain in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya—and accused the Obama administration of soft-pedaling the dangers there. On the heels of her “60 Minutes” report a week ago Sunday, her remarks amounted to nothing less than a frontal assault on some basic assumptions of Obama’s foreign policy—an area where he retains a significant advantage over Mitt Romney.
Alas, why gnaw you so your nether lip?
Some bloody passion shakes your very frame:
These are portents; but yet I hope, I hope,
They do not point on me. — Othello
When You’ve Lost Jeff Greenfield…
Well, what? I lost him several years ago, but I’ve been OK without him.
“Chicago’s Better Government Association”? Isnt this like a “Las Vegas Temperance Union”?
Well, they probably have drinks at a Las Vegas Temperance Union. They never get anything approaching better government in Chicago.
the comedians have more influence than anybody.
Stewart’s and Maher’s shock at Choom Boy’s defeat is the best bellweather of all.
If Letterman ever falls off the bandwagon (not likely since he’s a hard hard core fool), or even begins to hedge his bets an eentsy tiny bit, you’ll know it’s over.
It gets even better. The columnist who reported Logan’s speech moves in the same Chicago social circles as Obama and Valerie Jarrett. Laura Washington was deputy press secretary to the late Mayor Harold Washington. (Some say her white male boss was a token and she really ran the office.) She then became editor of a well regarded investigative journal on race and poverty called the Chicago Reporter, that is part of the Community Renewal Society’s operation. See http://www.communityrenewalsociety.org/about-us
You don’t get much more progressive than that. In addition to her regular Sun Times column Washington currently does political analysis for Chicago’s ABC affiliate and Public Radio. That she’d endorse Logan’s position on the Taliban, al Qaeda snd the Arab Spring had to give some in the White House heartburn.
The Logan speech deserves more attention because it is a devastating critique of Obama’s actions in the Middle East.
He are the material portions of the report on the talk:
“The Longest War.” It examined the Afghanistan conflict and exposed the perils that still confront America, 11 years after 9/11.
Eleven years later, “they” still hate us, now more than ever, Logan told the crowd. The Taliban and al-Qaida have not been vanquished, she added. They’re coming back.
“I chose this subject because, one, I can’t stand, that there is a major lie being propagated …” …
The lie is that America’s military might has tamed the Taliban.
“There is this narrative coming out of Washington for the last two years,” Logan said. It is driven in part by “Taliban apologists,” who claim “they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban,” she added sarcastically. “It’s such nonsense!”
… The Taliban and al-Qaida are teaming up and recruiting new terrorists to do us deadly harm, she reports.
She made a passionate case that our government is downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: “You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.”
Our enemies are writing the story, she suggests, and there’s no happy ending for us.
* * *
Logan even called for retribution for the recent terrorist killings of Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other officials. … Logan hopes that America will “exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil. That its ambassadors will not be murdered, and that the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.”
http://www.suntimes.com/news/washington/15581902-452/reporter-lara-logan-brings-ominous-news-from-middle-east.html
The State Dept just turned this scandal into Little Rock vs Chicago. The higherups at State are trying to save themselves from something they see coming.
This could get bloody.
“From David Letterman to Jon Stewart to Bill Maher… “.
Aren’t they the same person? :lol
Lara Logan, gang-raped by Muslims. A Conservative is a Liberal who was mugged yesterday.
The dynamics of this process are like what happens to a dog climbing on a teeter-totter. He has no idea that this thing will flip when he gets to the middle. Panic strikes, and the poor dog has no clue about what’s happening to him. He will never come anywhere near that playground ever again.
Lost hop’n-change has taken the first step on the slope of self-destruction. It’s about time!
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
(taking a cue from Charlie Martin’s dose of lit’rariness re topic glum; last two (of four) stanzas of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, published in 1867)
It is getting some traction:
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/10/10/video-lara-logan-accuses-obama-admin-of-lying-about-al-qaedas-strength/
I wonder if Lara Logan ever goes back and reads some of her previous articles? Does she grit her teeth at some of the corporate line she might have spouted once. Some conservative outlet (Fox News etc) would do well to snatch her up as a political or foreign correspondent. She obviously has talents that are not being exposed.