Frankly, I’m surprised that a pollster could find a majority that even knows why Benghazi is in the news. So…progress!
On Libya, 54% of the country is dissatisfied with the administration’s response to the Benghazi attack, with only four in ten saying they’re satisfied with the way the White House handled the matter.
“But that dissatisfaction is not because Americans see a cover-up,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “Only 40% believe that the inaccurate statements that administration officials initially made about the Benghazi attack were an attempt to deliberately mislead the public. Fifty-four percent think those inaccurate statements reflected what the White House believed to be true at the time.”
Well, that’s what a media blackout buys you.
There is no way that the White House believed that its Benghazi started from a movie schtick was true. No way.
Setting Ambassador Susan Rice aside for a moment, as she is really just one player in a multi-act play, the White House knew thanks to real-time information from the battle that it was a terrorist attack led by Ansar al-Sharia. That group had been identified as early as August by Library of Congress research as an al Qaeda branded Islamist group. The White House also knew that the Cairo attack was not a mere protest, but was a pre-planned attack. There was nothing save one terrorist exhorting his fellow attackers to use the Cairo protest as cover, to suggest that a movie had had anything to do with the attack.
The White House also knew that the Benghazi attack presented strong evidence that its campaign claim — al Qaeda is on the run — was not true.
For two weeks, all the way past Rice’s Sept 16 cavalcade of crap to President Obama’s shameful performances on The View and Letterman, right through his disgraceful speech at the United Nations, the Obama White House tried to keep the protest charade going. They jailed a movie producer. They attacked the First Amendment. The president declared that the future does not belong to those who “slander” Muhammad.
The media has an awful lot to work with in all of that, but has chosen not to pursue it with any zest. A few questions that the media could be, but are not, asking:
1. Who decided to blame a movie, and when did they make that decision?
2. Who changed the talking points from the CIA version, which identified al Qaeda, to the version that Rice and Obama used for two weeks?
3. Why did they make those changes?
4. Why haven’t then been identified and fired?
5. Did anyone on the Obama campaign play any role in the public Benghazi message?
6. If so, who, and what role did they play?
7. Why was Susan Rice tasked with appearing on the Sunday shows on Sept. 16 to explain Benghazi when, as President Obama recently said, she had nothing to do with Benghazi?
8. Doesn’t that tasking suggest that, at a minimum, someone who did have something to do with Benghazi had or has something to hide?
9. Why has the White House chosen not to release any photos from the Situation Room taken during the attack?
And so forth. But the media aren’t asking any of those questions.
So the majority of Americans aren’t aware that they’ve been misled.
Which is the point of misleading people, isn’t it?
Just one more unfortunate piece of evidence that a majority of the American people are fools.
Recall Lincoln’s famous words, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
Trouble is, you don’t have to fool all of the people, just enough to get elected again. Unfortunately, the density of fools has vastly increased, since Lincoln’s time. They are now actually running our country.
Obama won re-election.
Forget polls about Benghazi, that fact alone shows that the majority of the American public is either too disengaged or too foolish to see what this administration has been doing for four years. Probably both, actually.
When Pravda was the propaganda mouthpiece of the Soviet Union, I’m certain that the great majority of the Soviet people believed that the USSR was a prototype “Worker’s Paradise”. Is the reign of the Obamites any different?
Are you sure he won? When I take a look at the official>/b> numbers for Boston (allegedly not a swing state) I see that only three precincts had turnouts inferior to 100% Most had turnouts superior to 120%. Now let’s imagine we have similar North-Korea like numbers not in Boston but in the blue areas of Ohio, Virginia, Colorado…
Sorry, but I’m with the majority for once. I don’t need a vast, eyeball-popping conspiracy to dislike Obama. Nope, no coverup – just bungling. Possibly the most serious thing that’s happened in Obama’s presidency, and it was handled like Amateur Hour. They were confused up there at the WH, so they cobbled up a story that confirmed (as everyone seems to agree) the big narrative of Obama the Foreign Policy Genius. I think that’s called confirmation bias. You don’t know what’s true so you believe what you want to be true. And they blurted it out before they were sure. It was so obvious. Clumsy. Unprofessional. It was a disgrace and it’s still a disgrace. That’s what I’m angry about. That’s why I didn’t vote for the man.
P.S. – And where’s the outrage? Other than “condemning the attack in the strongest terms,” what is Jamie Foxx’s Lord and Saviour doing about it – other than covering his own ass, that is? Not seeing a lot of anger, not seeing a lot of action. Evidently, we’re just going to let it slide.
Jesus, what an empty suit…
Which means that the majority of the American public is OK with mediocrity and bumbling at the highest levels. Not surprising. The popularity of reality shows demonstrates that many Americans are fascinated by obnoxious mediocrities grabbing their 15 minutes of fame because they have learned to have an inflated high regard of themselves. The same underlying phenomenon makes them tolerant of ineptitude and corruption at the highest levels. We have no more moral anchors.
they need to push on hard with the investigation.. It’s all we got left of our Country at least to know the truth
The points this episode establishes:
The embassy, the Ambassador asked for additional support/protection for weeks or was it months before this incident and were ignored/denied.
They asked for additional protection within hours of the fatal attacks and atrocities and were denied.
They needed support as the attack began. Those who were in a position to support them were told to stand down. The seals who ignored orders and went to help were murdered with the Ambassador.
Rumors of guns running to Syria and possible black ops swirl in the ether.
Hillary murmured … I can’t believe they did that…
Then the fabrications boiled up.
What we do know is that this Administration in general and its leaders in particular don’t have the Ambassador’s, the Military’s and the United States citizens backs. We are mere bumps in the road to their achieving their aspirations. We need to take heed and be prepared to protect ourselves!
And those are the real questions. How they played the story is not the issue so much as the aftermath. If Obama, as he said, gave an order to do everything we can to help, then which General(s) refused to carry out an order from the CIC?
Telling people on the ground to stand down, and not following orders to assist Americans in the middle of combat is treason in my opinion.
And that’s the part of the story that even McCain and friends are ignoring.
I bet you that neither Rasmussen nor any other respectable pollster would conduct a fully-paid survey of the percentage of Americans who believe that the Moon is made out of green cheese. The results (i.e., that most humans are complete idiots) might destroy their business.
The primary question in the Bengazi mess is, What was America doing in Bengazi? After a meeting with a Turkish delegation, all hell broke loose. Were we selling cached weapons to Syrian rebels with Turkey brokering the deal? If we find out what was really going on in Bengazi we would be scared to death. America, selling weapons to the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. Well, our Muslim-in-Chief has been a big help in getting rid of middle eastern dictators, (Gadaffy, Mubarak)and installing the Muslim Brotherhood. It makes sense. This is not action from the America I grew up in and I fear that the Republic is lost.
if CNN had asked “do you believe that former president bush is at fault for the benghazi attack?” these same 54% of respondents would have answered yes.
is there really anybody half alive in the u.s. who thinks the most powerful office holder on earth, in this age of instant video communications, doesn’t have big screen t.v.’s all around him 24/7? i don’t think so. he missed many security briefings just prior to this event. probably not unusual i’m thinking. however, the facts speak for themselves. isn’t the only person who could have given an order for American troops to forcefully cross the borders of a country we are not at war with our famous el presidente? he knew. he watched it happen, if he wasn’t asleep. the drone pix were all over the big screens in the w.h. they receive constant info. from around the world. they all knew. go watch the ncis (navy investigators) com/video resources on t.v. and multiply x10.
its not that obamobots don’t believe the bloody bungller of benghazi did all these horrible things. they just aren’t educated enough (or bright enough) to care. claiming to be smart and walking the walk are two different animals.
kypd
The problem here is that the story itself hasn’t gotten into the public eye much, except places like here. As a result, when Susan Rice says (back then) that the best guess was that the attack wasn’t committed by terrorists, no one then saw that as unreasonable, because most everyone knew little or anything about the attack beyond that it had happened, and the Ambassador was killed. Once details leaked out (while the Administration desperately tried to quash them) it became apparent that the intelligence analysts had to know, while the attack was going on, that it was organized and probably Al Qaeda or an affiliate was behind it. The difficulty (of course) is that Obama was at the time campaigning on the “I’ve got al Qaeda on the run” theme, and so he didn’t increase security (for fear of pissing of local Libyans, and making the Arab world think he felt insecure about the Arab Spring) and his lack of action makes him look bad. So they covered up the fact that it was al Qaeda, and tried to spin this as a protest over a YouTube video.
The difficulty here, as is often the case, is that the “objective” news media doesn’t want to present the world with something that’s obvious. To them, the facts are always relentlessly pro-Democrat, or alternatively they’re “on the one hand” and “on the other hand” as if both Republicans and Democrats have a point, in the debate. Here, the Democrats don’t really have a point. They can’t say “Who could have guessed we would be attacked a second time on 9/11″ or “We didn’t know there were groups hostile to us in Libya” because it’s self-evident that an attack might occur on the anniversary of al Qaeda’s largest triumph, and there’s now ample evidence the Administration was warned, repeatedly. The attack itself took a long time (I’ve heard reports of anywhere from 7 hours to 8) and the Administration had ample warning and knowledge of the attack. The USAF has airbases in Sicily an hour away, but few Americans know this. And after the attack, the Administration insisted that they were investigating to try and figure out what had happened, when it was patently obvious within minutes what had occurred. They just didn’t want to announce the results of their “investigation” until after the election, and now they’ve figured out that when they do release whatever they’ve come up with, it’s going to look like they’re hiding something (only because they are). So they stall, and hope something else pushes the whole story off the front page of the paper.
A majority of the electorate probably thinks Ben Gazi is a celebrity.
I’ve seen this one before. At what point does Snowball the Pig get chased away?
I can tell you EXACTLY what this poll is.
This poll is a Score Card on how Effective the Mainstream Media has been regarding its DisInformation Campaign to make Obama Look Good at all costs.
The American people know better than to fall for a phony scandal being trumpeted only by Fox News, right-wing blogs, and talk radio.
Intelligence gives the talking points and Rice reads them, as Rice doesn’t have the intelligence clearance as UN Ambassador to double check the data; intelligence suspects Al Qaeda attack, but doesn’t want to to air the suspicion publicly through a statement by Rice or anyone else until the data is confirmed.
Everything was done correctly. The Bush scandals of torture and war crimes yet to be prosecuted are what needs more focus. It’s so shameless for conservatives to ignore those real government crimes and scandals by drumming up phony ones, particularly by insisting that the caution of the intelligence community in getting the information verified before publicizing it was the problem here after the deaths of four Americans, when publicized bad intelligence LED to the deaths of thousands of Americans in Iraq. REALLY shameless, and an insult to all those dead soldiers.
Heah dummy, the UN Ambassador has every intel clearance in the book and some that aren’t.
That’s absurd. A UN Ambassador does not have the same security clearance to classified information as a CIA director.
Get a clue.
Look moron, I just retired from 29 years in the defense and IC communities and have held every clearance in the book, so I know a little more about it then you do. The UN Ambassador, officially know as the US Representative to the UN, is a statutory member of the NSC. As such she has the same access to intelligence as the President.
Now shut up and stop embarrassing yourself.
The administration ran with the video story because they are chomping at the bit to limit the First Amendment and make “blasphemy” of Islam a crime. It fit their narrative and they were running with the bulletin before the blood had dried in the Benghazi sand. I think it was a combination of being overeager to jump on the story they wanted, followed by a coverup (aided and abetted by the media) to squench the real story, knowing that it would be a foreign policy disaster for Obama on the eve of the election.
The claim that there was confusion does not explain why Jay Carney was still running the video explanation five days after the event, which by then, everyone agrees, the truth was known by all. If Rice and Carney were so uninformed, they should be fired immediately along with a dozen intelligence officers to show that the administration sees bad intelligence and misinformation as a serious problem. Of course since Carney and Rice were following orders, that won’t happen. This administration is rotten from the top down.
What’s really annoying is that the syncophantic media will trot the video story out in the future as evidence of a need to curb free speech, even though it has been thoroughly debunked.
Hmmmm.
The American people think the United States government is too stupid to know what’s going on in spite of satellites seeing the whole event and merely made a goof when reporting it was a video inspired slaughter.
The United States Government knows the majority of American citizens are too stupid and will believe anything the black Jesus tells them.
Two groups of people who dearly deserve each other.