“Obama to Diplomats: I Value Your Work Because I Spent Time Abroad as Kid,” Daniel Halper of the Weekly Standard writes:
After President Obama delivered remarks on Libya this morning from the White House–and before his planned trip to Las Vegas–he visited the State Department to deliver more personal and more private remarks. He wanted to offer encouragement after four State Department workers were murdered yesterday in Libya.
A State Department official described the event to the White House pooler.
“Obama spoke for about 15 minutes to a large crowd gathered in the courtyard in the middle of the State Department Building. There were at least a couple of hundred people gathered for the president’s remarks, some people watching from the windows,” according to the pooler.
He talked about how important the foreign service is and what a great job it does representing the U.S. abroad. He also had a line about how he understands the value of the foreign service because he spent so much time as a kid growing up abroad.
Meanwhile, for the palace guard MSM, the attacks yesterday are all about Obama as well, as Byron York writes:
An instant consensus appears to have developed among reporters and commentators that Mitt Romney made a mistake when he released a statement last night condemning the Obama administration’s response to attacks on U.S. diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt. At Romney’s hastily-arranged news conference in Florida Wednesday morning, nearly every question was predicated on the assumption that Romney’s statement was a miscalculation. Also on Wednesday morning, journalist Mark Halperin, a reliable indicator of media insider sentiment, tweeted that Romney’s decision at the news conference to repeat his criticism of the Obama administration’s action could be the “most craven and ill-advised move of ’12.”
But Romney was, and is, right. As events in Benghazi and Cairo unfolded, the Obama administration’s first instinct was to apologize for any offense Muslims might have taken from an Internet video, made in America, that mocked and ridiculed the prophet Mohammed, and which the radicals cited as the cause for their actions. In his original statement last night, Romney said, “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.” Then, on Wednesday morning, Romney said the administration “was wrong to stand by a statement sympathizing with those who had breached our embassy in Egypt instead of condemning their actions.”
And that is exactly what the administration did.
Or to put it another way, “The fact the elite media was more upset about Romney’s critique of the White House than our dead ambassador says all there needs to be said about our press.”
Finally, some helpful advice from our own Andrew Klavan: “How to Behave During an Islamic Massacre:”
Drew links to his video at Ricochet under the headline of “The World is a Product of my Imagination” — which, come to think of it, sums up the solipsism of President Empty Chair and his enablers remarkably well.
Update: “Open mic captures press coordinating questions for Romney ‘no matter who he calls on we’re covered.'”
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