Hints of Sanity: Is the MSM Turning against President Obama’s Foreign Policy?
Has the combination of President Obama’s debate failure and the epic meltdown of his Middle East policy finally awakened key members of the MSM? I’m beginning to wonder. Yesterday morning, ABC’s Jake Tapper explained in painful detail not just the Libyan embassy staff’s request for more security but also the importance of the security teams prematurely removed from the country and the deteriorating security situation in Benghazi. In other words, we stripped our ambassador of protection just as American and British diplomats were most in danger.
Then, this morning, the Daily Beast (a.k.a Newsweek) published a lengthy account of CBS reporter Lara Logan’s weekend tirade against the administration’s Middle East mindset and policy. The Beast quite conveniently omitted the most damaging quotes (of course), but the Chicago Sun-Times published the key passages:
“I chose this subject because, one, I can’t stand, that there is a major lie being propagated . . .” Logan declared in her native South African accent. . . .
“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!”
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.” . . .
Logan even called for retribution for the recent terrorist killings of Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other officials. The event is a harbinger of our vulnerability, she said. 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.”
An aside about Logan: While I don’t always agree with her (I especially disagreed with her appearance on the Daily Show during the surge where she seemed to be advocating greater coverage of American casualties without corresponding and proportional coverage of enemy atrocities), no one can doubt her courage or her experience. She’s recklessly brave and has traveled throughout virtually every major front in our war against jihadists and was assaulted during the Egyptian uprisings (I refuse any longer to use the term “Arab Spring”). In other words, she has seen the world as it is, and she has the wisdom to recognize the president’s hope-based foreign policy for what it is: “nonsense.”
The Libyan scandal is truly horrifying. The administration stripped our diplomats of effective security, kept stripping their security in spite of our diplomats’ pleas and warnings, watched helplessly as they died, isolated, thousands of miles from home, then proceeded to lie loudly and shamelessly before the smoke had even cleared from the burning consulate. Words fail as I think of the fear and panic of our public servants’ last moments — effectively abandoned by the country they loved and served.
If the rest of the MSM can’t investigate this story — and hold public officials accountable for their grotesque and obvious failures — then they truly are beyond redemption.