The Patriot Post® · Deadly Hubris Drives the Benghazi Narrative

While many things have been said about the Benghazi fiasco, it remains undeniable that above all else it is a testament to progressive hubris and the fundamental misunderstanding of human nature that such hubris produces. To be blunt, four Americans, including ambassador Christopher Stevens, were executed because the Obama administration is inhabited by people who continue to believe – against overwhelming evidence to the contrary – that 7th-century-minded brutes yearning to impose worldwide religious totalitarianism, are as amenable to reason and intellectual prodding as the people who populate faculty lounges on Ivy League campuses.

And when reality interrupted that chain of thinking, this administration reacted in a manner that has become their standard operating procedure, no doubt buttressed by the track record of “sympathetic” media reporting they have long enjoyed. In short, they lied unabashed and unashamedly.

It began with U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice being sent in front of the cameras to propose that the attack had been “spontaneous.” That lie was perpetrated for eight days until White House Spokesman Jay Carney was sent out to explain that it was “self-evident” Benghazi was a terror attack. On a separate front, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed she had “absolutely no information or reason to believe there is any basis” that ambassador Stevens was in danger. That lie was blown out of the water by two subsequent stories. CNN, who managed to get to the scene of the attack long before the FBI, found Stevens’ diary, in which the ambassador expressed concern about both security threats in Benghazi, and a rise in Islamic extremism. A second CNN story revealed that the State Department’s top security official in Libya asked for extra security months before the attack, but received no response.

And then there was the video. The 13 minute trailer posted on YouTube became fodder for our prevaricating president who, even after it became apparent that the murders in Benghazi were a coordinated terrorist attack, insisted on blaming the video for the violence in a speech before UN General Assembly. He compounded that lie with an appearance on “The View” where he contended that, “we don’t have all the information yet” with regard to the attack.

Fast forward to early last week – and it is necessary to fast forward, because there is insufficient space to chronicle on the ongoing litany of lies that has been perpetrated since September 11 – and we get to the point where senior State Department officials admitted that the attack was “unprecedented” in terms of size and lethality, and that there were no protests that took place prior to it. The sudden “change of heart” was undoubtedly precipitated by the reality that Congressional hearings looking into the incident – and the possibility of contempt citations added to the mix.

Yet the president himself remained defiant. At a Tuesday night fundraiser in San Francisco, Obama claimed that “al Qaeda is on its heels,” the war in Iraq is over and the one in Afghanistan is coming to an end. Such hubris is remarkable. As the Weekly Standard reported, terrorists with ties to al Qaeda were not only involved in the attack at Benghazi, but at least three other U.S. embassy sieges in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia – and possibly elsewhere. As for Iraq, the New York Times, hardly a bastion of right-wing conservatism, notes that despite efforts to “leave a stable and representative government, avoid a power vacuum that neighboring states and terrorists could exploit and maintain sufficient influence so that Iraq would be a partner or, at a minimum, not an opponent in the Middle East,” the administration “has fallen frustratingly short of some of those objectives.”

As for Afghanistan, nothing epitomizes the deadliest results of progressive hubris moire than the 130 American soldiers killed or wounded by “insider attacks” carried out by Afghan trainees, who turned their weapons on their trainers. The utter bankruptcy of the progressive worldview was subsequently revealed when the military brass reversed a long-standing order that had required troops to remove the magazines from their weapons while quartered inside bases with their Afghan partners – in order to promote “trust.”

Incredibly, Joe Biden doubled down at the Vice Presidential debate, simultaneously tossing both the State Department and the intelligence community under the proverbial bus in order to exonerate himself and president Obama. When asked why the White House spent weeks falsely the attacks on blaming it on the video, Joe had this to say. “Because that was exactly what we were told by the intelligence community,” he claimed.

Joe is a duplicitous weasel parsing words here. As Fox News reported, Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick F. Kennedy, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, briefed Capitol Hill staffers on September 12th. He told them the killings appeared to be the result of a terrorist attack. Note that Joe said intelligence community, not State Department. In a world, courtesy of Bill Clinton, where honesty has been reduced to debating the meaning of a word like “is,” Joe is giving himself “plausible deniability.” The president also has plausible deniability – because he’s an inveterate slacker. Mr. Obama has missed more than 56 percent of his Presidential Daily Briefs (PDB) since taking office, including those between September 5 and 11, the entire week before the attack.

Yet as far as progressives are concerned, all of the above can be filed under the heading of “unintended consequences,” with the implication being that they did their best, but no one could foresee what would actually occur. Such preposterous nonsense is no longer acceptable. CBS reporter Lara Logan, who was sexually assaulted in Egypt’s Tahrir Square while Americans were told democracy was blooming into an “Arab Spring,” hit this bankrupt ideology with a dose of reality. “In your arrogance, you think you write the script, but you don’t,” she said. “There’s two sides and we don’t dictate the terms. In fact after eleven years of war in Afghanistan, we’re rushing for the exits as fast as we can, not only do we not dictate the terms, but we have less power to dictate anything on the world stage.”

Logan then directed her fire at Benghazi. “And when I look at what’s happening in Libya, this big song and dance, whether this was a terrorist attack or a protest, and you just want to scream for god’s sake, are you kidding me, the last time we were attacked like this was the USS Cole which was a prelude to the 1998 embassy bombings which was a prelude to 9/11,” she said. “And you’re sending FBI to investigate. I hope to God you’re sending in your best clandestine warriors who will go in to 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 do nothing about it.”

the only reason Barack Obama would “do something about it at this point” is to score political points for his re-election. Yet nothing he does can hide the fact that progressives own those Americans needless ly killed by a “winning hearts and minds” approach to Islamist savagery that has won nothing more than contempt. The ongoing efforts of this administration to brazenly lie about their foreign policy failures is slowly reaching critical mass. Americans have been far too tolerant regarding failure of progressives and their “good intentions.”

Dead patriots must not be so easily dismissed.