It’s time to get us rubes worked up!

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2012

All over but the shouting: As we noted yesterday, any chance of a real discussion ends with the last presidential debate.

From that point on, it’s all over but the apocryphal shouting. There’s nothing left to do but to get us rubes all outraged and furious.

Last evening, we looked in on The Five on Fox; the fury and lunacy were general. They started with Obama and Christie making nice in New Jersey. But about fifteen minutes in, Serra High School’s own Greg Gutfeld introduced a bit of tone concerning Hurricane Sandy:
GUTFELD (10/31/12): I want to introduce a new phrase that—after hearing a lot of this stuff, I call it political looting. This is when you use a catastrophe to further a political aim that you were unable to push before.

A couple of examples: Maureen Dowd talking about Christie's new relationship with Obama. The hurricane is the fault of the climate change deniers. Here you have Al Gore using other people's misery to advance his own profile. He's disgusting.
He didn't learn that in San Mateo! From there, the gang moved on to a couple of cherry-picked polls which showed that Romney was going to win.

After that? Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi! In our view, Andrea Tantaros brought the eternal note of sadness in, as the poet once wrote:
TANTAROS: Well, late-night comics are cracking jokes but the continuing controversy over what really happened the night terrorists killed four Americans in Benghazi is not funny. The White House may be forced to address the situation in the coming days if what Newt Gingrich says turns out to be true.

GINGRICH (videotape): There is a rumor—I want to be clear, it's a rumor, that two networks have e-mails from the national security advisor's office telling a counterterrorist group to stand down. That a group in real-time trying to mobilize the Marines and the C-130s and the fighter aircraft. They were told explicitly by the White House stand down and do nothing. This is not a terrorist action.

If that's true, I've been told this by a fairly reliable U.S. senator, if that's true and that comes out in the next day or two, I think it raises enormous questions about the president's role.

TANTAROS: Now as Gingrich said, this is a rumor. But, Eric, if this were to surface, I mean, this piles on to what I still think looks really bad.
The source of Gingrich's rumor was a fairly reliable senator! Just for the record: If Candidate Romney robs a bank, that will “look really bad” too.

If is a powerful word.

The Five were in a frenzy by the end of the hour. Though we’ll have to admit, we thought we saw some similarity as we watched the Maddow Show. Rachel was watching Obama and Christie making nice in Jersey too. And for her, it was also clear where the wild things were:
MADDOW (10/31/12): You know, you would expect in a disaster this big that a president would be standing alongside and directing storm response with the governor from the state most affected by the disaster. I mean, generically speaking, this sort of appearance is not a remarkable concept.

This thing becomes remarkable, though, to see President Obama and Chris Christie standing together and praising one another and talking about the ways they are working together, and to see their coordinated state and federal efforts to respond to this disaster as governor and president. This sort of thing becomes remarkable today, only because President Obama is a Democrat and Chris Christie is a Republican, and Chris Christie specifically is a Republican who has been a very caustic partisan critic of President Obama, in his role as a campaign surrogate for Mitt Romney, who President Obama is running against, in a presidential election that ends in six days.

Mitt Romney and that campaign today, that campaign that Chris Christie has been supporting, they made a somewhat remarkable decision to go ahead and keep campaigning today, to get back on the campaign trail and start doing partisan campaign rallies again, even while the president was still suspending his own schedule, so he could respond to the storm.

So what we saw today, in split screen, was President Obama departing the White House en route to storm-ravaged New Jersey, after he stopped in at FEMA headquarters, and at the same time, Mitt Romney in full-on campaign mode in Tampa, Florida. And then it was President Obama touring coastal New Jersey and comforting victims of hurricane Sandy, while Mitt Romney was holding what he called a big victory rally outside Miami.
We’re sorry, but it simply wasn’t “a remarkable decision” when Romney decided to keep campaigning. If you're a candidate for the White House, it's hard to do anything else. And guess what? Inevitably, whether you say so or not, Obama was campaigning too.

Rachel went on to fire our fury, naming several Republicans who had failed to be totally silent out of respect for Obama’s remarkable work in New Jersey.

Rachel got us all worked up, helping us locate our inner fury. We are willing to posit a guess:

As with The Five, so too over here. Some of us swallowed this whole.

Serra High's most famous alumni: In descending order of greatness:
Tom Brady
Lynn Swann
Barry Bonds
Coach John Robinson, USC
Jim Fregosi
Jesse Freitas
Bill Keller, New York Times
Greg Gutfeld, Fox News Channel
David Giuliani, inventor of the Sonicare toothbrush
Dental health is quite important. We're going to guess that Giuliani can buy and sell them all!

13 comments:

  1. So Bob. Maddow criticizing Romney for jumping back on the campaign trail -- which he did -- has "some similarity" to Newt Gingrich spreading a vicious, unverified "rumor" about the president and Benghazi that is an utter lie?

    On what planet?

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    1. On this one, doofus. "Some similarity" does not mean "equivalent." Try a dictionary.

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    2. Where is the word "equivalent"? I said "some similarity." And here you are, once again, making up whatever you want because you can't argue with THE TRUTH!

      Bottom Line: Maddow criticized Romney for reopening his campaign. Criticize her if you want, but don't say it in any way bears "some resemblance" to Gingrich spreading a vicious lie.

      And "some similarity" are Somerby's words, not mine.

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  2. Obama's failure to tell the American people exactly what happened in Benghazi suggests that the crisis was handled badly. Fox News deserves credit, not blame, for pursuing this important story. They are finally being joined by other media.

    Today CBS News reported:

    during the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, the Obama Administration did not convene its top interagency counterterrorism resource: the Counterterrorism Security Group, (CSG).

    "The CSG is the one group that's supposed to know what resources every agency has. They know of multiple options and have the ability to coordinate counterterrorism assets across all the agencies," a high-ranking government official told CBS News. "They were not allowed to do their job. They were not called upon."
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    Information shared with CBS News from top counterterrorism sources in the government and military reveal keen frustration over the U.S. response on Sept. 11
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    Another senior counter terrorism official says a hostage rescue team was alternately asked to get ready and then stand down throughout the night, as officials seemed unable to make up their minds.


    And, the Los Vegas Review Journal wrote:

    The Obama administration sat by doing nothing for seven hours that night, ignoring calls to dispatch help from our bases in Italy, less than two hours away. It has spent the past seven weeks stretching the story out, engaging in misdirection and deception involving supposed indigenous outrage over an obscure anti-Muslim video, confident that with the aid of a docile press corps this infamous climax to four years of misguided foreign policy can be swept under the rug, at least until after Tuesday's election.

    It turns out that Hillary Clinton's 2008 ad was right on the money. Obama got his 3:00 AM call and he muffed it.

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    1. Obama's failure to tell the American people exactly what happened in Benghazi

      Woah woah woah, stop right there. I don't remember President Bush rushing out on TV and listing off the names of the 20 hijackers and explaining how they carried out their attacks on 9/11 seven hours after it happened, and that was right here in this country. I'm glad the President didn't rush off half-cocked and start declaring that he knew exactly what happened until he had better information.

      I notice you omitted this bit from the CBS News article:

      "As to why the Counterterrorism Security Group was not convened, National Security Council Spokesman Tommy Vietor told CBS News "From the moment the President was briefed on the Benghazi attack, the response effort was handled by the most senior national security officials in governments. Members of the CSG were of course involved in these meetings and discussions to support their bosses."

      The Las Vegas Review-Journal piece that you cite is an editorial, not a news report.

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  3. Gee . . . "a high-ranking government official " and "top counterterrorism sources in the government and military" and "Another senior counter terrorism official". And not one of them willing to put their name to anything.

    This is bullshit, writ large.

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  4. When OBL was killed, Obama was quick to release the details, even though those details may have helped inform al Qaeda about our methods and capatilities. It's been reported that Obama made classified info available to people who were making a movie lauding Obama for OBL's death. Furthermore, it's possible that Obama's boasting may have inspired al Qaeda to mount their murderous attack in Libya.

    OTOH Obama has provided little or no info about the f*ckup in Libya. That info would make Obama look bad.

    With this Administration, it's all about making the President look good.

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    1. Details may have helped, it's been reported, it's possible. It's been reported that if a frog had wings it wouldn't bump it's ass hopping.
      With David in Cal these days, it's all about any wild conjecture coming from a questionable source that would make the President look bad.

      Ray DeLagarto

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    2. Hey, David. Did it occur to you that Obama might have known the "details" about the killing of "OBL" from the get-go?

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  5. Bob, the pious man of the faith, at least shows us Fox at their worst here, before reminding us pride cometh before a fall, and trying to show "us" are just like them. His case, this time, is about as weak as it gets, but he wisely avoids Romney's FEMA embarrassment, which might put Obama over the top.

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    1. Yep, and even proclaiming that what Maddow said bears "some similarity" to what Gingrich said, he never seems to get around to explaining why it works so well for "them" but so terribly for "us."

      The forest that Bob continually fails to see as he obsesses not even on trees but on saplings, is that we no longer live in an area where a "mass media" even exists to serve as an arbiter of truth, if it ever did.

      We live in a world of cable TV networks, talk radio shows, and blogs -- including this one -- where a single person becomes the arbiter of their own "truth" for whatever audience they are able to attract. And the audience they attract are those who seek validation for the "truth" they already "believe."

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    2. "era" not "area."

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