

After watching Sunday’s Meet The Press, one could be forgiven for wondering exactly when the United States went from being a country that faced down nuclear armageddon in the Cold War to cowering under the sheets from the threat of terrorists that may or may not exist.

David Gregory, clearly one of the liberal elitists that are in the tank for Obama, did his very best to conflate Benghazi, Boston and Syria as if they were all part of a grand terrorist plan to destroy America 3 or 4 people at a time:

I want to widen this out a little bit, because I think there’s the broader topic that we’re broaching here about national security, about our personal freedoms in America, coming out of the Boston bombing is, in part, ongoing concern about terrorism. The graphic this week in The Wall Street Journal about that growing al-Qaeda threat, even a couple of years now after Osama bin Laden is killed. Looking in North Africa, in the Persian Gulf states, where you either have al-Qaeda with a safe haven, or, indeed, more activity. And it leads, too, to what happened last 9-11 in Benghazi, and the ongoing questions about what the United States knew about that, what the administration knew. Did they do enough to stop it? And now, new hearings coming up, new details being reported on, Mr. Mayor [Guiliani]. Is there something here that somehow gets to why we’re more vulnerable now and whether the administration has done enough, in your estimation? (Emphasis mine)





I’m curious to know in what sense are we more vulnerable under Obama? Did terrorists hijack 4 airplanes and use them as missiles aimed at American buildings? Was anthrax used to kill several people using the mail? Were several different American consulates attacked resulting in dozens of causalities? If I’m not mistaken, so far in Obama’s 4+ years in office, terrorists have killed exactly 4 people on American soil and 4 Americans not in an active war zone.

Gregory goes on:

“Jane Harman, and Mayor Giuliani, as we look at all of this, whether it’s jihadist elements operating in Syria, whether we look at, now, this widening plot out of the Boston bombings, they wanted to attack, reportedly, on July Fourth, there are others now involved, friends of Dzokhar Tsarnaev, who show their pictures, who are involved, at some level, of clearing out some of the materials from his room, what does this tell us about what we’re up against here, specifically in the Boston plot, and this question of, “Are we any safer?””

“Widening plot?” Until they can put a finger on who, if anyone, trained the older brother, Tamerlan, the “widening plot” amounts to three young idiots doing something phenomenally stupid. That these imbeciles, which one official referred to as “the Three Stooges,” tried to (poorly) cover up something of this magnitude doesn’t make them part of a grand terrorist conspiracy that makes America less safe; it just makes them dumber than a sack of hammers. No lovable goofball ending here, just a lot of jail time.

But it wasn’t a total fear-fest. Mr. Gregory did accidentally allow Sen. Patrick Leahy to make a point that interferes with the whole “It’s all Obama’s fault we’re under attack” narrative:

DAVID GREGORY: –how vulnerable we are and what we’re doing about it? SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: Oh, there are questions should be asked. I know I chair a committee that handles the State Department’s budget. We put in extra money, a great deal of extra money, for embassy security. DAVID GREGORY: I mean that’s what we’re hearing about– (Translation: ERROR! ERROR! That is off script! We can not blame Republicans for their actions!) SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: Let me finish. And that was blocked by the House. They said they didn’t want to spend the money. Whether that would have made a difference or not, I don’t know. Should we look at Benghazi? Yes. But keep in mind that’s just one place. We should look at our security throughout our embassies, because there will always be easy targets. … DAVID GREGORY: Were warnings ignored on Benghazi, Congressman, in your judgment? (Translation: Let’s get back to promoting the right’s conspiracies!)

Even though Gregory had a House Republican not three feet away, he couldn’t be bothered to ask what that vote to block security funding was all about. In fact, it’s like Sen. Leahy never even opened his mouth. To be fair, Cotton took office after that vote but if he’s going to criticize actions the Obama administration took before Cotton was elected, I don’t see why he shouldn’t have to apply his deep insight into the actions of his own party.

Rep. Cotton did, however, immediately give the most generic statement of all time:

I think that there are cables before the Benghazi attack that suggest that the people in Tripoli and in Benghazi knew that they were going to be facing a potential attack.

That, of course went unchallenged. Let’s be honest: the reason no one made a huge deal about the various consulate attacks that occurred under Bush is because there is nothing special about them. At all. We have embassies and consulates all over the world in places where people do not like us. During a time where we are actively waging war in two different countries, to expect there to be no attacks on such relatively easy targets (as opposed to the Pentagon or New York City) is foolish and ignorant of reality. In the case of the GOP, willfully ignorant because it gives their base yet another empty excuse to distrust Obama.

The rest of the segment is not much better in terms of treating the Boston Bombing and Benghazi as the world altering events they most certainly were not. If there’s one thing I’m learning from watching the Sunday Morning talk shows is that balance and level-headed analysis of currents events ranks pretty far down on the list of “things to do.” Rather, it seems allowing Republicans and their spokespeople to whip up as much fear as possible is the order of the day.

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