Gang that can’t lie straight

What does it mean when the president and the president’s press secretary contradict each other? Yesterday, Obama spokesman Jay Carney said of the murder of four Americans in Libya last week: “It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack.”

A few minutes later, appearing on the Spanish-language network Univision, the president himself replied to a question about whether the attack was premeditated by saying, “We don’t know yet. We’re going to continue to investigate this.”

Which one of these guys didn’t get the memo?

When Carney spoke, it seemed as though he’d been directed to change the administration’s baffling official line— which last week was that the killing of Americans, the breaching of the Cairo embassy walls and the other riots against US embassies had simply been the result of spontaneous uprisings against a YouTube video that insulted Mohammed.

But who would direct him? Carney speaks in the name of the president. Yet the president opted to follow the line spoken by State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland (full disclosure: an old friend of mine), who said Monday, “I’m not going to put labels on this until we have a complete investigation . . . I don’t think we know enough.”

Why the smokescreen? Why is Carney saying one thing and Obama saying the other? Why did Carney and other administration spokespersons ever say anything other than what he said yesterday?

And why did Obama continue to say he didn’t know when, oh, yes, he certainly did then and he certainly does now?

What the hell is going on here?

Why on earth did the administration choose to peddle the insulting, ludicrous, head-scratching fiction that an attack featuring all kinds of al Qaeda signatures wasn’t an attack in the first place?

Those signatures included: a meaningful date (9/11), the targeting of official US diplomatic sites and personnel (as in the Tanzania and Kenya bombings of 1998), and two attacks in two separate countries on the same day (ditto 1998).

You don’t need the CIA or the FBI to tell you that. You just need to have read the paper.

The conduct of the administration in the face of an attack on Americans and American soil — and its acceptance of the “guilt” of the YouTube video that only served inadvertently to justify further riots and attacks on American sites across the Muslim world — is shocking. And on the surface, it seems to make no sense.

After all, why not say Benghazi was a terrorist attack, when it clearly was? And for that matter, why not operate from the assumption that the effort to overrun the Cairo embassy was, too?

The most cynical explanation is that the Obamans feared the political repurcussions with the election approaching. If so, they’re not as savvy as the Romney camp fears.

After all, what’s better politically — seeing Arab countries erupt in flames and seeing a US ambassador’s body dragged through the street and saying it’s all because of some video you can’t get YouTube to take down?

Or would it have been more politically sound to stand before the American people and say, “Eleven years after al Qaeda attacked American soil on the homeland, it has taken to attacking American soil abroad in the form of our diplomatic outposts. We will not tolerate, we will not allow, we will not stand for this. Those who have done this will hear from us soon.”

I know which of the two would have made criticism from the Romney camp impossible — and it wasn’t the “blame the video” option.

Let’s say the administration understands it had a patriotic play here and it chose not to make it. Why?

Maybe it doesn’t wish to face the harsh reality — the reality that its four-year campaign to improve America’s image in the Arab world, to find common ground lost under his supposedly ruthless predecessor, has come a cropper.

The reality that the Arab Spring is more ominous than promising.

The reality that leading from behind — his supposedly innovative form of waging war and making foreign policy — is not only a grammatical oxymoron but a potential recipe for disaster.

So much easier to blame a video. And so much easier to blow smoke and speak out of both sides of your mouth — say it was terrorism and say you don’t know if it was terrorism — when your ludicrous position becomes untenable.

Share Selection