Key phrase: "following the lead of the Islamists"

Kudos to Kirsten Powers. I was beginning to doubt if any liberals remained who would dare put country before knee-jerk partisanship. Sadly, it must have taken courage for Powers to step away from the herd. See her Friday column at the Daily Beast: Write About Terrorism? Nah, Let's All Bash Mitt Romney Instead!

 

What did they know, and when did they know it?

This Washington cliché has become the question of the hour, or at least it would be if the mainstream media could feign interest in the terrorist attack against the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and anti-American rioting throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

Nothing about the constantly evolving tale the Obama administration has been weaving about the attacks in the Middle East makes sense, unless it is seen as a deliberate attempt to mislead Americans into believing al Qaeda has been decimated, as President Obama has been know to assert. After dancing on Osama bin Laden’s grave for a week in Charlotte, the administration was faced with the reality that the war on terror is still quite on.

Rather than acknowledging this, they went into spin mode with the claim that a goofy video posted on YouTube caused the Sept. 11 attack that killed four Americans, including a U.S. ambassador. U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice took to the Sunday shows to assert: “What happened in Cairo, in Benghazi, in many parts of the region … was a result—a direct result of a heinous and offensive video that was widely disseminated.” She claimed the attack in Libya was “spontaneous” and not preplanned. It just happened to be on the anniversary of 9/11. No reason to read anything into that.

Never mind that a fourth grader could see that the Libya attack was anything but a spontaneous riot over an Internet video the administration, following the lead of the Islamists, has elevated to the genre of “movie.” Protesters generally don’t carry RPGs or use mortars, for starters. Then there was Mohamed Yusuf al-Magarief, president of Libya’s General National Congress, saying on Face the Nation on Sept. 16: “The way these perpetrators acted and moved, and their choosing the specific date for this so-called demonstration, this leaves us with no doubt that this was preplanned, predetermined.” Either the administration was lying with its original Libya story or it is frighteningly naive and clueless....

Read it all. While one column hardly signifies the return of a free and fair press, perhaps it is an early harbinger of better days ahead.