Benghazi murders are Obama’s hostage crisis

One thing I was struck by in the recent US Vice Presidential debates was how the candidates of both major parties seem now to both accept the fact that the attack on the US’s Benghazi embassy and the murder of the US Ambassador and three of his staff was not an over-excited protest over a YouTube clip that coincidentally occurred on the anniversary of 9/11, but a concerted terrorist attack.

As Mark Steyn points out, this concession follows weeks of lying.

There was no demonstration against an Islamophobic movie that just got a little out of hand. Indeed, there was no movie protest at all. Instead, a U.S. Consulate was destroyed and four of its personnel were murdered in one of the most sophisticated military attacks ever launched at a diplomatic facility.
    This was confirmed by testimony to Congress a few days ago, although you could have read as much in my column of four weeks ago. Nevertheless, for most of those four weeks, the president of the United States, the secretary of state, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and others have persistently attributed the Benghazi debacle to an obscure YouTube video — even though they knew that the two events had nothing to do with each other by no later than the crack of dawn Eastern time on Sept. 12, by which point the consulate's survivors had landed safely in Tripoli.
    To "politicize" means "to give a political character to." It is a reductive term, capturing the peculiarly shrunken horizons of politics: "Gee, they nuked Israel. D'you think that will hurt us in Florida?" So media outlets fret that Benghazi could be "bad" for Obama — by which they mean he might be hitting the six-figure lecture circuit four years ahead of schedule.
    But for Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, it's really bad. They're dead, over, gonesville. Given that Obama and Hillary Clinton refer to Stevens pneumatically as "Chris." as if they've known him since third grade, why would they dishonor the sacrifice of their close, personal friend by peddling an utterly false narrative as to why he died?
    You want "politicization"? Secretary Clinton linked the YouTube video to the murder of her colleagues even as the four caskets lay alongside her at Andrews Air Force Base — even though she had known for days that it had nothing to do with it…
    In the vice presidential debate, asked why the White House spent weeks falsely blaming it on the video, Joe Biden took time off between big toothy smirks to reply:
        "Because that was exactly what we were told by the intelligence community."
    That too is false…

The Benghazi attack, the non-reaction to it and the lying about it, are as symbolic of American defeatism today  as was the Iranian hostage crisis in the last days of Jimmy Carter’s defeatist Presidency.

The Benghazi murders are Obama’s hostage crisis.

[Hat tip Thrutch]