Steyn on Protests

I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about this week’s incidents in the Middle East.  Pete has said some favorable things about our current president’s foreign policy, but for me said policy has been appallingly misguided.  I do not see its success.  Libya is supposed to be one of Mr. Obama’s success stories.   Calling failure or mediocrity “Success!” is this administration’s modus operandi.  Proof by assertion — we do not have to accept it.

Mark Steyn says we are looking at an ” act of war, not a movie protest ” and excoriates both the administration and our press in his usual style.

Forget the free-speech arguments. In this case, as Secretary Clinton and Gen. Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher’s teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: that’s not a spontaneous movie protest; that’s an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower’s response to it. Secretary Clinton and Gen. Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

One can understand why they might do this, given the fiasco in Libya. The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli. How did that happen? They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a “safe house,” and switched their attentions accordingly. How did that happen? The United States government lost track of its ambassador for 10 hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they’ve investigated Mitt Romney’s press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press.