Symmetry required it: 2012 american general election thread #2

it's just a movie like terry jones burning the koran is just an idiot

so then how are there riots and assault on embassies happening?

it's a new mutant version of one of the most powerful underlying incentives for terrorism - the power that it affords non-state actors with few resources to draw attention to a cause. normally we think of that kind of action as a direct one, with some group going out and doing something violent. now with these internetz, globalization, etc, it's possible to make a profoundly ignorant video that no one even knows about in this country, publicize it, and use it to incite a reaction across the world. and there's a neverending well of stupidity. i'm not sure how you mitigate the risk, since you can't really stop stupid people from doing stupid things with internet videos and trying to provoke a reaction.

xposts, Just to be clear, it's not a Pastor Terry Jones production, he just jumped on the bandwagon.

Can't believe Muslims are upset over this video, you'd think we'd have been bombing them for ten years or something...

note that both jones and paranoid islamists have incentive to inflate jones' influence in the US

xp yeah that's true, but publicity by jones was responsible for making it well known in egypt:

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/obscure-film-mocking-muslim-prophet-sparks-anti-u-s-protests-in-egypt-and-libya/

I'm sure anti-US protests are going on all the time. If Libya was blowing shit up over here with drones i'd be protesting too.

I'm not totally shocked but, well, still shocked at how inaccurate, unhelpful and inappropriate Romney's response to the Libya mess has been. This guy is even tone-deaf when the mood calls for something simple like sympathy if not outright silence.

Jones is a scumbag, he keeps coming to Dearborn with his followers to harass Muslims.

Scott Galupo:

Before yesterday, I had assumed that the Romney campaign was perhaps mildly spooked by President Obama’s post-convention polling bounce, but nonetheless confident that the bounce would recede and that the race would return to the status quo ante September.

Now: not so much.

The Romney campaign’s reaction to the attacks on U.S. diplomatic missions in Egypt and Libya was, as Daniel Larison says, “hasty and stupid.”

I think Daniel is being charitable.

Think of it: On the eleventh anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, a day in which both campaigns have agreed to a political cease-fire on television, several U.S. foreign service workers are murdered by an angry mob. “Apparently unaware of the timing of the first embassy statement,” as the Times puts it, the Romney campaign crudely parlays the facts of the attacks — angry Muslims kill Americans — into a broader narrative about Obama’s supposed weakness on terrorism and “sympathy” for America’s enemies.

That’s more than hasty and stupid; that’s unconscionable.

I dunno if this is "panic" as much as its emblematic of the GOP's standard deep hypocrisy/cynicism

little from column a, little from column b

I think they just fucked up. I guess they were responding to a statement condemning this ridiculous video that was released before the murders, a failed attempt to calm people down. So of course the Republican line is that Obama was coddling or encouraging terrorists or whatever, but because they were impatient to break their negativity embargo they blurted prematurely. Which upped the asshole quotient of the Romney statement.

Patty Buch = stopped clock

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/has-obama-called-bibis-bluff/

x-post
And predictably, right-wing idiots like Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post webpage are defending Romney and pushing their standard cliches about Obama's foreign policy. Romney doesn't want to admit he made a mistake so he's gonna double-down on the nonsense.

I never read The American Conservative, do they normally make sense or do they just really, really hate Romney?

Romney kept up the attack in a speech today.

the american conservative is sort of the last vestige of what i'd call the palatable part of the old right. a lot of their columnists are the conservative foreign policy realists that lost the argument to the neoconservatives.

however, the old right as a whole makes my skin crawl (larison is no exception frankly). it's pat buchanan's magazine! grain of salt.

never read The American Conservative, do they normally make sense or do they just really, really hate Romney

On foreign policy, both. They love picking on Corner-ites too.

Well, I don't know if Brent Scowcroft and his ilk are represented in the magazine?

it's pat buchanan's magazine!

hahaha okay

grain of salt just turned into a full-fledged salt lick

I think it is really amazing that the modern Republican has become so crazy that Pat Buchanan seems to be a reasonable person in comparison

well it's a fine line between "america's fo-po should be modest, restrained, legal, and concerned with our interests" and "the white nation should not be the puppet of the international jew". so, caveat lector!

Amazed that noted Israel hater and anti-Semite Pat B. left out his standard nastyness and used some reasonable arguments

^^this!

I'm not a Larison fan but I've rarely if ever seen any of Buchanan's brontosaurus riffs on the perfidy of alien cultures. In fact, Larison rarely offers advice: he throws stones at Jonah types. Which is all I want from the likes of him.

he pretty much keeps his trap shut on domestic stuff too, except a few mentions of the 'unborn' here and there.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/romney-defends-criticism-of-white-houses-handling-of-libya-attack/2012/09/12/5d91e5c4-c0c2-47b6-aceb-456d10014c7a_video.html

How do you defend attacking the handling of something spontaneous that happened in the past? Romney is so lame."Obama was ill-prepared for this sudden riot related to a random stupid youtube video that was completely unrelated to the situation in Libya. If he was a better president he would have been better prepared for just such a contingency! Obama should get right on preventing the next random riot in the next random place, somewhere in the world. I, for one, have just such a preventative plan, which I will be happy to reveal after I am president."

judging from his convention speech his preventative plan is "start a world war, kill everyone on Earth"

I think today is the day Romney lost the election. The stench of panic coming off this whole thing is amazing.

ouch

http://www.salon.com/2012/09/12/gop_leaves_mitt_hanging/

"start a world war, kill everyone on Earth"

Admittedly, would solve a lot of problems! Global warming, education, food shortages, pollution, over-crowding, etc. Romney playing the long game into the afterlife.

remember when McCain wanted to suspend the last election to work on the financial crisis? i'd forgotten about it

http://www.usnews.com/news/campaign-2008/articles/2008/09/24/mccain-suspends-campaign-shocks-republicans

pat buch otm???

romney should definitely suspend his campaign to work on the threat of radical islam.

Great line in the Salon article about the one person who will back up Romney on the Libya issue:

Instead, Romney got the backing of Sarah Palin, who took the opportunity to make a penis joke: ”If he doesn’t have a “big stick” to carry, maybe it’s time for him to grow one.”

I can't wait for the press questions on this:

"So Mitt, on the topic of Libya, Sarah Palin says the president needs to grow a big one, do you agree?"

"We are aware of your great ability to evaluate the correct height of trees, might that be applied to this case as well?"

hey remember when Republicans really really wanted Rick Perry or Herman Cain to be the nominee. can you even imagine the level of ineptitude on handling something like this?

fuck it, even they might've had the good sense to stay away

idk its hard to imagine a more inept response than romneys tbh

xpost yeah actually i think that batshit cain would have steered clear - i mean santorum could have been equally stupid. now bachman on the other hand would have been asking for an investigation on keith ellisons whereabouts yesterday

"This whole Libya thing is a distraction from the real issues - the authentic original longform birth certificate of the Impostor President of the United States."

poor Keith Ellison

"WASHINGTON —The Obama administration suspects that the fiery attack in Libya that killed the American ambassador and three other diplomats may have been planned rather than a spontaneous mob getting out of control, American officials said Wednesday."

orly

*fingers crossed* i think Bachmann's going down

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/09/11/michele_bachmann_and_jim_graves_fight_for_minnesota_s_sixth_district.html

Planned, huh? In a country where everyday dudes tote around RPGs, I'm not sure how they determined that. An email from a ne'er do well stating "first sign of a riot, we're firing a rocket?"

Tuesday’s attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was planned in advance, and the attackers used the protest outside the consulate as a diversion, U.S. sources told CNN Wednesday.

The sources could not say whether the attackers instigated the protest or merely took advantage of it. The sources do not believe Ambassador Chris Stevens was specifically targeted.

A grenade attack created a fire in the U.S. consulate building in Benghazi, which created a very complicated and complex situation for those inside, according to a senior U.S. official familiar with the details of what happened.

“Folks inside were fighting the fire inside and the attackers outside. It was a cascading casualty, and Amb. Chris Stevens and the others got separated trying to escape to the roof of the building, ultimately succumbing to smoke inhalation,” the U.S. official told CNN’s Jill Dougherty. “There will be more details as we go forward, but there were several valiant attempts to re-enter the burning building to find and save the ones we lost. Valiant but unsuccessful.”

Another senior official with the State Department confirmed the details as well.

the 9/11 anniversary aspect is definitely suspect re: planned or not question

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-romney-libya-attack-obama20120912,0,6220306.story

After the attack, the embassy sent a series of Twitter feeds, one of which said: “Sorry, but neither breaches of our compound or angry messages will dissuade us from defending freedom of speech AND criticizing bigotry.” Another said: “Of course we condemn breaches of our compound, we're the ones actually living through this.”

Romney said those statements – it was not clear which --amounted to an apology for American values, particularly free speech. Asked if he hadn't reacted hastily by offering criticism before the full events were known, he said: "The White House also issued a statement saying it tried to distance itself from those comments and said they were not reflecting of their views. I had the exact same reaction."

He went on: "These views were inappropriate, they were the wrong course to take when our embassy has been breached by protesters. The first response should not be to say, `Yes, we stand by our comments that suggest there's something wrong with the right of free speech."

Asked how he believed the White House had erred, he said: "It's their administration. Their administration spoke. The president takes responsibility not just for the words that come from his mouth but for the words that come from his ambassadors, from his administration, from his embassies, from his State Department. They clearly sent mixed messages to the world, and the statement that came from the administration and the embassy is ... akin to an apology and was, I think, a severe miscalculation."