Embassy killings and protests prompt MSM, Dems to attack Mitt Romney

posted at 10:31 am on September 14, 2012 by Howard Portnoy

President Obama is having another terrible week, although you might not know it if your source of news is the mainstream media.

His 2009 Cairo love song to Islam that asked, in essence, “Can’t we all just get along?” was answered on Tuesday by the brutal murders of four members of the U.S. diplomatic corps. Initially, these outrages were justified as payback for another insult to the “religion of peace,” though later evidence suggesting that the attacks, which fell on the anniversary of 9/11, were part of a coordinated effort by Al Qaeda.

The initial response to the atrocity was a j’accuse from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo aimed not at the bloodthirsty mob that had carried out this disproportionate act of vengeance but to those would “hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.”

The president ultimately disavowed the remarks but it took him a day and a half to get around doing so because the evening after the storming of two American embassies and death of the Libyan ambassador he was in Las Vegas campaigning for another term. In the meantime, Republican candidate Mitt Romney rightly took the president to task for his dereliction of duties.

So what was the reaction to all of this by the elite media and Democrats? They ignored everything but Romney’s dressing down of the president, which was described as shameful. Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt was first into the fray, declaring in the early hours of Wednesday, “We are shocked that, at a time when the United States of America is confronting the tragic death of one of our diplomatic officers in Libya, Gov. Romney would choose to launch a political attack.”

Other leftists commentators were equally incensed at Romney’s callousness. The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky called the former governor’s comments “appalling” and accused him of having a “total neocon meltdown.” The president himself reacted to his rival’s criticism, inventing a mangled metaphor (“the tendency to shoot first and aim later”) in the process.

Some members of the MSM are still wagging fingers at Romney, even though both the president and his secretary of state have since made statements about chaos in the Arab world that have sounded like apologies all over again. Hillary Clinton, who should be warning our “allies” in the Middle East to get their houses in order, instead spoke at length yesterday on how “disgusting and reprehensible” is the anti-Muslim film that sparked the anti-American violence. “It appears,” she said of the film, “to have a deeply cynical purpose, to denigrate a great religion and to promote rage.”

Speaking of allies, Obama experienced a momentary fog when asked by Telemundo on Wednesday whether he considers Egypt an ally (video here beginning at 0:28). Turning long-established foreign policy on its head, he answered, “I don’t think that we would consider them an ally, but we don’t consider them an enemy.” White House spokesman Jay Carney later clarified, stating that we don’t have alliance treaty with Egypt and so the president was speaking correctly. The only problem with that line of reasoning is we don’t have an alliance treaty with Israel either, which raises the question of whether Obama considers Israel an ally. Then again, that’s probably a question best left unanswered.

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