Collateral damage.

You can read the PDF of his letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee disclosing the number here. If you’re having trouble grasping the magnitude of it, let Greg Pollowitz help you: #fact Obama has killed more US citizens than foreigners waterboarded under Bush — Greg Pollowitz (@GPollowitz) May 22, 2013 Correct. Three jihadis, most famously [...]

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Blame.

This makes two parents of men killed in Benghazi who’ve claimed that Hillary told them personally that the video was the prime mover in the attack. Tyrone Woods’s father went a step further and alleged that she vowed to have the filmmaker “arrested and prosecuted” — which, courtesy of California authorities, is what ended up [...]

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Narratives.

Via the Examiner. John Sexton had a nice post at Breitbart.com yesterday weighing the evidence, pro and con, for the “movie backlash” theory of the attack. Verdict: Yes, there were people at the scene who mentioned the movie when a camera was stuck in their faces, but no, there’s no hard evidence that the attack [...]

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Uncovered.

If you’ve been following the news about Benghazi, you’ll have two questions after watching this clip. One: Didn’t we already know this? Answer: Yes, “we” did, but not because our government was eager for us to find out. McClatchy published an interview with a Libyan guard wounded in the attack just two days after it [...]

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Crimes.

No word yet on what the violation was, but I assume it must be far more serious than using an alias or a computer. Given the insanity of the past two weeks, replete with the White House nudging Google to pull the video off of YouTube and the State Department running ads on Pakistani TV [...]

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"[Y]ou know, the best way to marginalize that kind of speech is to ignore it."

Via the Standard, a fine idea that I would take more seriously if he had mentioned it before the movie was condemned by the Cairo embassy, blamed for the Benghazi attack by Susan Rice, apologized for by the State Department via TV ads in Pakistan, and then discussed at length by The One himself in [...]

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Bumps in the road.

ABC: President Obama last night on 60 minutes the president referred to the situation in middle east as one of those bumps in the road the country will go through…he will also not have time to meet with some of those leaders while in NY — but will be on the view…how do you square [...]

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Allies.

U.S. foreign policy is in a very, very confused place when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sounds more sanguine about the latest insult to Islam than our ostensible allies do. In Egypt, an atheist who uploaded the Mohammed movie to YouTube was beaten during his interrogation by police and will stand trial for blasphemy next Wednesday. In Pakistan, [...]

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Hostages.

Let me recycle a few lines from the post on Martin Dempsey phoning Terry Jones because this is where I think we’re headed, at least as long as American troops are stationed in large numbers in the Middle East: Loyola’s right that military leaders phoning citizens to ask them to pipe down for the sake [...]

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Questions.

Via BuzzFeed, simple question from the Univision moderators: Why wasn’t your administration better prepared to secure America’s embassies on September 11th? The response, true to form, is nearly six minutes of meandering about how it’s important to stay engaged in the Middle East, how the Mohammed movie is “offensive” but shouldn’t be a pretext for [...]

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Nuance.

Alarming, not because you or I take this stooge seriously but because lots of dopey liberals do, and not just here in the U.S. At a moment when the left’s dimmer lights are taking a second look at blasphemy laws, it’s repulsive that a guy charged with defending human rights would equivocate on speech. But [...]

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Terror.

So here’s where we’re at after a week of inane White House spin. Until yesterday, the official line was that this attack — which involved heavy weapons — just might have been a spontaneous protest over the Mohammed YouTube video that got way, way out of control. Certainly it wasn’t anything organized or foreseeable or [...]

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It's come to this.

On a day when Egypt is appeasing its mob by issuing arrest warrants for the people responsible for the film (a capital offense there, do note), this is what’s running in the biggest paper in Los Angeles. Turns out the author, Sarah Chayes, is a former assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of [...]

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"He set out to create a response and he got it, in spades."

The key bit comes at the end. As you watch, bear in mind that Rushdie’s old tormentors in Iran announced just today that they’ll “search for, track, and pursue” the filmmaker. The only consolation here is my hunch that his old friend Hitchens would have recoiled at this sentiment, that a provocateur being hunted like [...]

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Blame.

Although the tumult subsided Saturday, senior administration officials said they had concluded that the sometimes violent protests in Muslim countries may presage a sustained crisis with unpredictable diplomatic and political consequences. While pressing Arab leaders to tamp down the unrest, Mr. Obama and his advisers are left to consider whether to scale back diplomatic activities [...]

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Fallout.

The US consulate in Benghazi, where the US ambassador to Libya died in an attack on Tuesday, was not given the standard security contract offered to many American diplomatic missions in the Middle East, private military contractors have told the BBC… Meanwhile the attackers appeared to know exactly where staff were being taken to and [...]

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Nuance.

Via Mediaite. I’m not sure how to square this with the fact that in Tunisia today they were chanting, “Obama, Obama, we are all Osamas,” since I’m pretty sure the Egyptian Copt who produced the Mohammed movie isn’t named “Obama.” Oh well. Erick Erickson puts it nicely: I long for the days before YouTube when [...]

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Suppression.

The first mention of this that I saw online was in a LA Times story about the filmmaker, where it was mentioned in passing five paragraphs down. If you thought General Dempsey pressuring Terry Jones to pipe down was bad, how much worse is it to have the U.S. government leaning on one of the [...]

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Speech.

After days of protests and related violence, concerns are growing that furor over an anti-Islam video could intensify even more Friday — threatening U.S. interests abroad and at home… Worries about Friday, in particular, stem from the fact Muslims hold weekly prayers that day — and may congregate afterward and march on U.S. diplomatic missions. [...]

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Values.

I wonder if he knows that there’s no legal action available to him (yet) and is simply grandstanding for the locals’ sake or if he actually thinks he can sue to shut this thing down. Silly Morsi: There won’t be a blasphemy exception added to the First Amendment for critiques of Islam for another, oh, [...]

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Under the bus.

I thought the White House might decide to keep quiet on this and hope that the media doesn’t press too hard tomorrow. And I think they would have, if not for the fact that Romney’s surely ready to go nuclear on them for it and force the issue. Remember, thanks to a few openings created [...]

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Escalation.

The attack was still ongoing as of 7:15 p.m. ET but there’s already a body count. Time for another, more forceful statement of regret about “hurt feelings” from the local embassy? “We can confirm that our office in Benghazi, Libya has been attacked by a group of militants. We are working with the Libyans now [...]

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Flags.

A show of strength from Salafists on 9/11 to remind Americans who’s winning these days in the Middle East. The newsworthy part isn’t the protest — we already know what a mob can do to an embassy in Cairo — but the reaction from the embassy. When this tweet started circulating a few hours ago, [...]

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"I think there is a limit to what our free speech consists of."

Watch to the end for the coup de grace to a week of news stories about people getting killed over burned Korans. In case the headline’s unclear, Martin’s not saying that choking an atheist for mocking Mohammed constitutes intimidation (he says there isn’t enough proof to conclude that it happened, although some sort of altercation [...]

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Disgrace.

Someone e-mailed us about this last night but I didn’t have time to look into it and figured the facts couldn’t be as bad as he suggested. Wrong: They are that bad. An atheist was parading down the street as “Zombie Mohammed” last year when a Muslim bystander allegedly flew into a rage and started [...]

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