Obama and the phony scandals
Pat Smith has something to say to President Obama:
The mother of a Benghazi victim is furious about the new White House strategy of calling the terrorist attack and many other scandals plaguing the Obama administration “fake” or “phony.”
Patricia Smith, mother of Sean Smith, who was slain in the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack, lashed out on “Your World” on the Fox News Channel…
“I don’t believe [Obama] anymore,” Smith said. “He’s wrong. My son is dead. How could that be phony?”
According to Smith, she has been given no answers about what happened that night. She said the administration told her she “didn’t need to know.”
And this despite promises Smith had gotten earlier from Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, at the ceremony for the welcoming of the caskets, that “they would get back to me to tell me what happened.” Well, Smith has yet to hear about that from them, and now insult has been added to injury when Obama used the word “phony” in his speech at Knox College on July 24 (full text here) to describe the scandals he’s been facing lately.
The speech was not specifically about Benghazi, of course; it was about the economy. Let’s see what he actually said:
With an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball. And I am here to say this needs to stop. Short-term thinking and stale debates are not what this moment requires. Our focus must be on the basic economic issues that the matter most to you ”“ the people we represent.
Pat Smith’s outrage is completely understandable, as is her focus on the scandal represented by the events in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, and this administration’s role in them as well as its callous dismissal of her concerns. But that’s only one of the many “scandals” to which Obama was referring and scoffing at—another would be the use of the IRS for the persecution and suppression of political enemies of the Democrats, an activity that Obama himself originally labeled as “inexcusable” and “an outrage.” But apparently his “outrage” was actually directed at those who would investigate what the IRS had done, and who are trying to figure out how high up the buck stopped.
A closer study of the president’s speech reveals even greater ironies. Let’s look at the words “distractions” and “political posturing” that come right before “phony.” Is not Obama’s labeling of the scandals that beset him as “phony” one of the most blatant cases of “political posturing” we’ve yet seen from a president whose specialty seems to be just that? As for “distractions,” who is it who has been distracted from dealing with the economy—which, after all, was the subject matter of the Knox College speech—for virtually his entire four and a half years in office? And have not those “distractions” been almost entirely self-imposed? Everything else came first for Obama—Obamacare, immigration “reform,” all the pet issues of the liberal platform—and those “pivots” to the economy he kept announcing were mere rhetorical flourishes while his true agenda lay elsewhere.
In the paragraph above from his Knox College speech, the president followed with, “Our focus must be on the basic economic issues that the matter most to you.” True enough. But where has he been all those years?
Obama’s characterization of the investigations into events such as Benghazi and the IRS targeting as “phony” is also part and parcel of another characteristic he’s exhibited ever since his first presidential campaign, which is to belittle as beneath him those issues and questions he doesn’t feel like addressing. The sad thing is that, with the full and sycophantic cooperation of most of the mainstream media, that evasive and sophistic tactic didn’t stop him from being re-elected.
“Phony” is a pretty good description of the MSM these days.
Obama has no idea why the economy is dead in the water. It’s government policies such as the ACA, anti-energy regulations, and misguided democrat attempts to improve the lives of working men and women.
Here’s an example from a Detroit small business owner:
“Until 1984, I was a business owner in the city, employing about 20. I moved my business 60 miles away. I didn’t want to leave, but I was, in effect, forced to.
What really killed Detroit and what drove me away was the government deciding it knew how the market should operate better than the market did. The market operates on a simple concept, ‘An honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work.’ If an employee doesn’t think he is being paid enough, he can leave. If an employer is unhappy with an employee’s performance he can fire him.
Well-meaning government programs such as Unemployment Insurance, Workman’s Compensation and Wrongful Discharge (i.e. age discrimination, sex discrimination, racial discrimination etc.), that were meant to help and protect employees turned this market concept on its head. In Detroit, hiring someone became the worst thing an employer could do, and being fired became one of the best days in an employee’s life.”
Read it all here: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/how_detroit_almost_killed_my_business.html#ixzz2aB6ujbvU
Obama’s pivoting to the economy is a bad thing for the economy. Any ideas he has for improving the job situation are actually counter productive. It would be better for him to concentrate on his golf game.
Foxnews and some Republicans are trying to make headway on the Benghazi and IRS scandals, but the MSM has sent them down the memory hole. As a result, for the LIVs, they don’t exist.
His strategy of belittling as “beneath him those issues and questions he doesn’t feel like addressing” is pure Alinsky. He could not get away with it without the complicity of the MSM. But we all know those things. It’s why we feel so helpless.
I agree with BO. Phony birth certificate, phony college transcripts, phony intellectual, phony presidency would logically mean phony scandals
We’re all preaching to the choir here. Obama isn’t really trying to convince anyone, nor is he really defending his actions or record because with a majority of Congress and the media solidly behind him, he doesn’t have to defend anything.
Obama doesn’t care why the economy isn’t doing well. Paying lip-service to that concern is all he has to do, for the audience he does care about.
What he is doing is reassuring liberal low-information voters, by offering the same platitudes that they have repeatedly bought. His message is ‘don’t give up the faith!’ This is all preparation for getting out the vote for the 2014 election.
He needs to distract, deny and obfuscate so that the scandals don’t adversely effect the 2014 elections. Obama’s doing what he does best, campaigning. The MSM will do what they do best, act as Obama and the left’s propaganda media machine. From their POV, why mess with success?
On a different aspect of the same post: I’ve been disturbed that Pat Smith is the only family to have come forth after Benghazi — though now that I think of it, there was a father who was interviewed in the early days.
Anyway, aren’t there a lot of family members of the dead or wounded? Where are they? I must say, I don’t think Pat Smith is a great spokesperson; she seems a little addled. Maybe that’s why they let her talk.
This is typical Obama playing the victim. He spent the past 4 years blaming the evil Bush for all the bad things and now he will spend the next 4 years blaming the evil republicans for all the bad things.
Like JJ said, it’s just Alinsky. No matter the issue, no matter how illogically presented, just swing the ad hominem, blaming spotlight onto the GOP. Stay on the offense. Avoid defense if possible. It’s all about frame control.
Regarding Libya, as I’ve said before, in order to get people to care about it, the false narrative on Iraq mission must first be fixed and Bush’s legacy rehabilitated. Or else, the Obama admin and their enablers will always shrug away any foreign policy scandal, at least in the Middle East, by claiming or implying anything Obama does there is automatically better than the alternative, ie, Bush’s foreign affairs.
The GOP rolled over on the propaganda attack against Bush, and many on the Right even contributed to it. As long as Bush’s legacy isn’t rehabilitated, the Right will lack standing to attack Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East.
Eric,
You are right about the Bush ME policy, but I’m pretty sure any opportunity to make that case has passed. We are going on 6 years away from a time when one might say we actually were engaged in something we planned to “win”. Weariness doesn’t quite describe the state of public affairs when it comes to actual warfare. Because of the MSM block, the fact that we suffered the worst equipment loss since Vietnam, last September in Afghanistan and the outrageous number of deaths compared to the Bush years, many of these the result of handing the enemy our weapons goes NO PLACE in the public square. Unfortunately, ignorance is carrying the day.
If the MSM weren’t the compliant and complicit sort, they might actually ask the President or his spokesman Jay Carney which scandals are the phony ones. Since they say there are phony ones, please name them so we know which we should pay less attention to.
By not actually saying which are the phony ones, it is up to the listener to determine which are phony (which is really what they want) and lets Obama and Carney off the hook since “they didn’t say that particular scandal was phony” when evidence gets close to the truth.
I want to know which scandals Obama thinks are phoney and what Republicans are specifically doing to keep the economy down. He speaks with such hyperbole, no real details, and uses “some” so often he cannot be held down.
Then I will trust the media when it truly tries to get to the meaning of what Obama is saying.
Several months ago, President Obama spoke out on IRS targeting of Tea Party groups. From, PostPartisan: Quick takes by the Post’s opinion writers, we hear some straight news about the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups.
At the beginning of the article, PostPartisan stated its opinion on the IRS affair:
Two months later, President Obama talks of “phony scandals.” It would appear that “diehard, right-leaning partisans” were correct in doubting the sincerity of President Obama’s outrage.
As others pointed out at the time, it was more likely outrage at being caught.
In re: Mizpants’ comments on other Benghazi families coming forward. There are half a hundred potential reasons why few of the other victims’ relatives have spoken out. But the most obvious one is realism: the understanding that speaking out is futile at best and counterproductive at worst. No offense to Pat Smith, but I hope she is not so naive as to believe that she will ever receive any coherent explanation or mea culpa from anyone in this administration. It will not happen. Period. And as long as the vast bulk of the MSM remains complicit, there really is not much point in wasting one’s breath. Worse, as the IRS scandal shows, if you speak out too much, if you are too vocal in your criticism of the One and his carefully crafted, “post-partisan” vision, you might receive a friendly call from a tax agent.
SharonW,
Be that as it may, at minimum you have to be able to explain why 4 dead in Libya is a scandal compared to the 1000s of Americans who died in Iraq.
There was an interesting article in the last few days which characterized Obama’s “phony” speech, and much else he has said, as an example of “gaslighting,” a term I had run into once or twice but didn’t, then, understand.
The term “gaslighting,” I determined after a little digging, has now even entered the Psychiatric vocabulary, and comes from the classic 1940s film “Gaslight,” which starred Ingrid Berman, Charles Boyer, and Joseph Cotton, in which husband Boyer tries to drive his wife crazy by embarking on a campaign of taking actions and making statements deliberately designed to undermine her self-confidence, and to make her doubt her own perceptions, view of reality and, eventually, sanity.
Thus, he would vary the lighting and when she noticed, he would deny that the lighting had varied, he’d move certain objects in the house and, then when she commented on this, insist that these objects had always been where they were now and had never been moved, tell her that certain things had happened or denied that others had happened and, when she said that these things were not true, he’d pityingly point to her statements as evidence of her faulty memory and accelerating descent into mental illness.
Well, isn’t the whole shtick of Obama and Co. and their army of agents, allies, and enablers in the MSM, Academia, Congress, the Entertainment Industry, various other organizations, and elsewhere just such “gaslighting?” Telling us that things anyone with common sense could see for him or herself are happening are not really happening, don’t mean what common sense says they mean, and are not important when they are?
In sum, isn’t the game really all about forcing us to accept and operate in an entirely different reality and use a different vocabulary that limits our ability to communicate, analyze, understand, and act–by, for example, banning certain thoughts and words–as for instance Obama & Co’s stripping of any terms discussing Islamic concepts of Jihad, or linking Islam to violence and Jihad from U.S. training manuals and courses, or terming illegal aliens, “undocumented workers,” terrorists “insurgents,” or violent criminals who destroy property, set fires, and injure others as merely “protestors.”
The answer here is, of course, to resist such gaslighting at every turn, to insist that the Emperor has no clothes, when he hasn’t, to label things as what they really are, and to adhere to actual reality, while pointing out each and every instance of trying to erase or change it.
Wolla Dalbo…brilliant insight into the undermining of our society.
Seeing and analyzing the machinations of the Left and Obama & Co.–always keeping the techniques of gaslighting in mind–it seems to me, brings a certain clarity.
Thus, what was the whole Treyvon Martin–George Zimmerman thing but an exercise in gaslighting writ large? The New York Times, a primary tool of the Left, started the ball rolling by describing Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic,” the MSM consistently always called Trevon by his first name, Zimmerman by his last, NBC altered the 911 tapes to make Zimmerman a racist on the prowl, and there were nonstop denunciations of Zimmerman the “wunnabe cop” and “vigilante.” But, on the other hand, hardly a mention of Zimmerman’s black grandmother, Zimerman’s efforts to tutor black children, or his defense of a local black man who he thought had been given a raw deal by the police. Moreover, what about the suppression of the photos of Zimmerman’s broken nose and bloody head that we just barely saw once the trial began, and the refusal of the prosecution to give the defense all the exculpatory material found on Martin’s cell phone until a whistleblower testified to its existence?
Meanwhile, the media made sure to always present Martin in the guise of the pictures of him as a young, angelic looking teenager and not the later hulking wunnabe thug with his gold “grill,” giving the finger to the world on his Facebook pages, no talk about his problems and suspensions at school–apparent burglary and stolen goods included–or their immediate dismissal, a focus on innocent “sweet tea and Skittles,” but no mention that they were two of the three chief ingredients in the narcotic concoction local “youts” used to get high nicknamed “Lean” that Martin said he drank and bragged about drinking.
Again, all a campaign designed to get us to accept and work out of an alternative reality favorable to the Left and its interests.
Or, how about Major Nidal Hassan’s Jihadi attack against his fellow soldiers at Food Hood, classified and described by the military lackeys of the Obama Administration as merely a routine and forgettable example of “workplace violence”–and by characterizing this obvious Jihadi attack as such denying all those killed and injured the Purple Hearts and the other military, financial, and medical benefits due to those wounded or killed in combat with the enemy and/or their survivors?
There is also the gigantic gaslighting campaign involving much of the statistical apparatus of the government, which has apparently been manipulated to cover up the perilous state of our economy in favor of a much rosier picture than the evidence warrants, and on and on…..
I’m sure Pat Smith’s absolute moral authority will be affirmed by the media any minute now.
above should have been “…denying all those killed and injured and/or their survivors the Purple Hearts and the other military, financial, and medical benefits due to those wounded or killed in combat with the enemy?”
Obama knows precisely why the economy is dead and that’s because he’s been looting it to pay himself and his cronies.
Those who think Obama is ignorant, incompetent, or some other excuse, are still around.
In the years before, I eventually concluded that the best evidence and proof for the nature of the Left… is to just have the Left tell their own story and present their own evil.
Nothing else is as convincing. And yet, people will still not be convinced until the last, very last, second of their lives.
Such is the nature of predetermined doom and the Sword of Damocles, made invisible by a desire to refuse to accept reality for what it is. Instead preferring a fantasy land of may have beens.
Those who help the enemies of humanity, by desire, intent, or unintentional mistakes, are of no worth to the human race.
Good one, ErisGuy!
Wallo Dalbo’s got it – it’s just gaslighting.
I think of it more as Obama delivering the approved narrative to the MSM; whether or not we listen or agree is irrelevant. At first I thought it was just silly that the MSM thought they could advance narratives that are clearly false (like everything is Bush’s fault, Republicans destroyed Detroit) until it dawned on me that this is a long game. Just ask the average person which party supported the abolition of slavery or the civil rights movement and you see how effective their gaslighting has been.
Re: Benghazi families – I would imagine they’ve been contacted by the administration and told to keep quiet, if not forced to sign non-disclosure agreements. We’ve neither seen or heard from any of the survivors. Which is strange when the MSM manages to track down every last Martin family member and friend, and at least one juror, no?
Obama, our very own “Father of lies,” was at it again this week, busy dishing out his own alternative reality on behalf of Muslims–when, although he has just not bothered in several instances to issue the usually standard Presidential proclamations honoring several major U.S./Christian holidays and celebrations, nevertheless, held his annual “Iftar dinner” for Muslims (to use the words of Erik Holder “my people”); a dinner at which he rhapsodized, yet again, about “Muslims many (and illusive) contributions to our country” throughout our history.
But, somehow, I doubt that the wonders of the Muslim Barbary Pirate’s attempts to strangle the U.S. at birth by choking off our absolutely vital maritime trade in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and the 20 years the U.S. Congress was forced to pay them annual Jizya i.e. protection money amounting to as much as 20 % of the entire Federal budget in some years, the rising number of “honor killings” in this country, Muslim’s first attack against the World Trade Towers, their successful 9/11 attacks, the Boston bombings, their inventions/use of the shoe, underwear, and pressure cooker bombs, various other minor successful or thwarted attempted instances of Jihad here in the U.S. , and Major Hasan’s very successful Jihadi terror attack at Ft. Hood were included in this litany.
One wonders–now that Maj. Hasan just yesterday issued a lengthy statement through Fox news to the world at large, and particularly to Muslims and to the “mujahedeen,” asking Muslim’s forgiveness for having joined the U.S. military, and justifying his violent massacre as trying to stop the U.S. military’s “war against Islam”–how the Administration and its lackeys in the military will be able to continue to maintain the fiction that Hasan’s act was merely just an episode of common, almost routine “workplace violence,” and not a deliberate Jihadi terror attack done in the name of Islam and Allah; particularly when Hasan was screaming the ancient Muslim war-cry of “Allahu Akbar” as he mowed his fellow soldiers down.
Mizpants: On Memorial Day I heard the widow of Tyrone Wood, Dorothy, speak at a ceremony honoring her late Navy Seal husband. She electrified the crowd. This woman is no doubt about it Hilary’s worst nightmare. The victims have a lot to say, but no one in the MSM wants to listen. What is odd to me is that Rush, Sean, Hugh and the rest of the Right Wing media are not putting this woman on their show. She would have a lot to say about this “phony” scandal if given the chance. You can read my, not very well done, account of her speech here. http://marlettsmith.com/blog/index.php/2013/05/27/omg-truth/
What interests me is that Obama and his cronies know they can get away with referring to the Benghazi dead as a “phony” issue. They know that half the population will hear that and not with satisfaction and agreement.
This horrid obscenity, this vile and unspeakable obscenity, is perfectly acceptable because it comes from Obama.
For “not” read “nod”
Richard Aubrey.
they called WACO the result of too many right wing gun owners and got away with that.
It doesn’t have to be Obama. In fact, the Leftist alliance has hundreds of dictators more cruel and unusual than Obama waiting in the wings for their chance at the throne.
Obama is a tiny dot in the sea of evil that is the Left. Those who think he’s something special, perhaps will be surprised in the times to come.
Y
I know that. My point was the fitty-twoers who will, because he said so, think this/these obscenities are “phony”.
From Freedom Outpost:
Benghazi Survivor David Ubben With Shredded Leg Waited For 20 Hours For Help After Fighting Alongside Navy SEALs
“In another demonstration of the not so “phony” scandal called Benghazi, we are discovering that Diplomatic Security Agent David Ubben fought alongside former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty to protect the diplomatic mission that came under attack on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi, Libya. As he did, he was injured and said he had to wait 20 hours for help, with a shredded leg.
“According to Fox News, David Ubben waited for twenty hours after he was hit on that rooftop with Tyrone Woods and Glenn Doherty. His leg was shredded. We know that he has been recovering for ten months at Walter Reed as Catherine has just reported. He was defending the US consulate and then no medical aircraft was apparently sent to this scene to get him out of there.
“How could this be?
“It’s because the Commander-in-Chief was more engaged in CYA tactics and cover-up than he was in doing his job.
“Ubben ran into the consulate to help recover the body of information management officer Sean Smith, and then fought alongside the two SEALS in an attempt to fight off the jihadist attack.”
Read more: http://preview.tinyurl.com/mtpseqo
This just enrages me.
Burkean Mama: That was a very moving post, and the pictures were glorious. As I looked at them, I thought, “Obozo and all the other scum who are currently in the seats of power –they’re not America.
THESE people in the photographs: THEY are America!”
Thanks for posting that. (I tried to leave a comment, but WordPress wouldn’t let me.)
beverly:
I took down my always-flying Old Glory last November, though neighbors fly theirs.
“I don’t believe [Obama] anymore,” says Mrs. Smith. “Anymore” ???
WHere you been, Mrs Smith???