Some disquieting thoughts about our inability to see evil.
The Scandals
Is it just coincidence that they’re all breaking seemingly at once, or something more?
The ABC Conjecture
The paradox of the proof. A very interesting story about math.
Wayne Hale
…is looking for input on his upcoming Congressional testimony. Here’s my suggestion: Tell them that they worry too much about mission safety, and too little about actually opening up and developing space.
Memo Reading For Idiots
The video magically appeared between edits two and three:
That’s when the video became the deus ex machina, the soon-to-be-visible hand of the bag of lies dumped on the electorate to prevent us from seeing the catastrophe of the Obama appeasement of radical Islam — a.k.a. “leading with the behind.” Saying “attacks” would have automatically put the Benghazi events in the context of the (banned concept) war against terror, whereas ”demonstrations” shifted the context — the whole Arab Spring thing consisted of lots of demonstrations, and the Obama crowd was basically pro-demonstration.
Indeed, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice justified the demonstrations. How? By blaming them on the video. More evidence that the invisible video was hidden in the third edit.
You can tell they were scrambling to try to save the campaign narrative.
The Latest Scandal
OK, so now it turns out that the Justice Department was spying on Associated Press reporters. That should further endear Eric Holder with the media.
Somehow, I’m not sure that this administration strategery of “distract them from the previous scandal a couple days ago with an even bigger one today” is going to work out all that well for them.
[Update a few minutes later]
Heh.
First time I’ve seen an agency do a Monday news dump bc a Friday news dump failed so spectacularly. It’s like a scandal fire sale.
— J.P. Freire (@JPFreire) May 13, 2013
So I guess the question at this point is: does one scandal distract from the other, or does it reach some kind of critical mass, in which the administration no longer has any credibility on anything?
[Update a few minutes later]
Government is just the word we use for things we do together, like audit political enemies and monitor journalists’ phone calls.
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) May 13, 2013
And another one. Twitter is going nuts:
Come on, guys, lay off DOJ. It’s not like they greenlit selling guns to Mexican cartels that ended up being used to kill border patrol.
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) May 13, 2013
The Benghazi Scandal Builds
…and Libya falls apart.
The Truth About Terror
From Benghazi to Boston, the Obama administration ignores it:
Looking back, a cynic would say that for this administration there really was no other way to characterize what happened in Benghazi but as a spontaneous protest to an anti-Islam video. For the truth to be revealed in the middle of a competitive election would have too many disquieting resonances, too many unknown effects. The specter of jihad must be muted and diffused. These are the same people, remember, who replaced the concept of “terrorism” with the euphemism “man-caused disaster,” who labeled Nidal Hassan’s jihadist rampage in Ft. Hood, Texas, an incidence of “workplace violence.” Who could doubt they’d blame the stupid videotape.
These are the same people, the Washington Free Beacon’s Bill Gertz reports, who have instituted a cultural change at the FBI that seeks “to dissociate Islam from terrorism, a policy critics say fails to properly identify the nature of an enemy engaged in waging religiously inspired war and insurgency against the United States and its allies.” It was the same politically correct blindness that led so many in the media and government, in their absurd search for a “motive” in the Boston bombings, to downplay the religious dimension of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s plot against America, to willfully describe the bombers as “lone wolves” despite their ideological allegiances and familial ties to overseas militants. Gertz’s sources suggest political correctness even may have played a part in the inability of the U.S. counterterrorism establishment to heed warnings from the Russians about the older Tsarnaev, whose every action in the run-up to the attack screamed, “Call the police.”
This is dangerous to our security, and utterly lacking in feck.
The Benghazi Baloney
Did Clinton and Obama really believe it? I don’t know what’s worse — if they did or if they didn’t.
The ObamaCare Tax
…is scaring the daylights out of some small business owners.
I’m sure worried about it, as someone who is self employed. All I want is a simple catastrophic policy, but I may not be able to afford it, if it’s even available at all.