Category Archives: Libya
Rodney Dangerfield of Jihad
ISIS is becoming the Rodney Dangerfield of Jihad.
Last week Trump called Obama the founder of ISIS. The next day Hugh Hewitt threw him a life line saying, “I know what you meant. You meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace.”
But The Donald doubled down calling Obama the “ISIS MVP” and adding Hillary as “cofounder” for good measure.
Mollie Hemingway in The Federalist points out that Trump has made the same claim for a long time. He did it three times in January and nobody made a big deal of it. Yet this time the media got all literal insisting that Obama did not actually incorporate ISIS.
Joe Biden claimed Republicans would put “y’all in chains”. That has yet to happen. Nobody took it literally.
Trump did say later in the Hewitt interview:
“I mean, with his bad policies, that’s why ISIS came about… If he would have done things properly, you wouldn’t have had ISIS… Therefore, he was the founder of ISIS.”
Still, Politifact gave him a Pants on Fire rating on the ISIS foundation issue.
Rodney Dangerfield of Jihad
Hemingway says the real point is that Americans are fed up with way Republicans and Democrats fight wars “where enemies receive decades of nation building instead of crushing defeats.”
Crowds are cheering Trump’s hard statements about Obama and Clinton’s policies in the Middle East because they are sick and tired of losing men, women, treasure and time with impotent, misguided, aimless efforts there.
She says Buzz Feed’s Andrew Kaczynski got more to the heart of what’s wrong with Donald Trump. He reminds us that Trump himself repeatedly called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
Does that mean ISIS has two daddies?
Benghazi Report
Trey Gowdy released the 800 page Benghazi Report on Tuesday. Hillary called it old news from the vast right wing conspiracy and said it’s time to move on.
Here’s some of the “old news” from Politico.
• The State Department Failed to protect diplomats
• The CIA was confused about who our allies were. Americans were ultimately rescued by forces loyal to Gaddafi – the Libyan ruler about whom Hillary previously said “we came, we saw, he died.” Cackle cackle.
• Marines ready for take-off were ordered to change into civilian clothes so as not to offend Libyans.
• The Obama administration stonewalled the investigation.
Suicide Mission
The State Department sent a a security expert to Benghazi nine months before the attack. His report:
Hillary publicly lied that the attack was inspired by an internet video. A day later she told the Egyptian Prime Minister, “We know that the attacks in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack – not a protest.”
David French (the guy Bill Kristol wanted to run for president) sums up the report:
So here we are. The presumptive Democratic nominee for president is largely responsible for one of the great foreign-policy disasters of the last eight years and unquestionably responsible for helping mislead the public, yet in the media calculus of our time the Benghazi report is a “win,” because it merely confirms failures we already knew about. And everyone knows that old failures are no failures at all.
Libya
President Obama told Chris Wallace in a Fox News Interview that Libya was his greatest mistake. He blames a lack of planning for the day after Gaddafi was killed. Or, as Hillary put it, “We came, we saw, he died.”
Vanity Fair points out that Hillary considers Libya to be one of her “chief accomplishments.”
