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Friday, May 10, 2013

"Sacrificed for Fiction"

Mark Steyn always tells the straight story, but I've rarely heard him so exercised and brutally direct as he was on Thursday in his weekly guest spot on Hugh Hewitt's radio show. The audio of his conversation about the Benghazi coverup with guest host Guy Benson is linked here, and it's worth listening to.

Excerpts of Steyn's remarks appear below. I've added emphasis to the statements that hit me like a gut punch because they are so true:

The …highest level of the United States government lied to the American people … about the death of this ambassador. That is a serious business. And the Democrats and Republicans alike, and ordinary citizens, need to think about whether they’re willing to go along with that lie, because to do so is to be complicit in it. And that’s not a healthy sign for a democratic republic. 

There isn’t actually a partisan element here. All the players involved in this are Democrats. Chris Stevens is in fact the poster boy for the Obama-Clinton view of the Arab Spring. He’s one of their guys…he was a personally courageous and brave man who was on the front line of the Obama-Clinton narrative about the Arab Spring. And they let him die, and then told lies over his coffin. And Democrats, liberals should ask themselves about that… They did that to one of their own....it is now clear that the local militia…to whom the security of these guys was entrusted, were actually complicit in the attacks…He was there in Benghazi on a symbolic day at the personal request of Senator Clinton. In a sense, he not only died for the Obama-Clinton fiction, he was sacrificed for the Obama-Clinton fiction of the Arab Spring. This is absolutely disgraceful. I cannot conceive of how empty and dead you have to be inside to put Ambassador Stevens through that, then leave him to die, and all the nonsense we heard about oh, they couldn’t have got there in time? Oh, really?...it’s like a football match, is it? …you’ve got an end time, you know they’re all going to pack up and go home at 5:00 in the morning or whatever? They didn’t know how long it was going to last. They left him to die....
 

I understand there is partisan politics. I accept that. You want your side to win. You put your side’s interests at heart. But I personally could not do that knowing the truth. She called him Chris. Obama called him Chris. Chris…no Ambassador Stevens, no Mr. Ambassador, none of that, Chris, Chris, Chris like…they’re best buddies…. And then she tells the families of the dead that they’re going to get this video maker…to put him in jail. And all the time she’s doing that, she knows that is false… she got the phone call. The very compelling testimony from Mr. Hicks, the number two guy in Libya, he calls her, he has this conversation with her. Then later, he calls back to leave a message that Chris, Chris, as Hillary Clinton calls him, Chris, Chris, Chris, is dead.…She doesn’t call back poor old Hicks on the front line trying to hold down what’s left of the American presence in Libya? She doesn’t call him back that night. She doesn’t call him back the following day. This is a failure of leadership at the top.…she’s gone, she’s out of it. But if she were still in her job, honor would demand that she resign...I think there’s compelling evidence she actually perjured herself when she testified on this.

More scathing critique from Steyn's outstanding National Review article, "The Benghazi Lie."