Josh Marshall on Mitt Romney’s hasty decision to use an outright lie to politicize the events in Cairo and Benghazi:
Some moments show you when a candidate is ready or not to become President of the United States. I suspect last night will become one of those moments for Mitt Romney. The verdict will not be positive.
As I noted last night, when the full scale of the events in Cairo and Benghazi remained unknown, the Romney campaign let fly a crude political attack both blaming the Obama administration for the attacks and suggesting that the President actually sympathized with them. This was after it was known that a then-unnamed Foreign Service Officer (later identified as Sean Smith) had died.
The statement read as follows …
“I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”
This was followed shortly by another attack from one of Romney’s prime surrogates, RNC Chair Reince Priebus, explicitly accusing the President of sympathizing with the attackers.
Romney’s attack was not only ill-judged and ill-timed, it was actually based on what appears to be a demonstrable falsehood. Romney, or folks writing in his name at his campaign, claimed that the administration’s first response to the attacks was to issue a press release condemning the anti-Islam film which had helped trigger the attack. This they picked wholesale from the right-wing blogosphere.
In fact, according to all available press reports and the account of the State Department, the press release in question came from the US Embassy in Egypt and preceded the attacks. So to claim it was a response to the attacks was simply false. So while American diplomats were dying in the field, Romney pops up with an egregious attempt to politicize the deaths with a flat out lie.
What would Romneys first response would have been if he was in the White House now? I shudder to think. He is so damn stupid. He never addressed the death of our ambassador, or offered solidarity to our president at a time is was called for.
The attack was fueled by an internet film made by an anti Muslim wing nut…a conspiracy nut…and it is being said now on NBC that pastor Terry Jones in Florida has a hand in the film. They are saying he showed the film on 9/11. We cannot permit the right to free speech be used to commit sedition or treason …this film was touted by anti American forces as a film depicting the sentiment of our country. We cannot allow the malcontents on either side cause us to cause the escalation of violence.