Steyn starts with the silly line from Stephanie Cutter, "The entire reason that this has become the political topic it is, is because of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan." Goes on to "Big Bird" and winds up with a poignant picture of the President himself politicizing the corpses of the Americans killed in Benghazi
He opens up on, “Stephanie Cutter, President Obama's deputy campaign manager, speaking on CNN about an armed attack on the 9/11 anniversary that left a U.S. consulate a smoking ruin and killed four diplomatic staff, including the first American ambassador to be murdered in a third of a century. To discuss this event is apparently to "politicize" it and to distract from the real issues the American people are concerned about. For example, Obama spokesperson Jen Psaki, speaking on board Air Force One on Thursday: *** "There's only one candidate in this race who is going to continue to fight for Big Bird and Elmo, and he is riding on this plane."
Steyn then showed why he is a virtuoso at political sarcasm and satire: “She's right! The United States is the first nation in history whose democracy has evolved to the point where its leader is provided with a wide-body transatlantic jet in order to campaign on the vital issue of public funding for sock puppets. Sure, Caligula put his horse in the Senate, but it was a real horse. At Ohio State University, the rapper will.i.am introduced the President by playing the Sesame Street theme tune, which, oddly enough, seems more apt presidential walk-on music for the Obama era than "Hail To The Chief." Then his piece continued, A healthy mature democracy should spend its quadrennial election on critical issues like the Republican Party's war on puppets rather than attempting to "politicize" the debate by dragging in stuff like foreign policy, national security, the economy and other obscure peripheral subjects....”
It was at that point that Steyn pivoted and thrust his skewer into the BIG MAN instead of the BIG BIRD, “... But, alas, it was her boss who chose to ‘politicize’ a security fiasco and national humiliation in Benghazi. At 8.30 p.m., when Ambassador Stevens strolled outside the gate and bid his Turkish guest good night, the streets were calm and quiet. At 9.40 p.m., an armed assault on the compound began, well-planned and executed by men not only armed with mortars but capable of firing them to lethal purpose – a rare combination among the excitable mobs of the Middle East. There was no demonstration against an Islamophobic movie that just got a little out of hand. Indeed, there was no movie protest at all. Instead, a U.S. consulate was destroyed and four of its personnel were murdered in one of the most sophisticated military attacks ever launched at a diplomatic facility.”
Steyn also shows that his sarcasm can be deadly serious when he’s talking about deadly things: To "politicize" means "to give a political character to." It is a reductive term, capturing the peculiarly shrunken horizons of politics: "Gee, they nuked Israel. D'you think that will hurt us in Florida?" So media outlets fret that Benghazi could be "bad" for Obama – by which they mean he might be hitting the six-figure lecture circuit four years ahead of schedule. But for Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, it's real bad. They're dead, over, gonesville. Given that Obama and Secretary Clinton refer to Stevens pneumatically as "Chris," as if they've known him since third grade, why would they dishonor the sacrifice of their close personal friend by peddling an utterly false narrative as to why he died? You want "politicization"? Secretary Clinton linked the YouTube video to the murder of her colleagues even as the four caskets lay alongside her at Andrews Air Force Base – even though she had known for days that it had nothing to do with it. It's weird enough that politicians now give campaign speeches to returning coffins. But to conscript your "friend's" corpse as a straight man for some third-rate electoral opportunism is surely as shriveled and worthless as "politicization" gets.”
This Steyn item is well worth a read in its original:
//....ocregister.com/opinion/obama-374398-four-security.html/
No comments:
Post a Comment