Just read Cliff Kincaid's excellent Nov. 8 analysis of the election in which he highlights Karl Rove's leading role in shaping the Romney campaign strategy not to define Barack Obama as the radical that he is: the Communist-mentored, Frantz Fanon inspired, faculty-lounge-Marxist who began his political career as a "fusion" candidate, running on both the socialist New Party and Democrat ticket.

As Rove saw it, the GOP couldn't say anything bad about Obama or it would turn voters off. Romney, alas, apparently agreed. (My rundown of what happened and why, here and here.)

Kincaid cites exclusive Bloomberg Businessweek coverage of a closed event at the tail-end of the GOP convention in Tampa where Rove addressed 70 top GOP donors. There, he laid out his strategy to win over crucial swing voters to defeat Barack Obama: as the reporter put it, "to criticize Barack Obama without really criticizing him."

Here is what Rove said, via Bloomberg:

What had emerged from that...

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The LA Times reports:

On the morning of April 27 last year, Afghan Air Force Col. Ahmed Gul walked into a control room on the Afghan military side of the Kabul international airport. He was armed with a Smith & Wesson pistol provided by the United States military.

Within minutes, eight U.S. Air Force advisors and an American contractor were shot dead. The advisors were executed with bullets to the head. The nine killings remain the single deadliest incident among insider attacks that have targeted U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan.

A couple of previous posts here and here.

An Air Force investigation concluded that Gul, who had been radicalized by Islamist extremists, acted alone. ...

My take on the Air Force investigation here. Also, here is a report worth revisiting on the anti-infidel invective of Kabul mosques (Ahmed Gul attended one such mosque), which I now notice includes the revelation that in February 2011, two months before Gul's rampage,...

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Former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) at WND.com dispels the notion that a soul-selling, GOP amnesty push would lead to Hispanic-driven GOP victories. Not only is such a strategy numerically a non-starter, it is also a political non-starter. Hispanics are registering as Democrats not because the GOP, at least theoretically, is identified with border control and immigration control, but because they identify with the Democrat Party. Think about it. If the one issue of amnesty drove Hispanics, they would have voted, for example, not only for John "Shamnesty" McCain in 2008, they would have voted for the party of Reagan in the 1988 election, two years after the historic amnesty legislation supported by Ronald Reagan passed. That 1986 act, of course, disastrously served as a magnet to draw millions more mainly Spanish-speaking illegal aliens to this country and "into the shadows" where they have been awaiting the "next"...

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...

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Below is a CNN transcript of Rep. Peter King's appearance before the press after David Petraeus appeared  before the House Intelligence Committee on November 16. King is clearly struggling with what he has heard from Petraeus: a version of Petraeus' September 14 briefing at odds with what King and, more important, the record as set at the time by the ranking Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger, recall. In a nutshell, on September 14, Petraeus emphasized a "spontaneous," video-driven protest that became violent as "extreme" groups opportunistically attacked the US compound (with RPGs and mortars). Petraeus spun this false narrative to the intell committee at a time when the US government already knew no protest whatsoever had taken place in Benghazi; rather, that the ambassador and three other Americans had been killed in a planned assault by al-Qaeda linked groups on the anniversary of 9/11. Petraeus' testimony, in other words, was a lie and an outrage -- but no one seems to care. Meanwhile, it is a crime...

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This is a photograph of Anne Casper, the new US Consul General in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In the photograph, she is beaming about the 25,000th visa presented in Saudi Arabia in 2012 on October 21 (93.7 percent of Saudi visa applicants have been approved this year, according to the article in Prince Alwaleed's Arab News). The lucky visa-holder is a "Saudi businessman" heading for the US for meetings about a company which is described as  promoting "studying engineering sciences through after-school programs for young people."

How great is that?

One day earlier, Casper had been "received" by the OIC's SecGen Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, which is OIC-ese for "met with." Caspar and Ihsanoglu, the OIC declared, had a "useful and extensive exchange of views on issues of mutual interest" (read: Islamic interest), which, in this case, you can bet, was an exchange about outlawing defamation of Islam, or, as...

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As CIA Director, David Petraeus testified before the House Intel Committee in a closed hearing on Benghazi  on September 14.

(Mistake #1: These hearings should have been open.)

A recap from a post of October 20 titled "What Did the CIA Know and When Did It Stop Knowing It":

On September 14, ABC established that a bifurcated narrative was emerging from different wings of the administration. On the one hand, CIA Director David Petraeus was putting out the (non-existent) protest story; on the other hand, the Pentagon was already talking terrorist attack.

(Worth tucking away as background from an earlier Ignatius column is that the CIA Director "is also said to have pushed hard in Libya, rushing case officers there to work with the opposition" -- a.k.a. al Qaeda.)

ABC reported:

The attack that killed four Americans in the Libyan consulate began as a spontaneous protest against the film “The Innocence of Muslims,” but Islamic militants who may have...

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This week's syndicated column:

Was David Petraeus as great a general as the write-ups of his downfall routinely claim? This is a provocative question that I will begin to answer with another question: Did America prevail in the Iraq War? I suspect few would say "yes" and believe it, which is no reflection on the valor and sacrifice of the American and allied troops who fought there. On the contrary, it was the vaunted strategy of the two-step Petraeus "surge" that was the blueprint of failure.

While U.S. troops carried out Part One successfully by fighting to establish basic security, the "trust" and "political reconciliation" that such security was supposed to trigger within Iraqi society never materialized in Part Two. Meanwhile, the "Sunni awakening" lasted only as long as the U.S. payroll...

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On Tuesday, November 13 at Hillsdale College in Washington, DC, the Center for Security Policy presented a live-streamed panel discussion on the shariah doctrinal threat to national security. Dr. Andrew Bostom, Diana West and Stephen Coughlin were joined by Frank Gaffney to discuss "Benghazi: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Influence of Shariah Doctrine."

Another reason not to be nostalgic

Time magazine:

“Petraeus is a remarkable piece of fiction created and promoted by neocons in government, the media and academia,” argues Douglas Macgregor, a retired and outspoken Army colonel and innovator, known for Breaking the Phalanx, his book taking the Army to task for the way it organizes and uses its ground forces.

Macgregor elaborates:

“How does an officer with no personal experience of direct fire combat in Panama or Desert Storm become a division CDR in 2003, man who for 35 years shamelessly reinforced whatever dumb idea his superior advanced regardless of its impact on soldiers, let alone the nation, a man who served repeatedly as a sycophantic aide-de-camp, military assistant and executive officer to four stars get so far? How does the same man who balked at closing with and destroying the enemy in 2003 in front of Baghdad agree to sacrifice more than...

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In 59 voting divisions of Philadelphia, Mitt Romney lost 59,605 to zero. As IBD notes, Romney was

similarly blanked in nine precincts in nationally pivotal and heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County, Ohio, centered on Cleveland, where he did even worse than third-party candidates.

Seem impossible? Yes, it does. And that's not just our opinion. Rich Exner, the Cleveland Plain Dealer's data analysis editor, said he doesn't find the shutout credible.

Equally as implausible were the turnouts in Democratic strongholds that either exceeded the number of registered voters or the voting-age population.

What to do? At least Allen West (R-FL), for one, is fighting back, demanding a recount...

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Saudi Arabia's Turki al Faisal addressing Bill Clinton at Clinton Global Initiative shindig, September 25, 2012:

"Muslims will never forget your deliverance of Bosnia-Herzogovenia and Kosovo, and near-deliverance, within 100 meters, of Palestine from occupation."

Uncle Sam Wants Him: Libya Shield spokesman Hafez al-Aquri and the grand old al Qaeda flag

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From the Washington Post, November 10:

Last week, a U.S. Embassy delegation, led by CIA operatives, traveled to Benghazi to meet and recruit fighters directly from the Libyan Shield, a powerful umbrella organization of militias, according to Fathi al-Obeidi, a commander of the group.

The Libyan Shield provided the rescue force that assisted the U.S mission in Benghazi on the night of the attack, and Obeidi said his fighters represent the most viable local option for a special unit.

Wonder how that Libya Shield "assistance" worked out? All I seem to read about it is that the US rescue force was held up at the airport in Benghazi for hours awaiting permissions or papers or red tape or until everyone was dead or whatever. It seems that after the ragtag US team...

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They say Romney is shell-shocked; well, so am I.

As what passes for post-election conventional wisdom crescendoes in choruses of "Republicans can win again if they become Democrats," some counter-conventional wisdom lies deep in the exit polls. Bottom line: Don't accept the isolating, poisonous, drip-drip demonization of white men. Yes, they voted for Romney 62 to 35 percent (for which the Left is cranking up re-education camps to put them through intensive rigors of shaming and peer pressure until they are fit to join brave new Obamaworld), but polling tells us they are not alone.

The first and most seismic poll result blows up the GOP's so-called "gender gap." Yes, a majority of women voted for Obama (55 to 44 percent), and a majority of men voted for Romney (52 to 45 percent). However, a majority of white women voted for Romney, too. Fifty-six percent of white women voted for Romney; 42 percent voted for Obama. End of gender gap. We're back to a racial divide.

I first...

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Read and weep, America

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This week's syndicated column:

If Election Day is about picking winners, the morning after is for post-mortems. That’s when we slice open the losing campaigns, set aside the hundreds of millions of dollars that gush out and pick apart the cause of death.

Why did the Romney campaign fail? Maybe the country is now GOP-proof. That is, maybe a Constitution-guided, free-market, limited-government candidate no longer can “appeal” to the majority of the electorate. It could be that the death knell rang early this year once 67.3 million of us, or one in five Americans, had come to depend on federal assistance, formerly known as “the dole.”

This nearly takes us back to the level we hit in 1994 (23.1 percent), before President Bill Clinton and the GOP-led Congress “ended” welfare as we...

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Via Newsbusters.

Everybody tried to pin them down? Who's Everybody?

For shame.

Stanley Kurtz provides a likely summation of what is in store in Obama's second term.

What would that be? Obama's first term.

Kurtz explains:

That’s because the president’s first term hasn’t really happened yet, at least not in the conventional sense. Ordinarily, a president enacts various policies in his first term, the public test-drives the changes, and the president’s reelection campaign is a referendum on those new policies. The difference in Obama’s case is that in order to secure reelection, he has backloaded nearly all of his most transformative and controversial changes into a second term. Obama’s next term will actually put into effect health-care reform, Dodd-Frank, and a host of other highly controversial policies that are already surging through the pipeline yet still barely known to the public.

...

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On September 17, Reuters ran a story headlined: "Intel agencies warned U.S. Embassy in Egypt of possible violence."

That's nice. So why didn't "intel agencies" warn the US Embassy in Libya of possible violence, too? Presumably because the "intel agences" -- Petraeus' CIA, no doubt -- were focused on a "video threat" in Egypt, not in Libya, and on September 10 they cabled the embassy in Egypt accordingly. Egypt was indeed jump-starting another Islamic rage cycle from a Youtube video clip, "Innocence of Muslims," whose producer, incredibly, remains in jail on "parole violations." But, conveniently forgotten amid the many administration statements that there was no forwarning of an attack in Libya, AQ leader Ayman al-Zawaheri uploaded a video of his own on September 9 and 10 calling for Libyans to attack the US to avenge the US killing of a senior AQ leader from Libya, Yahya al-Libi. This video apparently went ignored by these same "intel agencies."

Why did a clip from a Mohammed movie...

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Herschel Smith at The Captain's Journal isn't buying the Pentagon's just-baked tale that there simply were no assets available to support beleaguered Americans in Benghazi. On considering a recent post by Paul Wolfowitz advancing this same claim (interesting how Wolfowitz and Condoleeza Rice have been vocal in supporting O narrative), Smith writes:

According to this claim, the Africa command (based in Europe) had no assets to which it could turn.  None.  Contrary to reports (that I have cited), there were no Delta operators at Sigonella.  There was no AC-130, there wasn’t even Marine Force Recon, again, contrary to published reports that I have cited.

They were apparently all in the field, deployed across Africa.  No one was available.  There were no air assets available to assist the poor souls at Benghazi.  Not even an MP or cook could have responded...

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First, the WSJ, now the NYT: CIA Director David Petraeus is feeling a little heat from the spotlight regarding Benghazi. It's an extremely soft-focus spot, however, one that obscures the most important question regarding Petraeus' role in Obama administration mendacity in characterizing what was a planned terrorist attack as a violent melee growing from a "spontaneous" protest over a Youtube video. That most important question is, Why, three days after this terrorist attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, did Petraeus go before the House Intelligence Committee and brief lawmakers that a Youtube video was to blame for a "spontaneous" protest -- wholly fictitious -- that "went on," as ranking Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger told ABC on September 14 following the Petraeus briefing, "for two to three hours"?

Ruppersberger:

“In the Benghazi area, in the beginning we feel that it was spontaneous – the protest- because it went on for two or three hours, which is very relevant...

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This week's syndicated column:

As we arrive at Election Day, some of the most crucial questions left unanswered about Benghazi are, in fact, the simplest. They are not “fog of war” questions. They are not questions rendered unanswerable by “conflicting intelligence.” They are questions that probe clear actions taking place not on the roof of a safe house under mortar fire, but inside the fortress-like, orderly and well-lit White House.

Who turned down requests for military relief for Americans under rocket and mortar fire? Who decided to suppress the fact that no protest preceded this attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya that claimed four American lives? Who ordered senior Obama administration officials to lie to the American people for two weeks by blaming a YouTube video for a “spontaneous” outbreak of violence that was, in fact, a coordinated terrorist assault?

President Obama declared he made his priorities about Benghazi clear “the minute I found out what was happening.”...

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My latest report for:



Washington, DC -- Two weeks ago, I reported here that the Obama administration had dug itself into a minefield of lies about the Benghazi terrorist attack that the president would have to cross to get to Election Day. Whether he will do so unscathed remains unclear, but if Barack Obama is re-elected president on November 6, it will be for one reason only. It will be because the US media threw themselves on every Benghazi bombshell that threatened the president, shutting down democracy in the process.

Not all of the media, of course. Fox News, WND.com, Daily Beast, Reuters, CNN, CBS and others have reported most of the key facts now available. These include, first, the revelation that intelligence immediately indicated the US consulate in Benghazi was destroyed in a planned terrorist attack, not as the result of a “spontaneous” protest triggered by a Youtube video. The latter scenario, however, is the demonstrable lie the Obama administration, including President Obama, repeatedly told for weeks. Later, the State Department established the fact that no “protest” at all occurred before the attack. The Obama administration explanation for these and other discrepancies? “Bad intelligence” or “fog of war.” The major media largely agree, no questions asked. Literally.

...

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Greta Susteren interviewed Cathering Herridge on Fox last night about a smoking cable:

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, FOX NEWS HOST: Disturbing new information about Benghazi and the Obama administration. Fox News obtained a classified cable sent in August from the U.S. mission in Benghazi to the State Department in Washington. The cable, coming just weeks before the attack, warned the Benghazi consulate could not sustain a coordinated attack.

But that is not all that was in that cable. Fox News chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge, who has read that cable, is here with the latest -- Catherine.

CATHERINE HERRIDGE, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Well, the status of the cable is that I really believe, having read it, that it is the smoking gun warning here. You've got this emergency meeting in Benghazi less than a month before the attack. At that briefing, the people are told that there are 10 -- 10 -- Islamist militias and al Qaeda groups in Benghazi.

The consulate cannot...

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