Security

The president himself is in Asia, mispronouncing the names of everyone he meets, and trying to play kissyface with Aung San Suu Kyi, the heroic woman who led the struggle to free Burma from the grip of evil generals. In the photographs, the lady is trying to keep her mouth out of the way of Mr. Obama’s kissing equipment.

The president was just being friendly, but she doesn’t look as if she’s enjoying herself. (Can’t the U.S. government afford a protocol officer to explain to the president that Asians are generally not fans of the American obsession with hugging and slobbering over everyone in sight on first meeting?)

Mr. Obama got the name of the new reformer president, Thien Sein, wrong, calling him “President Sein,” instead of “President Thien.” The Burmese describe this as “a slightly affectionate reference” that likely made his hosts cringe. This was not as bad as Jimmy Carter’s infamous invitation to a welcoming crowd in Poland to share a sexual adventure with him. Mr. Jimmy could blame his interpreter, who was confused by a word with two different meanings. Mr. Jimmy suffered international humiliation and the rest of us got a big laugh, or at least a large chuckle.

Americans, apparently even Harvard Law School graduates, are never very good with languages, and particularly with unfamiliar forms of address, but presidents travel with aides who are paid to know such things. Mr. Obama even got the name of the country wrong, using “Myanmar,” the preference of the evicted evil generals, instead of “Burma,” which is preferred by the reformers and Aung San Suu Kyi, whose name the president also mangled. “Burma” is the preferred usage of the State Department, and the White House explained that the president used “Myanmar” as “a diplomatic nicety” in deference to the discarded order. Mr. Obama is said to be working on an explanation to blame George W. Bush, who once called Greeks “Grecians,” for which he caught considerable flak from the popguns of the media’s Gaffe Patrol.

The president’s magical mystery tour of Southeast Asia, making no real news, is a perfect distraction from the real events of Benghazi and the Middle East. Hillary Clinton fell on the president’s sword a fortnight ago, and now Susan Rice must follow. The White House and its acolytes in the media are trying to make the Benghazi story about what Miss Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, knew and when she knew it. The president’s men are portraying her as the little woman who only told five Sunday morning talk shows what the big, brave men at the CIA wrote out for her to say. If the talking points were doctored, well, why blame the White House?

The White House excuse for the misinformation about what happened in Benghazi was “faulty intelligence.” That explanation falls apart on closer examination. The Washington Guardian now reports, quoting senior officials, that the president and “senior administration officials” were told within 72 hours that the Benghazi attack was largely the work of organized terrorists, not street mobs writing a critique of an amateur video portraying Mohammed as a pedophile.

The timing here is crucial. The consulate was attacked on Tuesday, Sept. 11, and President Obama was told not later than Friday that it was a terrorist attack. Miss Rice was dispatched Sunday morning, two days later, with the bright, shining lie, and repeated it five times. Mrs. Clinton and the president’s resident press flack did so as well.

The administration’s story blaming the CIA for faulty talking points has changed slightly: the talking points included disinformation to mislead terrorists. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, now says Miss Rice’s lie was “within the context” of what was presented as fact. Who knows who, if anyone, is telling the truth?

The president, trying to reassure Israel in its hour of maximum peril, says the Israelis are within their rights to answer the Palestinian rockets. Well, duh. With that and five bucks, a reassured Israeli can get a decaf latte at Starbucks. A decaf latte is considerably more than we sent Chris Stevens, the American ambassador begging for help as terrorists closed in on the Americans in Benghazi.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

President Obama, who demonstrated in the election just past that he’s still the tall, dark and handsome prince of feminine fantasy, stepped up manfully to defend the honor of Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations who eagerly joined the spinning of the enormous fib that the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was about a home-made video.

He didn’t say much about the specifics of the lie she told, but warned skeptics of the administration’s cockamamie excuse for the Libyan calamity to stay away from her. If certain U.S. senators want to go after somebody, he told a press conference (his first in eight months), “they should go after me, and I’m happy to have that discussion with them. But for them to go after the U.N. ambassador, who had nothing to do with Benghazi and was simply making a presentation based on intelligence that she had received, and to besmirch her reputation, is outrageous.”

A gentleman playing dragon-slayer would have sent his seconds to call on John McCain and Lindsey Graham to offer them their choice of pistol or sword, but that’s not the way a lady’s honor is avenged in Chicago. So he growled, in the way of a Bugsy or an Al, to “come get me.” And don’t wait until St. Valentine’s Day.

Such a patronizing defense of Miss Rice would, back in the day, elicit only snorts of scorn and resentment from the likes of Bella Abzug or Gloria Steinem. A fish riding to the rescue on Miss Steinem’s bicycle could take care of a couple of senators in short order. But that was then, and we’ve got a new now.

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Nancy Pelosi, just in from San Francisco, the bastion of the manly arts, sounded like a little lady herself. Miss Pelosi has yet to come to terms with the fact that she is merely a former Speaker of the House, and she had convened the Democratic women’s caucus to lift their spirits. Two more years of life in the chorus was not quite what Miss Pelosi promised them. She was not stepping down as the leader of the Democratic minority, as many of her colleagues had expected.

She first wanted to correct something she had said earlier: “I said we did not have the majority but we have the gavel. Excuse me, we don’t have the gavel. We have our own gavel. We have something more important. We have unity. We do not have the gavel, we do not have the majority. But we have unity.”

Having cleared that up, she took questions. When Luke Russert of NBC News asked how she would respond to certain of her colleagues who say that at 72 she should step aside because she’s too old, the little ladies of the caucus, flanking her on stage, hissed and booed. “Let’s for a moment honor [that] as a legitimate question,” she told the inquiring reporter, “although it’s quite offensive that you don’t realize that, I guess.”

Poor piggish clod, he got it backwards. He doesn’t know that 72 is the new 27, as any offended feminist could have told him, and all women are young and they’re all smart, clever, and beautiful besides. The ex-speaker, summoning her inner cougar, argued that “everything I have done in my almost decade now of leadership is to elect younger and newer people to the Congress.”

But this was smokescreen and subterfuge, all to distract attention from the scandal at hand, the administration’s bungling of the tragedy in Libya. John McCain got it right, that Mr. Obama is guilty of either cover-up or incompetence. Instead of offering to punch John McCain and Lindsey Graham in the nose on behalf of Susan Rice, the president could explain why he sent her to the U.N. armed only with a lie or with “intelligence” he knew was bogus.

The president’s native eloquence has gotten him out of jams with ladies all his life, and he has not yet learned that the buck (and the bunk) stops with him. He has been encouraged to think he is immune from reality by his Chicago pals, his rich Hollywood friends and donors, party hacks, and by the scribbler class, which wants only to caress and coddle -- and shut up anyone with a question. But reality is not a lady, unimpressed by election returns, and ultimately demands a full accounting of swindle and deceit.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Big scandals from little leaks grow. Watergate was at first only “a third-rate burglary.” Bubba thought he was only trying to cover up the details of a failed real-estate scheme down on the White River. Humiliation, resignation and even an impeachment followed.

History warns presidents that second terms are never Sunday picnics, and the unfolding – exploding is more accurate – of the story of what really happened on a violent night in Benghazi and the days that followed is Barack Obama’s introduction to his next four years. We probably ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Nearly everyone suspects that Mr. Obama, trying to avoid questions about the mishandling of Benghazi, was running out the clock, hoping to stumble past the election before being overtaken by facts and hard reality. Some of the congressional Republicans are talking bravely now about getting to the bottom of the sordid story, and the Democrats give every sign of attempting to squelch and evade: let’s move on, nothing to see here.

But maybe there is something to see. The press had no interest in the Benghazi story when it could have been the campaign show-stopper, but now some of stars of print and screen are slowly coming out of their self-induced coma. Sex makes any story irresistible, even to pompous hacks and blowhards. The resignation of David Petraeus was treated at first as driven by illicit and undisciplined passion to astonishing indiscretion, a good man seduced as men have been seduced since Eve tempted Adam with a Golden Delicious. Why else would a four-star general, the chief of the nation’s spies, correspond with his mistress by e-mail? As juicy as all that is, the story is leading inevitably and inexorably back to Benghazi.

Maybe the general and his paramour shared more than titillating pillow talk. The Wall Street Journal reports that FBI investigators discovered classified documents on the paramour’s computer. Where did Paula Broadwell get them? And now the account surfaces of a speech Mrs. Broadwell made at the University of Denver on Oct. 26 in which she revealed the news that the CIA had been holding two terrorist prisoners at the consulate and the attack was an attempt by terrorists to rescue them. Where did she get this information? Was she making stuff up to sell her book or did she inadvertently spill a state secret coaxed from a lover?

The CIA says that story is not true, and maybe it isn't, but you would expect the CIA to deny it even if it were.

We’re asked to believe eleven impossible things before breakfast, and a half-dozen more after lunch, and in the absence of a coherent explanation we get speculation and surmise from people who may or may not know what they’re talking about. The true story, leaking slowly in dribs and drabs, goes beyond a catfight over the affections of a general, or a turf war between the FBI and the CIA.

We’re asked to believe that the FBI investigation into the general’s affair, with its enormous national-security implications, was conducted over a period of weeks and the president was never told anything about it until Mr. Petraeus submitted his resignation. A half-dozen government agencies, in this fanciful telling of the story, treated the president as if he were a virgin in a bordello, all to preserve his “innocence” in the final weeks of a bitter election campaign. If the president didn’t know what was going on upstairs, this is incompetence bordering on criminal malfeasance.

With no facts, we have only the tangled web of lies in the changing official stories. Was the general intimidated – if not blackmailed – into joining the president, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice in their ridiculous story, told over and over, that the Benghazi attack was set off by demonstrations protesting that obscure video? Mr. Petraeus supported the president’s story about the video in testimony to Congress shortly after the assassination of Chris Stevens. He surely knew better.

By all accounts David Petraeus was and is a man of honor and integrity, now disgraced and broken by a familiar indiscretion born of human frailty. Looking to Congress for brave men and women who can unravel this web of deceit, a web perhaps woven of high crimes and misdemeanors, is usually a fool’s errand. But Congress is all we've got.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Mr. Romney wants to talk about the economy. When he does, his questions and answers are sure, sharp, crisp and right on target. He doesn’t have to look at a teleprompter for facts and figures. The economy is his home field. Foreign policy is his road game.

The president wants to talk about anything but Libya. It’s his No. 1 screw-up abroad and he knows it. He thought he could talk his way out of taking responsibility for what happened in Benghazi and in the subsequent public-relations fiasco. But for once his remarkable gifts of blab and bluster have failed him. The cover-up of the sad, tragic story of what happened to Ambassador Chris Stevens, and why, continues to unravel. The president promises an investigation, but is trying to run out the clock until after the election, when the real story can’t any longer cost him.

The mainstream media, as usual, is doing what it does best, rooting through effluvia in search of trivia, sensation and irrelevancy. Some of the media glitteries seized on Mr. Romney’s use of the word “binders” to describe where he kept names of qualified women for high positions in state government when he was governor of Massachusetts. Certain women too delicate to go out in the sun without a parasol accuse Mr. Romney of wanting to put them in some sort of kinky exercise. But “binder” is a perfectly appropriate word for “loose-leaf notebook” (available at any Staples or Office Depot); if he had said “loose-leaf notebook” he could be accused of wanting to consort with “loose women” -- and it’s a good thing for him he didn’t say he kept the lists of women “under covers.”

The New York Times even took Mr. Romney to task for recalling how, as governor, he prescribed flexible hours for women with small children, to enable them to leave the office early to get home to make supper for them. This enraged the editorialists: “But what if a woman had wanted to go home to study Spanish? Or rebuild an old car? Or spend time with her lesbian partner?” (Neither Jonathan Swift nor Evelyn Waugh could make up satire as good as this.)

But Mr. Romney isn’t addressing his campaign to lesbians eager to get home to finish ring-and-valve jobs on old Pontiacs while listening to their partners tutor them in Spanish pronoun declensions. Instead, he’s casting a wider net for votes. He wants to assure women – even “the little lady [eager] to go home early and tend to her children” – that he understands the burdens and responsibilities of women and wants to make their lives easier. Such women, as alien as they may be to the mainstream media, have been hurt, and badly, by the economic incompetence of Barack Obama.

Just ask them. When CBS News, no friend of Republican candidates, asked a polling sample just after the second presidential debate who they thought was better on the economy – the most important issue in the campaign – 65 percent of them answered “Romney.” Only 34 percent said “Obama.”

Results like this encourage Mr. Romney, as some of his wise men have, to go easy on the Libyan fiasco in the final debate. But he shouldn’t. With considerable help from an inept moderator, President Obama further muddled the miserable record on how he screwed up on Libya. Candy Crowley admitted afterward that Mr. Romney was “essentially” correct when he said that for two weeks the president couldn’t admit the Benghazi tragedy was a terrorist attack.

The president, with Miss Crowley’s help, took refuge in the ambiguous transcript of his muddled remarks in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, but Mr. Romney has one last opportunity to put the record straight. For 14 days, the president, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his ambassador to the United Nations, and his press flack spun the imaginative tale that the tragedy was the result of an Internet video that almost nobody saw. This conflicted with the fiction, peddled endlessly by the president, that he destroyed Islamic terrorism when he dispatched Osama bin Laden to wherever evil Muslims go when they die. This is the lie Mr. Romney must drive a stake through.

Going after Obama foreign-policy mistakes and misadventures cries out for the sure, sharp, crisp questions and answers Mr. Romney displays when he talks about the economy. The overriding concern in this campaign is the consistent, driving incompetence of Barack Obama in everything he touches – at home and abroad. That’s what Mr. Romney must make him talk about.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Making foreign policy an issue is usually hard to do, since most voters think a foreign affair is a naughty weekend in Paris. But this foreign affair is different.

The betrayal in Benghazi – and that is exactly what it was – was tragic for Mr. Stevens and his family, and it went beyond tragedy for the rest of us. The ambassador, watching the security arrangements dissolving over a period of weeks, had begged Washington for additional help. The White House answered with silence, not even sparing a little gas money for the 1936-vintage DC-3, a lumbering old airplane with a legacy of service in a half-dozen wars, assigned to American diplomats in Libya. The plane was insurance for a quick getaway. There was, however, $108,000 available to install a charging station for a fleet of Chevy Volts at the embassy in Vienna. It was a question of green priorities.

Mr. Obama, who fell in love with the sound of his voice many years ago, no doubt figured that if there was a genuine need for more security he would make a speech. Surely the terrorists, like the birds, would fall to the ground at the sound of that voice. So he and his surrogates, including Hillary Clinton, started spinning tall tales about what the attack on the U.S. consulate was all about. Who could doubt a messiah, particularly one so close to the land of the pharaohs?

They insisted, against the evidence that a blind man could see, that the trouble was not a terrorist attack, or a “man-caused disaster” or even “workplace violence,” as we are now told by the White House to call Islamic terrorism. Everybody else in the Middle East called it terrorism, probably meant to mark the observance of 9/11, which is the highest high holy day of radical Islam, observed annually with a beheading or a dismemberment of an infidel. So why couldn’t Mr. Obama call it what it was? Even the president of Libya, who ought to know, called it by its right name.

Barack Obama, if he is as smart as he wants us to think he is, knew better. So did Mrs. Clinton and even Jay Carney, the president’s mouthpiece. Mitt Romney called it for what it was, the betrayal of Americans in Benghazi, and the glitteries and notabilities of the mainstream press, many of whom probably knew better, too, rallied for the ritual crucifixion of the Republican nominee.

Nevertheless, President Obama, figuring he had no alternative, “doubled down on denial.” He couldn’t admit that he hadn’t, after all, eliminated al-Qaeda once and for all. For a fortnight he and his surrogates insisted that the original cover story was true.

Joe Biden doubled down on denial, too, in his debate with Paul Ryan. Nobody expects a lot from ol’ Joe. The Obama campaign is comfortable sending him out to say whatever crosses his mind, which is usually a hoot. He’s always good for comic relief.

Mr. Romney must resist the temptation to be nice to the point of reticence in his second debate with the president. He has to double down himself, telling it like it was about betrayal in Benghazi. He can be polite and respectful. No noisy talk-over, and none of ol’ Joe’s idiot smiles. He should remember to step often on that big toe, Tuesday night and afterward, pretending that Barack Obama is suffering gout. He can expect the worst from moderator Candy Crowley, puffed up, as you might say, with self-importance and eager to prove that the Romney-Ryan ticket is a Republican death wish, as she said it was just after Mr. Ryan was chosen.

The president revealed himself in the aftermath of Benghazi to be either terminally naïve, which would require an absence of judgment, or terminally incompetent. Neither quality is exactly what anyone wants in the White House. Or it could be something worse.

Mr. Obama knows he looks foolish rattling across the country in pursuit of Big Bird, Elmo and the assorted muppets of a child’s imagination. But it beats having to explain why he rattled on about an Internet video that almost nobody has seen while American interests are on fire all about him. The president and the Democrats are living in a fantasy land, and it’s up to Mitt Romney to jerk them back to the reality where the rest of us live.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

A new survey by Gallup asked Americans how much trust and confidence they have in the mass media – newspapers, television and radio – when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly: a great deal, a fair amount, not very much, or none at all. The result shows that “trust” disappeared long ago. Trust becomes disgust.

Gallup has been taking this measurement over the past decade or so, and the erosion of trust has been consistent and steady since at least 1998. Twelve years ago, 53 percent of Americans told Gallup that they had “a great deal” or at least “a fair amount” of trust in the media. By this year, only 40 percent of Americans put their trust in newspapers, television and radio to tell them what’s going on in the world. A remarkable 60 percent said they had “not very much” trust or “none at all.”

This should frighten editors and publishers, but it won’t. With few exceptions, they’re locked in to their high-minded prejudices and the noble conceit that the role of the media is not to report the news but to tell readers, viewers and listeners what to think about the news. This trend is vividly illustrated by the coverage of the presidential campaign this year. This latest survey was taken in the second week of September, so it’s hot off the press.

The results work out to a pretty miserable “favorable percentage.” If the media were a baseball team, it would be mired so deep in the cellar that it couldn’t even see next year. When Gallup asked these questions in the l970s, when the Watergate scandal was in full bloom with a new sensation across the front page every morning, the percentage of those who had a great deal of trust in the media was consistently in the high 70’s. Even allowing for the usual partisan divide – Gallup finds that Democrats, enjoying the liberal stroking of their “good” prejudices, alone in their approval of the press – this is a disastrous portent for the future of the mainstream media.

Two examples from the week’s news illustrate how and why. Mitt Romney finally released the awaited dump of information on his tax returns, after Sen. Harry Reid’s fanciful accusation that Mr. Romney did not pay any taxes for six years obsessed the media for weeks. The dump revealed that Mr. Romney had actually paid more than his fair share of taxes and that he gave away nearly 30 percent of his earnings to charity.

This compares to President Obama's 21 percent for charity -- and only 1.5 percent from Joe Biden, the miserly old uncle in the attic. Joe’s talent for squeezing every penny until Abe squeals recalls Bill Clinton’s taking deductions for old underwear he gave to charity. (To be fair, Bubba’s skivvies were little worn, since most of the time they were around his ankles.)

The reporters and pundits who were so obsessed with Mr. Romney’s taxes mostly passed on “analyzing” these facts. But the far more serious sin the media ignored was the debacle in Libya, where Islamic terrorists killed the American ambassador who, despite fervent pleas, had been left stranded in a hostile land without sufficient security.

For days the president, his secretary of state and the ambassador to the United Nations scoffed at the notion that the terrorism was the work of terrorists, and insisted it was spontaneous rioting by devout Muslims angry about a video they had never seen. It couldn’t have been the work of terrorists, because Mr. Obama had gone to Cairo as soon as he was inaugurated to bow to the imams and apologize for America being America. Nobody was any longer mad at us.

The big media had no interest in following the story; the celebrity journalists knew the president and they knew he was a stout fellow. He meant well and deserved a second term. Everybody knew that. When Philippe Reines, who holds Hillary Clinton’s horse at the State Department, was questioned closely about why the administration thought it necessary to tell such whoppers about the death of an ambassador, he blew his stack and resorted to trite schoolyard vulgarity.

The Obama administration finally conceded that it had been trying to sell a lie about what really happened in Libya, exposed by a few brave dissenters to the media consensus. Dissent was the work that all reporters and pundits once did, back in the day when “the press” was trusted to do its job. The fatal slide continues.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

There’s plenty to get up to date on. Campaign trivia is all the rage, mostly because trivia is what campaign correspondents understand best, but there’s real news out there. We’re seeing the daily grim result of Mr. Obama’s apologetic outreach to the Muslims.

The American embassy in Pakistan battens down under siege. The prime minister of Iraq, thought to be an American ally, beats the dead horse on which the infamous video rides. Protests and demonstrations shut down a U.S. consulate in Indonesia. Crowds in Afghanistan chant death for America (when they aren’t killing American soldiers.)

But serenity is the rule in Washington. The president prefers life in his bubble, where he can survey the world as he imagines it is, eager to hear another speech, rather than the world as it really is, full of bad people on their way to the mosque and keen to kill, maim and dismember Americans to please Allah. If only Israel would behave and the First Amendment disappear. Peace and love would envelop us all.
Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, and Jay Carney, the presidential mouthpiece, gave him – and the rest of the world – a lot of misinformation (and maybe even disinformation) about the assault on the Benghazi consulate, and now they have to admit that everything they said was wrong.

They shamelessly peddled the pernicious nonsense that the assault was a spontaneous fit of anger, maybe even righteous anger, by Islamic zealots upset by a home-made video. The White House hooted at the idea that the assault was “pre-planned,” even when the president of Libya said everything he knew about the attack told him it was planned. Ignorance about weapons is highly prized at this White House, and neither Miss Rice nor Mr. Carney know the difference between a BB gun and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Otherwise they would understand that heavy weapons do not spontaneously appear on the streets, not even in places where the mobs are inspired by the religion of peace.

The White House lie was swallowed whole by the compliant media, but eventually the facts grew legs and a voice, however reluctant and timid. Mr. Obama’s government at last has to acknowledge what everybody else could readily see, that the attack on the Benghazi consulate was “a terrorist attack.” Four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, died at the hands of terrorists.

“I would say yes, they were killed in the course of a terrorist attack on our [consulate],” Matt Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the Senate Homeland Security Committee under sharp questioning by Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. But the reluctant spook wouldn’t quite surrender the whole White House lie that the attack was spontaneous, and not “pre-planned.”

The ambassador, it now turns out, was worried about security at the embassy in Tripoli and the consulate in Benghazi, and his personal safety as well. The Libyan government said it warned the American three days before the planned and co-ordinated assault in Benghazi, but nobody was listening. The word never got inside the bubble.

The president had his usual media help in spinning the news, and Mitt Romney’s criticism of the president for being asleep at the switch was widely described as a “gaffe.” But now it’s clear that Mr. Romney was right and the Gaffe Patrol was shooting blanks. Polls show that approval of the president’s handling of foreign policies – such as knowing what to do when an enemy strikes – is down 5 points. Worse, after all the huffing and puffing about Romney “gaffes” about Libya and his remarks about “the dependency society,” who pays taxes and who doesn’t, Gallup’s daily tracking poll put the race Thursday as dead even again, 47 points for the president, 47 points for the challenger.

It gets worse. A new poll taken for the American Jewish Committee says the president’s support among Jews in Florida is down 7 percentage points from 2008. This represents 50,000 Jewish voters, more than enough to tip the result to the Republicans in a race as tight as the 2012 race appears to be.

The news is enough to make a president put his iPad away and go to sleep, and be grateful for the security of his bubble, and dream dreamy dreams of Susan Rice and Jay Carney and their tales of the Arabian slights.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The news from Libya gets darker, and the worst of the bad news for the president is that if everybody at the White House is “on message” it’s because everyone gets to make up his (or her) own message for nobody to believe.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who obviously needs a good night’s sleep, got in a war of adjectives with some of the caliphs of the Arabian knights. She fired the first volley of adjectives at the infamous video about the Prophet Mohammed, which the White House, against all available evidence, insists is the sole cause of the deadly riots. The video is “disgusting and reprehensible,” she said, “and it appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and provoke rage.”

A secretary of state, any secretary of state, rarely gets to use a large-caliber word like “reprehensible,” and Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, fired back with large-caliber words of his own. The video is “heinous and evil.” A president, even of a Muslim nation whose language is written in purple ink, rarely employs “heinous,” which is of a slightly deeper hue than “reprehensible.”

Mrs. Clinton paid tribute, sort of, to the First Amendment, which represents the principle on which America was founded, but she couldn’t resist the temptation to add a demeaning footnote. “There are, of course, different views around the world about the outer limits of free speech and free expression, but there should be no debate about the simple proposition that violence in response to speech is not acceptable.”

The footnote was not unnecessary, since the First Amendment does not guarantee happy speech, intelligent speech or even responsible speech. It guarantees free speech. But others in the government eagerly repeated the semi-apology over the first hours after the rioting exploded. This could have been a teaching moment about why Americans revere a Constitution that, in the words of the Weekly Standard, “was not written on behalf of poets and philosophers and film producers but to enshrine the rights of all citizens.” Instead, the White House tried to keep the focus on the video, to distract attention from its incompetence.

The White House keynote of distraction was sounded first by Jay Carney, the president’s press agent, when he insisted the riots were not aimed at his boss, the government, or even at “the American people,” but only at the video. Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., sounded even sillier when she insisted the storming of the American consulate in Benghazi was not planned and organized as a deliberate assault on America and its diplomats, but was a “spontaneous” happening against the movie. In her telling, it was probably a bunch of guys in Benghazi, loitering on the corner talking about the what was under the chadors the girls wore, and just happened upon a cache of automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades, and when one of the good ol’ boys suggested they attack the American consulate from three directions, they thought, well, why not? Guys, you know, like, will be guys.

The Libyan government’s insistence that the riots were not spontaneous, but highly organized and led by outsiders from Yemen and Mali, sounds like special pleading – blaming outsiders is always tempting for governments under siege. But it comports with what everyone so far knows.

If the president wants to find someone to blame, he should look at the face in his mirror. He imagined that a few honeyed words would make the Islamic world love him (and maybe even tolerate the rest of us) merely by making goo-goo eyes at those who want to kill us. We’ve had three years of goo-goo and the Muslim red-hots are still killing American soldiers, occasional civilians and selected diplomats.

Now the government is playing movie critic. The video is not likely to win an Oscar this or any other year, but criticizing the religious faith of others, and not just the faith of Christians and Jews, is well within what Hillary Clinton calls “the outer limits of free speech.” Apologizing, whether by word or deed, for America is asking for trouble. Nobody does apology for America better than Barack Obama, but now we see what he gets for it, even if he doesn’t.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Barack Obama’s pickle is a whopper made of his own bungling, and his stiffing the Israelis is part of that bungling. Push is just about ready to confront shove in the Middle East, and particularly in Iran, which has sworn to destroy the Jewish state, and Mr. Obama apparently can’t spare a few minutes to talk to Mr. Netanyahu about it, even after the prime minister flew to America for the conversation. He shouldn’t be surprised that evil men in Arabia watch, and take note of American “resolve.”

His dilemma over what to do about the assault on American diplomatic outposts in Egypt and Libya is related to Mr. Netanyahu’s pickle, though the president might not understand that. He’s blinded by his infinite patience with the endless barbarism that certain followers of Islam continue to inflict on the rest of the world.

A high Israeli government official says Mr. Netanyahu asked to see the president during a 54-hour visit to the United States, where he will attend a session of the United Nations to listen to abuse, insult and vilification from delegates from assorted tribes with flags who can’t wait to watch somebody else do something they can’t.

The White House response to Mr. Netanyahu’s request, or lack of one, was described by Ha’aretz, the Jerusalem daily that is the favorite of the Israeli left, as marking "a new low in relations between [Mr.] Netanyahu and [Mr.] Obama, underscored by the fact that this is the first time [Mr.] Netanyahu will visit the United States as prime minister without meeting with the president."

Mr. Netanyahu must tread lightly dealing with this White House. Ehud Barak, the defense minister, takes careful note of this reality, saying "we must not forget that the United States is Israel's most important source of support in terms of security." When Mr. Obama's White House burps and spits, he expects the Israelis to swim. Hence the dilemma: something must be done soon about Iran, or else accommodate Tehran as an irresponsible new member of the nuclear club. Mr. Obama has made it clear that he is not much interested in Israel's security problems, though he's willing from time to time, when under duress, to display rhetorical devotion to a U.S.-Israel special relationship. He acts as if he doesn't believe a word of it.

Mr. Netanyahu must decide whether to deal with Iran's nuclear program now, before Nov. 6, while President Obama would be under irresistible political pressure to go to Israel's aid, or delay a strike on Iran's nuclear weapon works, gambling that Mitt Romney, an authentic friend, will be elected president. If he decides to wait and Mr. Obama is elected to a second term, Israel must do without a trusted friend in Washington. Some pickle, and it's not even kosher.

Mr. Obama promised Vladimir Putin that if he could get a little space between now and November, he will have "more flexibility" in U.S.-Russian relations after his re-election. He didn't tell us exactly what that means, though his policy has been to "re-set" relations between the two countries. Once elected, Mr. Obama would "re-set" relations with Israel, too.

We got a glimpse this week of the kind of re-setting we should expect in a second Obama term. "The world tells Israel to wait, 'there's still time,'" Mr. Netanyahu said. "And I say, wait for what? Wait until when? Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don't have a moral right to place a red light before Israel. If Iran knows there is no red line, if Iran knows there is no deadline, what will it do? Exactly what it's doing."

As if on cue, a spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department stepped up with the usual girly-girl stuff: "We don’t think it's particularly useful to have these conversations in public. It doesn't help the process and it doesn't help the integrity of the diplomacy." A similar girly-girly message of sympathy for the mob led to horror, tragedy and humiliation in Libya.

Diplomacy is nice, and keeps the wet, the wilted and the wimpy of Foggy Bottom off the street. Sometimes diplomacy works, but never when it's backed by appeasement, apology and high-minded argle-bargle. We're getting a demonstration in Egypt, Yemen and Libya of what happens when a president speaks softly and carries an apology and a wet noodle. He eventually sounds like Alfred E. Neuman, the famous world leader from Mad comics: "What? Me worry?"

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Many of these soldiers, sailors and Marines feel betrayed by the senior officers of the services, beginning with the commander in chief. The old customs and traditions which have held the services together through war and peace have been scorned and trashed, replaced with the politically correct attitudes and regulations that gag real men. Even saying so is a sure way for an officer to ruin a career. The men in the ranks understand this, too.

The Army’s Center for Army Leadership at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., asked 16,800 commissioned and non-commissioned officers whether they think “the Army is headed in the right direction to prepare for the challenges of the next 10 years.” Their answers, as reported by CNS.com, ought to be enough to scare a commander in chief straight. His defense chief, too. But it won’t, because they’re exactly the men responsible for the survey results.

Only 26 percent – 1 man in 4 – say they think the Army is on track to continue as the scourge of evildoers who yearn to do the republic ill. Nearly 40 percent say the service is headed in the wrong direction, and 36 percent say they don’t have an opinion (and no doubt if they did, they’re smart enough to keep it to themselves).

The pessimists – or “realists,” as they might be called – cite two reasons. One is the hollowing out of the military as proposed by President Obama, and the other is the stifling effects of the politically correct run amok. They don’t understand why the men entrusted to manage the Army go along without protest with the nonsense mandated by the White House. Generals and admirals, just like shavetail lieutenants, know who punches their tickets.

Both President Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta are continuing to “evolve,” but to what end we yet know not. This year, the president decreed that the armed services, hollowed out or not, “must” celebrate “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month,” and Mr. Panetta cheerfully agreed: “During Gay Pride Month, and every month, let us celebrate our rich diversity and renew our enduring commitment to equality for all.”

You don’t have to pass on Gay Pride Month to wonder what taking pride in what’s in a gay soldier’s skivvies has to do with the fighting spirit that is the mark of an army ready to meet a foe. Speaking of “equality,” Mr. Panetta has not yet ordered a month set aside to celebrate the contributions of black soldiers, Hispanic soldiers, lady soldiers or the soldiers descended from Scots-Irish forbears who have shaped and led the Army from its origins in the Revolution.

A public display of affection – a “PDA,” as it was called in the “old” Army – has traditionally been discouraged in the ranks, discouraged long before anyone thought to ask and when there was nothing scandalous to tell. The Army has always had unforgiving rules about personal conduct. Commissioned officers have been court-martialed for adultery. Cuddles and kisses were nice, but not necessarily on the firing range or in uniform and on the street. Discipline, dignity and self-restraint were always recognized as crucial to good order.

But now gay soldiers (and merely cheerful soldiers) are encouraged to march in uniform in gay-pride processions, to carry aloft the flag, ribbons or even one of the five-foot papier-mache penises so popular in San Francisco parades. Phil Sheridan, John J. Pershing and George S. Patton would not recognize their Army.

Barack Obama, whose views have only recently “evolved,” probably doesn’t think very much about the military, except when he’s on duty with Seal Team 6, hogging credit for chasing down bad guys in Afghanistan. In modern America, as politicians like Dick Cheney and Bill Clinton have shown by example, military service is a grim task to be avoided. Even with expert coaching, in eight years as commander in chief, Bubba never learned to properly return a salute. But like President Obama, he was eager to report for photo-op duty with authentic heroes.

The men in the ranks are as dedicated and as eager to serve as their fathers and grandfathers ever were, and they deserve selfless leadership from the top. High-tech weaponry, wondrous as it may be, and politically correct attitudinizing, as warm and fuzzy as it may make generals and admirals feel, are never substitutes for leadership. That’s the message in the Army’s leadership survey. Mr. Romney, take note.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.