It is more than analytically flawed for the Obama administration to focus on the “Bacile” video. It is so superficial and convenient as to appear cynical, as if the video is the readiest excuse to hand for the administration’s bizarre, twilight behavior. This approach puts American liberty on the spot, rather than recognizing that there are hostile as well as friendly forces at work in the Arab Spring, and that they showed their intentions in flashing neon on 9/11 last week. The Obama administration’s posture on this development seems to argue a colossal lack of knowledge, understanding, and analysis. Indeed, it comes off as an ideology-accelerated “war is peace” fairy tale.
For the most part, the MSM have slavishly repeated the administration’s narrative. They also went high order on Mitt Romney, who reflexively said the thing Obama did not about the events in the Muslim world: that is, the American thing. There is no excuse for murdering Americans or attacking our embassies. There is no excuse for foreign governments that allow these attacks to happen. No video ever made can serve as an excuse for these outrages, and none should even be mentioned. Romney said the thing that resonates with the American people. The MSM were furious with him for it.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has pathetically tried to shed responsibility for the video, which has no doubt gained far more attention through the US administration’s narrative than it ever would have otherwise. Standing in the spotlight for America, she groveled before some putative Muslim audience, proclaiming that the US government “had nothing to do with” the video in question – as if the issue here were culpability, and as if it would have been perfectly fine for the terrorists who unjustly tortured and killed our ambassador to kill out of vengeance our citizen who (at least reportedly) made the video.
The narrative by which the Obama administration and the MSM are living is a house of toothpicks. It is so transparently based on a false evaluation of the situation that it has become surreal to watch it unfold.
This, in the end, is what will do it in. Orwell was an incredible storyteller, but weknow what he did not: the end of globalist Marxism, and its shabby exposure for the lie it was. Collectivism and indoctrination – Ministries of Truth and Love – don’twork. They don’t gain ascendancy over a working order. They never retail truth; by their very nature, they must deal in lies. The human spirit recognizes that, which is why so many have had to be sent to reeducation camps under communism, and why so many Americans – even without fully understanding why – continue to resist collectivization and urgent ideological coercion.
America protects freedom of speech, thought, and religion, even when it is ugly, stupid, or silly. If we do not, America is nothing. Everything else we cherish will be lost if we do not hold to this. And Americans do believe in these things. We have fought and died for them. We live them every day.
Our current president and his administration are at odds with the people on these matters, willing to obsess over, apologize for, and try to shed blame for a form of protected expression that should simply be taken in stride. It even seems that the U.S. Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation of the video’s perpetrator (h/t Breitbart) and this after the White House tried to get Google to remove the video from YouTube. Google showed more gumption in rejecting this request than it did in the face of Chinese censorship a few years ago. (Google is cooperating in the censorship of the video in India and Indonesia.)
Too many of the American people may have become lost in a fog of political confusion these days, but the people are still better than this. We are better, and we deserve better. False narratives are weak and accompany morally weak behavior. They are not the winning side. Ronald Reagan knew that about communism and the Soviet Union, and we must be his students and know it today about the 1960s holdovers who sit at the pinnacle of our federal government.
Their ideology cannot stand. It is weak and corrupt at its core. It must not take us down with it. Change course in November. Elect Romney. No, he’s not a philosophical conservative. But he’s our option for moving forward peacefully. The world will not leave us alone to delay a course correction.