Useful Idiots

WASHINGTON -- Ever since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2012, the Obama White House has sought to lay blame for deadly and destructive anti-American attacks in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and more than two dozen other countries on someone else. The O-Team -- and the perpetrators -- have had a lot of help from the "useful idiots" in the mainstream media. The disinformation campaign being waged by the Obama administration over the cause of this violence would be comedic but for the fact that six Americans have been killed and dozens have been injured.

From the perspective of many "covering this story," the global jihad we're witnessing is mostly the fault of an incompetent "filmmaker," and the "spontaneous outrage" is over a "provocative video." Notably, the same is being said about protests against French diplomatic posts in the Middle East because "obscene cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad" were published in a French magazine. What's really obscene is the way all of this has been covered by the potentates of the press -- particularly the events in Cairo, Benghazi and Afghanistan.

The U.S. Embassy in Cairo was first off the block -- issuing an apology for a poorly made Internet video titled "Innocence of Muslims." Though the video was shot in 2011 -- not by an Israeli as first reported but by an Egyptian -- it attracted almost no attention when brief segments first appeared on the Internet in July 2012. The Obama administration continues to tell us that the Muslim Brotherhood and a host of other Islamic radical groups in 30 countries just happened to come across the "offensive videos" on the 11th anniversary of the devastating 9/11 al-Qaida attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 of our countrymen.

That alone requires a willful suspension of disbelief by anyone at all familiar with reality. Only a tiny fraction of the young men assaulting our diplomatic posts, our military installations and U.S. businesses and killing Americans have seen what the White House and our State Department have described as a "disgusting," "insulting" and "distasteful" movie. Yet major networks and print outlets continue to parrot the administration's propaganda. If a Republican were in the Oval Office, the press would be calling it a cover-up.

The failure of the media elites to ask questions and demand answers is particularly egregious in two specific cases: the "spontaneous" attack on our consulate in Benghazi, in which four Americans were killed on the night of Sept. 11-12, and the attack in Afghanistan in which two U.S. Marines were killed during a ground assault at Camp Leatherneck/Bastion. Both of these events warrant questions -- and answers -- as to how they could happen.