Baghdad shows the Left can't keep its stories straight
President Trump continues to make Leftists decompensate in ways that can be worrisome but also are occasionally refreshing. In the latter category, Leftists are so desperate to diminish President Trump's actions in the wake of the attack on the American embassy in Baghdad, they are abandoning their long-held narrative that President Obama's response to the Benghazi attack in 2012 was virtuous or, at least, unremarkable.
On September 11, 2012, the Islamist terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia attacked the American consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi, killing four Americans, including an ambassador. In addition to challenging the State Department's security practices before the attack and the administration's tall tales after the attack, Republicans strongly questioned whether Obama had done everything possible during the attack to secure the compound and rescue Americans. While Sean Smith and Ambassador Stevens were killed early as events unfolded, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were still mounting a defense at the CIA annex several hours after the attack began.
The Democrat establishment pushed back hard against Republican concerns. President Obama, Democrats assured America, had done everything right, reasonable, and possible when word about the attacks broke. They insisted that conservative media was focusing obsessively and in conspiratorial fashion on events that were entirely unremarkable. In other words, while Benghazi became a watchword to conservatives for President Obama's malignant negligence, America's Democrat establishment, whether in politics or the media, held that it was just a case of bad things happening that were not President Obama's fault.
With news that an Iranian-backed militia attacked the American embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday, and that President Trump responded aggressively, bringing in the Marines and sending troops to Kuwait, Leftists have suddenly adopted a new idea: They're now saying that Baghdad is President Trump's Benghazi, something that is not meant as a compliment. Joy Reid, in fact, tweeted that out explicitly:
As Trump's Benghazi unfolds in Iraq... https://t.co/X8FsJpt6Au
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) December 31, 2019
The popular Palmer Report reflects the same attitude (language warning):
Donald Trump is having his very own “Benghazi” in Iraq right now, and instead of acting like a fucking president for once, he’s still just lazing around at a golf resort and tweeting stupid shit. Trump is going to prison in the end. He should just resign and report there now.
— Palmer Report (@PalmerReport) December 31, 2019
This is an amazing sea change in attitude. Having denied for years that Benghazi was a problem, the Left is suddenly shouting that Baghdad is President Trump's Benghazi.
Think about the ramifications of this intellectual position: Either Democrats are saying that President Trump handled the situation in Baghdad as perfectly as they long claim President Obama handled Benghazi, something impossible to believe; or, in their ongoing war against President Trump, Leftists are at long last, obliquely and unwittingly, acknowledging that President Obama's Benghazi response was a disaster.
No matter how you look at it, the Left's ferocious bias against President Trump, one unleavened by a smidgen of objectivity, leaves them incapable of understanding events playing out in real time – and means that the media is incapable of intelligently or accurately reporting on the news of the day.