Obama, Horses, Delusions, and other debate-related items

Gonna do a column/post/article/op-ed round-up today, ’cause there’s several good ones out there and it’s highly unlikely too many of you will have a chance to get to ALL of them.

I mean, let’s face it: that’s why you have us.

First up is Newt Gingrich writing on the debate performances for Obama and Romney. From Human Events:

After a disastrous performance in the first debate — the worst by an incumbent president in the 62 year history of presidential debates — Obama shifted to a much more aggressive and energetic style for the second and third debates.

Americans have been trained by American Idol, Dancing with the Stars and other TV shows to judge performances. They have also learned to distinguish important nuances.

In both the second and third debate Americans said Obama was a better ‘performer’. Yet in both debates people said they were more likely to vote for Romney as a result of the debate.

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Next is Allahpundit over at HotAir.com, who fired off this post late Tuesday night. It follows the most recent news on Benghazi and begins to tighten the snare around this Administration, as well as the consistent inconsistencies with which they’re trying to distract us:

If I understand the White House’s Benghazi narrative in its current form, it boils down to this. There was no protest, but the attack was still kinda sorta spontaneous insofar as it was inspired by what was happening at the embassy in Cairo. And it wasn’t an official Al Qaeda or Ansar al-Sharia operation, even though members of AQIM and Ansar al-Sharia — including the founder of the latter group — were on the scene and/or participating.

Essentially, the White House wants you to believe that members of two prominent jihadist paramilitary groups were kicking around on September 11 when one of them turned on the TV, heard about the Mohammed movie from coverage of the Egyptian embassy assault, and decided to quickly pull together a complex, heavily-armed attack on the local U.S. consulate involving 20 or so people. Never mind that there had been harassment of, and attacks on, western interests in the city for months; these guys apparently had no serious designs on Chris Stevens or his compatriots until they heard about the YouTube video and hulked-out in the form of an organized armed raid.

The only thing that makes this story plausible is that security for Stevens at the compound was so disgracefully poor that hardened jihadis probably could have drawn up a play in the dirt outside the building and gotten to the ambassador.

That’s Obama’s defense here, essentially — that the consulate was so easily breached thanks to threadbare protection for Stevens that it’s quite possible the whole thing was put together by amateurs, without planning.

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Bob Gorrell, a political cartoonist, had this over at Townhall.com. I, along with quite a few others, was happily sending it around the Twittersphere last night, since it is such an accurate portrayal:

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There was an excellent blog post on Obama’s “Horses and Bayonets” debate wisecrack that pretty much destroys any-and-all credence to which he was clinging. Written by retired US Naval intelligence officer J. E. Dyer, on her theoptimisticconservative blog:

The key question implied in all this is what kind of operation you envision, as you consider which military forces to develop and buy. (In August 2001, no one envisioned the US military needing horses for special operations in Afghanistan.)

The president’s statements about our inventory of naval combat ships imply much the same question.  Obama’s statement suggests that aircraft carriers and submarines (“ships that go underwater”) have made the surface combatant – the cruiser, destroyer, and frigate – less necessary.  If we have only as many of them as we had in 1916, that’s not a problem, in Obama’s formulation, because technology changes.

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If you want to control the seas, you still need surface combatants.  And since the seas are the pathway to most of what we do outside our borders, there is no such situation as one in which we will only need to do what aircraft carriers do, or only what submarines do, or only what minesweepers or oilers or merchant ships do.  If we do not control the seas, we do not control our security conditions or our strategic options.

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Our fourth and final post concerns perhaps the most important choice we’re making this year: the choice between the ever-growing State and the individual. We’ve covered much of the same ground last week here, but leave it to John Hayward (aka ‘Doctor Zero’) to bring his inimitable flair to the topic:

But none of that “free market” stuff for America!  On the really important issues – health care, energy production, televising billion-dollar puppet shows – only the judgment of the State can be trusted. 

Obama sees the marketplace as a barren tundra prowled by predators, and equates freedom with abandonment.  The public can only be allowed to frolic within carefully controlled spaces, where failure is not an option, and excessive success will be punished.  Obama’s faith in the wisdom and intelligence of free people to increase the general wealth of the nation, by discovering and exploring opportunity on their own, is virtually undetectable. 

To him, ensuring “access” to something means forcing other people to pay for it.

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Be sure to check out the entire posts with these, if you can. There’s obviously a lot more there than just what we included.