David Gregory on Benghazi: “WHAT cover-up?”

Once upon a time, journalists were professionally curious individuals who could sniff out a story like a bloodhound, would look for clues diligently, and wouldn’t take ‘no‘ for an answer.

Plus, the Fourth Estate instinctively knew when they were being fed a line of bull by the current Administration, regardless of which party was in the White House.

Wow, that seems like a very long time ago, indeed.

“Unexpected”: Our GDP drops to -0.1%

Ever have a nightmare where you’re falling, and everything happens in super slow-mo?

Where you have time to think “How did I ever get myself INTO this mess?”, or “Why didn’t I do (insert alternate decision here) instead?”

Well, I feel the same way right now, and I dearly wish I was dreaming.

From HotAir:

House passes Fiscal Cliff deal

As much as I’d like to say the entire thing stinks, that would be unfair. It’s merely that this most recent “deal with the devil” just MOSTLY stinks. It’s a tribute to the convoluted-by-design nature of our politics that there could be this many aspects (both positive and negative) in one measly bill. 

Still, there are a number of things to consider, and Mary Katherine Ham covers several of ’em, such as: 

Obama, Binders, and a failure of Leadership

This is leadership?

I won’t go into the whole “Binder” silliness which the Left is pushing, since it is just that: silliness. Ed over at HotAir put it into context, giving credit to Mark Halperin for “being one of the very few journalists that spoke out about Barack Obama’s lack of a second-term agenda or much substance at all after the debate on Tuesday night.”

We have exploding debt, ambassadors being murdered, no actual budgets having been passed in years, ‘Taxmageddon’ on the horizon, record unemployment for his entire 1st term, …and all Obama can do is make juvenile “Binder” jokes?

If it wasn’t so tragic, it’d be comical.

News flash to the President: what we really need to be concerned with is THIS (from Breitbart.com):

Weekly applications for U.S. unemployment benefits jumped 46,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 388,000, the highest in four months.

What else is there?

Agreed, Benghazi is horrific and we need something other than dissembling and semantics from President “Al Qaeda is on the run” Obama. We have a multitude of items to fix, both foreign and domestic, but if our folks don’t have jobs, …real jobs, …we simply can’t fix anything else.

So, Mr. President, are you going to continue to keep throwing mindless distraction upon distraction in front of the American people, or are you going to finally, once and for all, hold yourself to the standard you set four years ago?

“You know, a year from now, I think people are going to see that we’re starting to make some progress but there is still going to be some pain out there. If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.”

Yeah, …I think we all know the answer to that question.

—–

Since President Binder wants this to be the conversation of the day, okay, …I’ll play along:

(***Image courtesy of Stix Blog Backup…)

Presidential debate #2: Romney manages to beat Obama AND moderator Crowley

Tuesday night’s 2nd Presidential debate was marked by some silly questions, and silly behavior. But after the dust settled, Romney walked away not only unscathed, but with a close & hard-fought win.

Oh, I’m sure the Obamacrats were all excited that their man Barack popped a couple 5-hour Energy drinks before he went onstage, and it’s true that he was better than his somnambulistic persona from 2 weeks ago. However, the President employed the Joe Biden “malarkey” method of debating, which means you repeatedly call your opponent a liar, facts-and-truth-be-damned. It also means that you constantly interrupt your opponent, which taken together makes it very hard for many viewers to tell what the heck is going on.

This strategy, however, doesn’t appear to be benefiting Obama. More on that at the end.

—–

The item which we’ll be talking about for days is the “terror” question as it relates to Benghazi. The President, assisted by moderator Candy Crowley, attempted to re-write history and basically insist he had said all along that it was a terrorist attack.

Which is great and all, ….except that he didn’t.

Obama didn’t call it a terrorist attack; he was speaking in relation to 9/11/01 and used the word “terror” in general. This isn’t opinion; it’s objective fact. Is it now a matter of semantics as to whether the Obama Administration did or did not recognize the attacks as terrorism?

Heck, in his Rose Garden speech, he also used the words “Walter Reed“. Based on his previous logic, should we then assume that Obama suspected the famous Army doctor had something to do with the Libya attacks, as well?

It’s almost as if the Administration WANTS me to keep replaying this video:

(The Entire timeline for what was said, and when, can be found HERE).

There are several places to view reports on this, including HotAir.com (with two posts now) as well as Human Events. I suggest you give BOTH sites a peek.

—–

I was actually flabbergasted at one point during the evening, when Obama tried to portray himself as pro-oil, -natural gas, & -coal…and then say that he is responsible for improved results in these areas! I’ll say this: Obama’s not a gifted liar in the mold of Bill Clinton, but he sure is a bold one.

“Pro-coal”? Really? You may wish to tell that to the Coal Industry; they somehow have missed that message. Of course, when your campaign maligns Ohio coal miners who attended a Romney rally as “being forced to attend by their union“, it should be pretty obvious who’s lying about being on the side of Coal in our country.

—–

Pro-OIL? Puh-leeeeaase…. I have two words for that laughable statement: KEYSTONE PIPELINE.

President “Yay, Oil!” Obama has been busy in other ways, too:

“The Obama administration also announced recently it would lock up nearly half of the 23 million acres in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska from energy production and instead set it aside for wildlife and species protection.”

And this from HotAir.com’s Erika Johnsen:

Obama tries to hit back on Romney’s accurate observations — “Very little of what Governor Romney just said is true. We’ve opened up public lands. We’re actually drilling more on public lands than in the previous administration” — but again, Obama ignores the facts about the rates of leasing and permitting that disqualify his claims, and Romney doesn’t let him get away with it. (Also, Obama’s “use-it-or-lose-it,” “you can’t just choose to drill when it’s profitable for you” policy argument, demonstrates a devastatingly pathetic lack of understanding about the way the markets work to everyone’s best advantage.)

Maybe I’m just slow, but none of this strikes me as “pro-oil”.

—–

As always, we have the full debate video for you here:

—–

The bottom line from last night was that Obama spoke to his diminishing base of cultists followers, and they probably put up new posters of him on their wall. However, those folks are in the tank regardless what he does. Rather than building any sort of “O-mentum” from Tuesday among the electorate-at-large, Obama was slammed with the news that he’d lost the debate as measured by both CNN and CBS. Even the MSNBC focus group called it a tie.

And when your opponent’s trajectory is going up, and yours is going down, that means advantage: Romney.

Armed with that knowledge, faced with the inevitable discussions of Libya/”terror-or-not-terror”, and talks of dead ambassadors, one thing is certain: this is going to make a very tough week for the sitting president.

**sniff**

Oh, that’s MUCH clearer now…

They just can’t help themselves.

Via HOTAIR.com, National Organization of Women President Terry O’Neill tried to turn Hilary Rosen’s ridiculous inflammatory statement from Wednesday night into a positive by, basically, …..repeating it.

The money quote:

TERRY O’NEILL: What would we be saying if Hillary Clinton had said this: that Ann Romney has never, has not worked for pay outside the home a day in her life? That’s my understanding that’s an accurate statement, and that raises the exact issue that Hilary Rosen was trying to get to, which is do Mr. & Mrs. Romney have the kind of life experience and if not, the imagination, to really understand what most American families are going through right now? I think that that was what Hilary was getting out, and so she left out the words “for pay outside the home.”

Ed Morrissey actually echoes in his post today what I was saying yesterday:

Once again, we get to see the professional Left’s utter disdain for women who chose to stay home with their children rather than work in the workplace. Do they also lack “life experience” and “imagination”? Are their political and economic views also irrelevant? Is a woman’s worth entirely measured by her salary? Is that the official position of NOW? If so, then perhaps they may want to think about an official name change.

My only advice to these folks?

Keep digging, guys. Keep digging….