Kudos to Kyle Becker of IJ Review for doing the fact-checking on the left’s ’13 Benghazis That Happened Under Bush’ Viral Meme.
Many of us have seen the narratives refuting “Benghazigate.”
“Where was the outrage about all those embassy attacks under Bush? What about all the people killed in those attacks? Where was Fox News then?”
Let’s put aside for now that this line of questioning has nothing at all to do with why people are concerned about what happened during and after the Benghazi terror attack.
All 13 false equivalencies are picked apart, here.
Of course there were attacks on US Embassies in terrorist hot spots throughout the world during the Bush era. We were fighting two hot wars as part of what used to be called – “the global war on terror.” But there were major differences between these attacks and Benghazi, including the fact that in most of the examples no Americans died, there were no requests for more security that were ignored, and there was no active cover-up after the attack. They were not “just like Benghazi” at all.
Bush readily admitted that we were fighting a global war on terror. But Obama wanted the nation to think that he had decisively won the war after Osama Bin Laden was assassinated. The war on terror was over. Now, we just had overseas contingencies and workplace violence and demonstrations over Youtube videos.
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The left uses dishonest defense strategies to protect Obama and they have used them time and time again to explain away his scandals. They mischaracterize past events to draw some sort of moral equivalency – which often involves blaming Bush. It looks good on the surface, but falls apart upon close scrutiny. But it doesn’t matter how weak their false equivalency is, because the strategy is geared toward BDS-ridden O-bots who are inclined to agree with them and not do any independent fact-checking. They just want to be spoon-fed what to think, and the Alinskyites running the show right now, are happy to provide them with the nonsensical pablum they need to fulfill their preconceived notions about a world in which every enemy has an R after his name.
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Perhaps the first time the left used this strategy to protect Obama came after Holder’s DOJ dropped the charges against the New Black Panthers in what one Justice Dept lawyer described as a slam dunk case – the clearest case of voter intimidation he had ever seen..
The charges stemmed from an incident at a Philadelphia polling place on Election Day 2008 when three members of the party were accused of trying to threaten voters and block poll and campaign workers by the threat of force — one even brandishing what prosecutors call a deadly weapon.
The three black panthers, Minister King Samir Shabazz, Malik Zulu Shabazz and Jerry Jackson were charged in a civil complaint in the final days of the Bush administration with violating the voter rights act by using coercion, threats and intimidation. Shabazz allegedly held a nightstick or baton that prosecutors said he pointed at people and menacingly tapped it. Prosecutors also say he “supports racially motivated violence against non-blacks and Jews.”
The Obama administration won the case last month, but moved to dismiss the charges on May 15.
Believe it or not – the left tried to blame Bush for the decision – forcing conservative bloggers like Delroy Murdock to waste time slapping down their idiotic false narrative:
Olbermann, recently fired Washington Post analyst Dave Weigel, and The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer have all crowed that Bush’s Justice Department dropped a criminal case against the NBPP. In fact, there never was a criminal case to drop. The NBPP faced a civil lawsuit prepared by Justice’s Voting Rights unit. This is exactly what career prosecutors recommended in the first place.
With respect to all but one defendant, Justice abandoned its civil case under Obama, not Bush — no matter what Olbermann and his comrades would like to believe.
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During the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal, in which thousands of high powered guns were allowed to fall into the hands of criminal gun cartels, Democrats constantly tried to argue that the Obama administration’s Operation F & F, was a continuation of “Wide Receiver”, a failed gun-tracing operation that the ATF briefly tried under George W. Bush. Democrats often used the Wide Receiver narrative during Congressional hearings, and Jay Carney used it when questioned by reporters during press briefings.
They were lying.
Besides the fact that they were two separate operations, Wide Receiver actually made an attempt to track the guns that were headed into Mexico – guns were implanted with RFID chips and were tracked electronically. The ATF in Phoenix also implemented aerial surveillance tactics in an attempt to follow the weapons.
Obama’s ATF took no such steps to track the walked guns other than recording the serial numbers before allowing them to cross the border into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. ATF agents involved with Fast and Furious would later testify that they were ordered to stand down and not track the weapons even when interdiction was possible. The objective was to get them into the hands of drug cartel bandits only to be interdicted after they had killed people – at which point, they were traced back to the gun shops that sold the guns to straw purchasers (at the ATF’s behest.) It was not a “botched operation. It was totally effed up from the start.
The Bush administration also worked in cooperation with the Mexican government. When about 200 guns were lost track of – the operation was terminated in 2007.
Mexican authorities were kept in the dark over Fast and Furious and were outraged when the details about the criminally insane operation were revealed. The operation started in the Fall of 2009 and not terminated until Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered with one of the Fast and Furious Guns in December of 2010.
A good question for Eric Holder would be why would the DOJ resurrect a program like Wide Receiver after it failed – but he would tell you he had no idea about it or Operation Fast and Furious. He testified that he didn’t even know about Fast and Furious until well after Brian Terry’s death in Dec. 2010. Any emails that might say otherwise have been protected by Executive Privilege.
There are still liberal drones out there who will knowingly tell you that Fast and Furious is a GW Bush scandal because it was a continuation of a Bush era gun-walking operation.
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Remember Solyndra? The solar company that went belly-up after the Obama administration awarded them with an ill-advised half a billion dollars loan? That was Bush’s fault, too, you know.
After spending months touting the Obama administration’s decision to loan $535 million to the California solar energy upstart Solyndra, top officials took a new tack Wednesday while testifying before Congress about the company’s abrupt shut-down and bankruptcy: the loan, they said, was actually the Bush administration’s idea. The Energy Department’s top lending officer told Congress that the Solyndra loan application was not only filed during President Bush’s term, but it surged towards completion before Obama took office in January 2009.
“By the time the Obama administration took office in late January 2009, the loan programs’ staff had already established a goal of, and timeline for, issuing the company a conditional loan guarantee commitment in March 2009,” said Jonathan Silver, who heads the Energy loan program.
It was a key part of the Democrats’ pushback over the Solyndra scandal. Dems argued that the loan guarantees made to the solar panel company were just as much the doing of the George W. Bush administration as they were of the Obama administration.
This argument has been pushed repeatedly by the Democrats on the Energy and Commerce committee, by liberal groups like Media Matters and even by the Energy Department itself, which has been emailing reporters regular press releases spinning the scandal.
For example, Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce investigation subcommittee, asked Friday, “Whether the Bush and Obama administration conducted due diligence on the loan guarantee.”
But the facts don’t justify this claim. The bottom line remains that the Bush Administration did not approve the Solyndra loan guarantee. And just before they headed out of town, Bush officials ordered the project back to the drawing board.
Democrats argue the Energy Department first received the loan request in December 2006. By January 2009, it was still under consideration. That month, the department’s Loan Guarantee Credit Committee put the project on hold.
IBD concluded, “there were two administrations involved in this project. One, after more than two years of consideration, was still sending it back for further review. That was the Bush administration. The second was placing “intense pressure” on department staff to approve loans from the moment it walked in the door and even had the energy secretary himself personally reviewing each loan. That was the Obama administration.”
It would be like a Republican administration coming into office after Obama, immediately approving the Keystone Pipeline, and when something horrible goes wrong – trying to share the blame with Obama because he’s the one who “established the goal” of approving the pipeline.
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The IRS Scandal: One defense strategy the left has employed to defend the Obama Regime is the laughable “Progressive groups were targeted too!” false narrative. I’ve actually seen them try to argue that progressive groups were targeted even more than conservative groups. I mean if you’re going to lie – go big, right?
NO progressive groups were unfairly targeted by IRS
This would already seem obvious given the fact that absolutely no progressive groups have come forward with horror stories about the abuse they supposedly endured as a result of being targeted and unfairly scrutinized. Congressional Democrats had every opportunity to let this alleged multitude of “progressive IRS victims” testify before various committees during several hearings that have been held on Capitol Hill on the scandal. Not-so-shockingly, no progressive victims have been identified and none ever testified.. Because they don’t exist.
There are still liberal drones who spread that particular brazen lie in the comment sections of our nation’s newspapers.
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Be on the look-out for this particular defense strategy. Now that we see the pattern, it should be obvious when we see them employing it.
The VA scandal is in its infancy, but I fully expect the left to blame the scandal on Bush era policies that Obama is heroically fixing. If they haven’t done that already.
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