"Something Fishy"

‘Something Fishy’

 

Long accustomed to helping my former company to distribute its literature at public fairs (when I was through taking pictures of employees, agents and their team members), I’ve learned to be diplomatic about approaching the public with something they possibly don’t want.

I volunteered to help the local Tea Party distribute flyers for the Republican freeholders.  Most people aren’t even sure what a “freeholder” is – it’s your county representative.  Just as we have municipal, state and federal representatives, we also elect county representatives.

Few people (except Tea Partiers) wear their party affiliation – if they even have one – on their sleeves, or in this case, belt.  Not knowing which side of the fence potential voters were on, I would just tell them I was out remind them to remember to vote.  Some refused the literature, many accepted.

My last two customers were at the bus stop, heading northwards after an afternoon of shopping in town.  They both refused at first.  The woman on the right declared that she wasn’t voting for anyone.  “They’ll all politicians.  I don’t like that Romney.  But I like Obama,” she said with a smile.

Now, being a Tea Partier, I wasn’t very inclined to urge her to vote, but I did note, “So you are voting for one of them.”

“No!” she declared.  “I said I liked Obama but I’m not voting for him.”

Here was a dilemma:  I didn’t want to encourage her to change her mind but I couldn’t help wondering why wasn’t going to vote for him?

“Well,” I said, “if you like him, why don’t you vote for him?”

She frowned.  “I don’t know.  But there’s just something fishy.”

Her companion then asked me for one of the flyers, which I gave to her and walked away, lest the other woman change her mind and decide to vote for Obama.  Another woman at a local convenience store said the same thing.

“I’m not voting!” she cried, fleeing for the store.  “I’m not voting for anyone!”

One must be polite in all circumstances.  Even if you don’t want to encourage people to vote for the other, you must justify your presence out on the street, and my introduction was always to remind people to vote on Nov. 6 – hopefully in favor of the people whose flyer I was passing out.  But if not – I didn’t molest the people.  One young lady clearly wasn’t interested in the flyer and I diplomatically backed away and simply reminded her to vote.  Where she had been cautious, now she smiled timidly.  If nothing else, I hope I gave her a better, if humorous, impression of the Tea Party.

At the moment, things seem to be going poorly for Obama.  He and Romney are neck-and-neck in the polls.  Obama is running against a crippled, old man this time; he’s running against a tall, handsome, successful man with a great sense of humor and the right credentials for office.

Obama’s latest gaffe was in the Comedy Central interview that a military response (or any other kind of response) to the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi and the murder of the U.S. Ambassador and four other was “not optimal.”

To be just, Jon Stewart led him into, but it seemed as though Obama knew it was a leading question because he took up the word immediately.

In regard to the administration performance in the aftermath of the incident, Stewart remarked, “I would say, and even you would admit, it was not the optimal response – at least to the American people as far as all of us being on the same page.”

To which Obama replied, “Here is what I will say:  if four Americans get killed, it is not optimal.  And we are going to fix it, all of it.  And what happens during the course of a presidency, you know, the government is a big operation at any given time, something screws up, and you make sure you find out what’s broken and you fix it.”

“And, you know, whatever else I have done throughout the course of my presidency, one thing that I’ve been absolutely clear about is America’s security comes first and the American people need to know exactly how I make decisions when it comes to war, peace, national security, and protecting Americans.  And they will continue to get that over the next four years of my presidency.”

Yes, we know exactly how he makes his decisions and how he implements them – he apologizes.  He bows.  He cuts down on our military forces to unprecedented level, making it almost impossible for us to defend ourselves.  He places so much debt upon the American people that all the millionaires from Main Line Philadelphia to Boston couldn’t pay it off.  That means very little money for defense.

Stewart also noted that “the perception that State was on a different page than” Obama, and how Susan Rice (one of Obama’s very good friends – she proofread his second book, “The Audacity of Hope”), our U.N. ambassador mistakenly tied the attacks to protests over an anti-Islam video five days after the protest took place, the president insisted that they’re “going to do an investigation and figure out what happened.”

After the election.  Meanwhile, reports are mounting that the ambassador to Libya was very definitely tied to some sort of arms trade with the rebels.  Obama had to admit, also, that there were still Al Qaeda operatives in the Middle East.  Today, the CIA is backing up Susan Rice’s claim that the video did influence the attack on the consulate.  Even if that happens to be true, Christopher Stevens wasn’t killed at the consulate – he was killed at a supposed “safe-house.”

Nor is Benghazi the capitol of Libya; Tripoli is.  Why protest at a minor consulate rather than at the main embassy in Tripoli?  How did the protestors know the ambassador was there?  Why was he there?   Why should we believe reports a month later, rather than the initial reports?  The documents are referred to as “talking points.”  Talking points?

According to David Ignatius of the Washington Post:

“’We believe the timing of the attack was influenced by events in Cairo,” the senior official said, reaffirming the Cairo-Benghazi link. He said that judgment is repeated in a new report prepared this week for the House intelligence committee.

“Here’s how the senior official described the jumble of events in Benghazi that day: ‘The attackers were disorganized; some seemed more interested in looting. Some who claimed to have participated joined the attack as it began or after it was under way. There is no evidence of rehearsals, they never got into the safe room . . . never took any hostages, didn’t bring explosives to blow the safe room door, and didn’t use a car bomb to blow the gates.’

“The Benghazi flap is the sort of situation that intelligence officers dread: when politicians are demanding hard ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers but evidence is fragmentary.”  So there you have it:  a senior official says that, while the protestors in Benghazi were watching the events in Cairo, they weren’t particularly prepared for anything more than a protest.

Yet the attack was extremely well-planned, some did discover the location of the safe house, someone did bring explosives, as well as guns, and some did blow up a car.  This Media is the successor to the generation of reporters that lied to America, telling us that the Kent State protestors were innocent and the victims of murder, when actually they were drunken Liberal students, stirred up initially because the mayor of the town had shut down the locals bars when the students started burning cars in the streets, and the next morning, listened to a group of agitators work them up into a lather over the Viet Nam War.  Someone besides the National Guard brought a gun to that fight, too.

It also sounds like someone is abusing his presidential office and authority, and forcing a rewrite of the script to fit his narrative and cover his assets.  Documents can be falsified and wrapped up in newspaper.

But if there’s a dead fish inside, the story will still smell fishy.