(Update, Monday, 11:25 a.m. EDT: Most unfortunately, it now appears that the “Frankenstorm” forecast, if few other predictions we’ve read about in the news, will prove correct. A meteorologist on the Weather Channel — someone who, like me, experienced the March 1962 storm, the benchmark for destructive power visited on the Jersey Shore — says the similarity between the two storms is clear: extremely high tides and winds exceeding 100 knots. The kicker this time is that a hurricane AND a Nor’easter will be hitting together, probably causing spectacular destruction in my old home town and along the New Jersey coast. Early Tuesday morning: The damage has been bad so far, but we won’t know how bad until later in the day. The hurricane caught Atlantic City squarely, flooding the island and demolishing sections of the Boardwalk, but these were fairly common occurrences when I was growing up on Absecon Island in the 1950s. From the news reports and videos I’ve seen so far, it doesn’t look quite as bad as the March Storm of 1962.)
What do these current news stories have in common: the World Series, Hurricane Sandy and Benghazi? Answer: Each has been covered by the news media in a way that reminds us why we trust journalists even less than we trust bankers, politicians and used-car salesmen. Recently the press has embarrassed itself with boldly mistaken predictions about the Series; courted skepticism by relentlessly hyping “Frankenstorm”; and disgraced itself as never before by deliberately ignoring an apparent White House cover-up of the attack on America’s diplomatic mission in Libya.
Let’s start with baseball’s matchup between the San Francisco Giants and the Detroit Tigers. Heavy underdogs last Wednesday when the seven-game series began, the Giants on Sunday night completed a four-game sweep of the Tigers. Days before the series began, the sports pages were filled ad nauseum with paeans to Detroit’s murderous batting lineup
and to ace starter Justin Verlander, whose fastball supposedly was unhittable. Granted, he’d shut down Oakland in the divisional playoffs and the Yankees in the pennant series. But so what? Oakland is a rookie team with no October veterans in the starting lineup, and the Yankees looked so bad in getting obliterated by the Tigers that the New York Post kissed them off the other day with the headline “Dear Yankees, We don’t date losers. Signed, New Yorkers.”
Will Hurricane, Too, Be a Dud?
Will Hurricane Sandy prove to be as big a dud as Justin Verlander was on the mound versus the Giants? With the storm set to engulf New York City today, we’ll lay even odds that it fails to live up to its sensational billing as the possible Storm of the Century. Just a hunch. We grew up on the Jersey Shore ourselves, on a small island just two blocks wide at its narrowest, and so we are not unfamiliar with the destructive power of hurricanes and, even moreso, Nor’easters. But when we checked with some of our old neighbors by phone yesterday, they were planning to ignore evacuation orders and ride it out. A childhood friend who lives just a block from the ocean, an experienced sailor and denizen of many powerful storms, says a few sandbags piled in front of her door will probably be protection enough.
Which brings us to Benghazi. Nowhere on the front page of Sunday’s New York Times, which yesterday endorsed Obama, do we find even a passing mention of this growing political scandal, perhaps the biggest since Watergate. Unlike Watergate, however — a story the news media pursued relentlessly only because they hated Nixon so much — in Benghazi, quite possibly because of gross negligence directly attributable to the President, Americans actually died: Ambassador Chris Stevens, foreign service officer Sean Smith and two former Navy Seals, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, who evidently defied orders in a heroic attempt to defend the mission. Obama slept on the news and went to Las Vegas the next day to campaign, even as his lackeys continued to insist that the September 11 firebombing in Libya was a spontaneous attack by Islamists angered by an anti-Mohammed film that had surfaced on the Web. We now know not only that the attack was planned in advance by al Qaeda to coincide with 9/11, but that earlier attacks had prompted requests for additional security at the mission. The requests were ignored, but Obama is insisting they never reached his office.
A Mayday Plea
We shall see. In the meantime, another story has surfaced suggesting that the President himself may have denied support requested by the Benghazi mission when it was under siege. This would have happened even as U.S. drones were monitoring the fiery attack in real time. If someone did indeed let a mayday plea from the mission go unanswered, CIA director David Petraeus says it wasn’t him. “No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need,” a CIA spokesman told the press.
With a week to go before the election and Obama slipping badly in the polls , don’t expect the New York Times and other left-leaning purveyors of the news to press the White House for answers. But their reputations and credibility will be further damaged, and badly, if Fox News and Matt Drudge continue to pry loose details that implicate the President in the needless deaths of four Americans who evidently had feared for their lives.
It would be an ironic end to Hillary Clinton’s political career if Fox and Drudge back her into a corner before next Tuesday, forcing her to cough up an account of Benghazi that dooms Obama’s reelection bid. Earlier, presumably at the President’s behest, she took blame for the lapse of security at the mission. While this allowed the President’s zealous partisans in the New York Times newsroom to back off the story, Fox and Drudge have continued to pursue it. Now, they appear close to breaking a scandal that will make Watergate look like penny-ante stuff. It seems possible that even with an unashamedly biased news media going all-out to suppress the Benghazi story, enough details will emerge in the days ahead to fully embroil Obama in scandal by the time voters go to the polls.
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Obama, hero? And i thought he killed the number one terrorist that BUSH just couldn’t find all those years. And i thought that this WAS the HERO act performed while invading an ally nation.
Please, someone slap me but it doesn’t get any better than that. Yet the nation yawned on his success. No fanfare, no adulation, no long lasting BUMP in his re-election campaign.
Does anyone really think these stupid ignorant conspiracy theories on Libya hold any truth? Gimmie a break! How about the TRUTH. His own generals said they would not recommend troops to invade a foreign country. His own generals stated that they had to be concerned about an attack anywhere in the WORLD. No action packed movie scenario where the United States always wins in the nick of time.
Defending FOX’s against having extreme positions is like declaring water can be turned into gold. Does anyone actually believe FOX is NOT biased to the extreme? Does anyone actually believe Murdoch doesn’t have total control over his station? If you believe FOX is a balanced news station, than there really is no bases for further discussion. Thats like trying to prove martians don’t exist. FOX the number one station that uses ignorance, fear, extreme prejudice to win over their audience.
The ultimate absurdity is defending the Bush administration as some ignorant clueless administation that just didn’t know what they were doing. 2 wars started, one against the world where the united nations were dead against it. The “proof” of WMD’s were never wanted or expected. Cheney himself went on TV and said it didn’t matter if Iraq had them or not. We even went to war on Canada. Yes an administration that alienated everyone. Arm twisting during that administration was a disgrace. Bush’s legacy: sitting in a kindergarten classroom holding a children’s book upside down, beinbg told of an attack on american soil. His quick thinking told him to stay in the class and not interrupt the teacher. 20 minutes went by before his staff said we have to go. Say goodbye to all those nice folks. And this nation elected him 2 times? We truly deserve him and more like him.
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Gary being Gary again. Anyone who bothers to respond needs to get a life. RA