"Talking Points" & Walking Around in Your Socks

I spent some time lately looking at some well known leftist web sites.  It was an exercise that was both illuminating and a little disturbing.   Some of these sites are a good place to go if you are a leftist looking for ways to reinforce what you want to believe, as opposed to looking for factual information about anything.  Part of my property is an area my dogs use to attend to their, umm,  'post-nutritional', er,  'issues'.  Walking around down there at night in your socks would be about as wise as thinking you're going to encounter objective reality on these sites.  In either case, what you'll likely step in will result in ruining your socks.

These websites aren't places where you'll find a lot of actual truth, what you're going to encounter is more what is called 'talking points', and sadly, they're not the only ones that do it.  This kind of manipulation can be found on both sides of the spectrum.   

In the hands of people concerned only about their political fortunes, talking points are not  tools used  to clarify anything or shed light on anything,   They aren't attempts to persuade anyone through reason.  They are  a strategy designed to bend peoples perception, at the expense of the simple truth.  

Everything said and done by this administration since Benghazi has been focused on protecting President Obama and his agenda, and on protecting Hillary. Her  prospects in 2016 are far more important to the left than the mere fact that some people died in Benghazi last September.  If they had done their jobs and honored the oaths they took those people would have had the military support they should have had.  Protecting them would have made Obama and Hillary look like heroes, and they wouldn't be facing exposure for the cowards and politically motivated frauds they are.  But cowards and political frauds, by definition, don't do heroic things.  What they do is hide, and then concoct 'talking points'. 

In the days after the attack on Benghazi, Pres Obama's remarks were one long list of  these euphemistic talking points.  He "insisted that nobody was ever told to stand down, and that all available resources were utilized".  That was a lie.  As we're learning now from the testimony of the "whistleblowers"  speaking before congress, the truth is that there were plenty of military resources available to counter this attack, but they were told to stand down.  Far from merely failing to utilize available means to prevent the loss of life, which failure would have been an inexcusable act of incompetence in itself, we hear now that Mr Obama took active steps to prevent that deployment.  Then he apparently went to bed.  His next move was to concoct a story line that attempted to blame it all on some ridiculous video.  All of his actions could be assigned to cowardice and/or incompetence, but they had a far more sinister intent.  In the days prior to Sep 11, he had made several public statements about the demise of Al Qaeda, Ghaddafi, and Bin Laden, all designed to impress us with the effectiveness of his leadership.  The attack on Benghazi proved otherwise, and his attempts to rewrite the entire matter were nothing more than a desperate attempt to conceal that fact.