The Impediment Of Origin

Process Driven
In the process, the most important questions about Benghazi, where Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed on Sept. 11, have largely gotten lost: Were requests for greater security for diplomats in Libya ignored? Even if Al Qaeda’s core in Pakistan has been decimated, what threat is posed by its affiliates and imitators in other countries where they have taken refuge? How can crucial diplomacy be conducted amid the dangerous chaos that has followed the toppling of dictators across the Arab world?

Instead, it is the parsing of the talking points — who wrote them, altered them, recited them on television or tried to explain them — that could decide the fate of a leading candidate for secretary of state, Susan E. Rice, currently the United Nations ambassador. (NYT, 11/28/2012)

The New York Times now piously claims that politicians and media are focused on the wrong aspect of the Benghazi story: the characterizations of the attack by Obama, Rice and Clinton rather than the more important questions of security and the death of four Americans. This from the publication that first ignored and then repeatedly downplayed ALL aspects of the story for weeks on end. Of course the Times is at least partially incorrect. For months, Republicans like Senator John McCain along with Fox News have been consistently and demonstrably asking the questions that the Times now asks. We are happy to have the Times now on board, but - forgive our cynicism - wonder where they were before the election.


Data Driven
Romney was once a world-class management consultant with a legendary appetite for “the data.” His private-equity success was due partly to his knack for identifying and purging inefficiencies from bloated, underperforming enterprises. It’s time, therefore, to set him loose (analytically speaking) on the mother of all domestic challenges: America’s radically inefficient health-care system. (Matt Miller, Washington Post, 11/28/2012)

Funny how - after he has lost the election - Liberals now have such glowing respect for Mitt Romney and his business acumen. The same Mitt Romney who they previously contended had plundered companies, callously fired workers, shipped jobs overseas, killed the spouses of other workers, etc. 


Will Power
With a chip on his shoulder larger than his margin of victory, Barack Obama is approaching his second term by replicating the mistake of his first. Then his overreaching involved health care — expanding the entitlement state at the expense of economic growth. Now he seeks another surge of statism, enlarging the portion of gross domestic product grasped by government and dispensed by politics. The occasion is the misnamed “fiscal cliff,” the proper name for which is: the Democratic Party’s agenda. (George Will, Washington Post, 11/28/2012)

No one alive can write like this.


Own It
Republicans have got to make Obama own the economy. 

They should spend from now until the end of the congressional calendar reading aloud from Thomas Sowell, Richard Epstein, John Lott and Milton Friedman and explaining why Obama's high tax, massive regulation agenda spells doom for the nation. 

Then some Republicans can say: We think this is a bad idea, but Obama won the election and the media are poised to blame us for whatever happens next, so let's give his plan a whirl and see how the country likes it. (Ann Coulter, 11/28/2012)

We are honored. The great Ann Coulter agrees with RedStateVT on prospective Republican strategy.