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Romney narrowly wins, but refuses to attack Obama on Benghazi cover-up

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Re-cap from the Palm Beach Post.

Excerpt:

Romney also repeated his claim that Obama had gone on an “apology tour” to the Arab world when he took office, saying foreign leaders saw it as an act of weakness.

“Nothing Gov. Romney just said is true, starting with this notion of me apologizing,” Obama said, calling Romney’s claim “the biggest whopper of the campaign.”

Romney stood by his assertion.

“Mr. President, the reason I call it an apology tour is because you went to the Middle East and you flew to Egypt and to Saudi Arabia and to Turkey and Iraq. And by the way, you skipped Israel, our closest friend in the region but you went to the other nations,” Romney said.

“And by the way, they noticed that you skipped Israel. And then in those nations, and on Arabic TV, you said that America had been dismissive and derisive. You said that on occasion America had dictated to other nations. Mr. President, America has not dictated to other nations. We have freed other nations from dictators.”

Here’s a clip of that speech:

Now here’s an example of Obama from NBC News:

Romney: “Our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917. The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission. We’re now at under 285…We’re headed down to the low 200s if we go through a sequestration. That’s unacceptable to me.”

Obama: “I think Governor Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works.

“You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.”

Here’s the clip of that speech:

I don’t think that this arrogant tone he adopted is going to work on women and independents.

Moderate Chris Wallace’s opinion of the debate:

I don’t have much to say about this debate. To me, if Romney wanted to win, he would have gone after Obama on Benghazi, hammer and tongs. I’m disappointed with Romney’s weakness, but I think that there was enough there for Romney to eke out a narrow victory. I think that Romney thinks that he has it in the bag, and just doesn’t want to come off as patronizing like Obama did.

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New study finds that egalitarian marriage doesn’t make women happier

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Elusive Wapiti writes about in this blog post.

Excerpt:

Norwegian researchers confirm and extend Brad Wilcox and Steven Nock’s research suggesting that egalitarianism sets couples up to fail:

“What we’ve seen is that sharing equal responsibility for work in the home doesn’t necessarily contribute to contentment,” said Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study entitled “Equality in the Home”.

The lack of correlation between equality at home and quality of life was surprising, the researcher said. “One would think that break-ups would occur more often in families with less equality at home, but our statistics show the opposite,” he said.

The figures clearly show that “the more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate,” he went on. The reasons, Mr Hansen said, lay only partially with the chores themselves. “Maybe it’s sometimes seen as a good thing to have very clear roles with lots of clarity … where one person is not stepping on the other’s toes,” he suggested. “There could be less quarrels, since you can easily get into squabbles if both have the same roles and one has the feeling that the other is not pulling his or her own weight.”

See, Wilcox’s view is this:

The companionate theory of marriage suggests that egalitarianism in practice and belief leads to higher marital quality for wives and higher levels of positive emotion work on the part of husbands. Our analysis of women’s marital quality and men’s marital emotion work provides little evidence in support of this theory. Rather, in examining women’s marital quality and men’s emotional investments in marriage, we find that dyadic commitment to institutional ideals about marriage and women’s contentment with the division of household tasks are more critical. We also show that men’s marital emotion work is a very important determinant of women’s marital quality. We conclude by noting that her marriage is happiest when it combines elements of the new and old: that is, gender equity and normative commitment to the institution of marriage.

His full study from 2006 is here.

And more again from Elusive Wapiti’s post about the new Norwegian study:

Men’s emotion work (and women’s assessments of that work) is the most crucial determinant of women’s marital quality. It is more important than patterns of household labor, perceptions of housework equity, female labor force participation, childbearing, education and a host of other traditional predictors of global marital quality. This finding suggests that the functions, character, and stability of contemporary marriages are intimately tied to [women’s] emotional well-being.

…our findings suggest that increased departures from a male-breadwinning/female-homemaking model may also account for declines in marital quality, insofar as men and women continue to tacitly value gendered patterns of behavior in marriage. Specifically, we find that the gendered character of marriage seems to remain sufficiently powerful as a tacit ideal among women to impact women’s marital quality, even apart from the effects of the continuing mismatch between female gender role attitudes and male practices.

[W]omen are not happier in marriages marked by egalitarian practices and beliefs…For the most part, marriages that are more egalitarian in belief and practice are not marked by higher levels of men’s positive emotion work [EW: love, affection, and understanding] or by women’s happiness with such emotion work…women who are more egalitarian-minded and more upset with the division of household labor receive lower levels of positive emotion work from their husbands, perhaps because they are more likely to initiate conflict with their husbands. Thus, rising expectations among women for marital equality may also have the unintended effect of lowering investments in marital emotion work on the part of men. [N]o measure of egalitarianism in practice or belief is associated with higher levels of men spending quality time with their wives. Indeed, in keeping with the gender model of marriage, wives’ gender egalitarianism and work outside of the home leads to less positive emotion work on the part of husbands.

Instead, we find modest evidence that wives’ gender traditionalism is independently related to higher levels of men’s positive emotion work in marriage. We also find evidence that homemaking wives report greater happiness with their husband’s emotion work, and may be more likely to receive such work from their husbands. In other words, adherence to traditional beliefs and practices regarding gender seems to be tied not only to global marital happiness but also – surprisingly enough – to expressive patterns of marriage.

[S]hared church attendance and normative support for the institution of marriage are associated with higher levels of women’s marital happiness. Thus, declines in religious attendance over the past four decades (Steensland, Park, Regnerus, Robinson, Wilcox and Woodberry 2000), along with the liberalization of attitudes to divorce and extramarital sex (Thornton and Young-DeMarco 2001), may also account for recent shifts in marital quality insofar as they reduce the social and normative supports that foster higher investments in marriage.

Wives who share high levels of church attendance are more likely to report happiness with their husband’s emotion work in marriage. Moreover, wives who share a normative commitment to marriage with their husbands are more likely to report happiness with the emotion work done by their husbands…socially conservative practices and (possibly) beliefs appear to be linked to lower expectations of marital emotion work on the part of women. But it is also possible that they are associated with more expressive marriages. In any case, women who share a commitment to the institution of marriage with their husbands express greater happiness. [2]

He has an interesting graph there of what women want from marriage, and what men want. Who knew that women wanted gardening?

In any case, I really do think that this is important to understand, because I see a lot of pastors and evangelical leaders embracing egalitarianism, because they can’t make the case for complementarianism using anything except the Bible. Well, the Bible does support complementarianism. But when you are debating it with an egalitarian, it helps to have the evidence.

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In tonight’s debate, Romney must go after Obama about the Benghazi cover-up

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Mitt Romney must go after Obama on the Benghazi cover-up in tonight’s foreign policy debate.

To prep you for the debate, here’s a review of what we know about the Benghazi cover-up from Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

America’s slain ambassador in Libya repeatedly sought security which went unheeded, new documents show. The CIA, meanwhile, told Washington within 24 hours that the Benghazi attack was terrorism. So where was our president?

The sorry answer is that it’s starting to look as though he and his team knew all along that the attack in Libya was a terrorism from the start.

That hasn’t been what he’s presented to the public. But instead of owning up to it, the White House has perpetrated the red herring that a old YouTube video depicting Islam in a bad light was the real reason, because calling terrorism terrorism would reveal their their Middle East policy failure.

Friday, the evidence piled up. The New York Times reported that 166 pages of internal State Department documents released by GOP congressmen showed that now-murdered Ambassador Christopher Stevens and other U.S. officials had repeatedly warned that security was deteriorating in Benghazi and they pleaded for additional protection. The Libyan government, he wrote on Sept. 11, was “too weak to keep the country secured.” Stevens’ alarms went ignored.

The Benghazi consulate was actually attacked a couple of times before the Sept. 11 attack. Security was not improved after the first two attacks.

More:

After Stevens’s brutal death that night, the CIA station chief in Libya reported to Washington within 24 hours that the attack was carried out by terrorists, not spontaneous protestors, according to U.S. officials who told the Associated Press.

That isn’t what the Obama administration spent five weeks telling the American people.

The White House attempted ferociously to convince U.S. voters that the lethal Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was nothing more than a spontaneous demonstration that got out of hand and as such, something the government could not control.

More details in this Wall Street Journal article, which discusses the conflicting timelines and the open questions.

It concludes with this:

In Tuesday night’s debate with Mitt Romney, President Obama claimed to have “told” the American people that Benghazi was a terror attack the very next day, Sept. 12, when speaking from the Rose Garden. The assertion was untrue, despite moderator Candy Crowley’s ruling to the contrary. The president had only spoken generally of terror attacks, and Benghazi would have been understood to fall under that umbrella only if it had been acknowledged as a terror attack.

On Sept. 12, that was not the administration’s line. Not until his afternoon appearance on “The View” on Sept. 25—the “two weeks” of delay that Mr. Romney alluded to in the debate—did the president offer Americans an explanation of Benghazi that made no reference to a protest over a video. The YouTube connection had figured prominently in his Benghazi pronouncements as late as Mr. Obama’s Sept. 20 appearance on Univision, and even in his address to the United Nations General Assembly on the morning of Sept. 25.

You can watch the video above, which features clips of Obama and his administration claiming that the the attack was caused by a protest over a Youtube video, despite the reports from the CIA and the State Department to the contrary. Perhaps Obama was not aware of the threat because he was not attending his Presidential Daily Briefings, but was instead out campaigning in Las Vegas?

It would be nice if Romney brought up questions about why America was involved in Egypt and Libya in tonight’s debate. I am more hawkish than most, and I would not have gone into Egypt and Libya at all. If we are going in anywhere, it should be Syria. Interfering in Egypt and Libya could only help our enemies in Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. I would also like to see Romney attack Obama about his decisions to increase foreign aid to countries run by people who support us, as well as his weak response to previous terrorist attacks. I would just like Obama to explain what his foreign policy is, and explain his plan for dealing with Iran and China, in particular.

Unfortunately, it looks as though we will have an even more biased moderator than Martha Raddatz and Candy Crowley put together.

Here are the details of the debate tonight:

Third presidential candidates’ debate between Obama, Romney

  • Topic: Foreign policy
  • Date: Monday, Oct. 22
  • Time: 9 – 10:30 p.m. EDT
  • Location: Lynn University, Boca Raton, Fla.
  • Moderator: Bob Schieffer, chief Washington correspondent, CBS News, and moderator, “Face the Nation”
  • Format: “The format for the debate will be identical to the first presidential debate and will focus on foreign policy.”

Be sure and tune in, or watch it via streaming at Fox News Live.

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