Tag Archives: Bob Schieffer

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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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On “Face the Nation”: Marco Rubio says the President has no plan

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Marco Rubio takes on Obama spokesman Bob Schieffer on CBS’ “Face the Nation”. (H/T Mariangela)

In this speech on the floor of the Senate, he lays the whole debt problem and the solutions.

I just wish that the voters would compare Obama’s class-warfare rhetoric and his performance on job create with Marco Rubio’s clear explanation of the incentives and motives of job creators. We don’t need redistribution of wealth, we need people to have jobs. When people have jobs, they feel comfortable to investing or spend money.

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Titanium spine: Michele Bachmann one point behind Romney in Iowa poll

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Presidential Candidate Michele Bachmann
Presidential Candidate Michele Bachmann

The Des Moines Register reports that Michele Bachmann trails Romney by one point in the latest poll from Iowa.

Excerpt:

Two-time candidate Mitt Romney and tea party upstart Michele Bachmann are neck and neck leading the pack, and retired pizza chief Herman Cain is in third place in a new Des Moines Register Iowa Poll of likely participants in the state’s Republican presidential caucuses.

The results are bad news for the earnest Tim Pawlenty, a former Minnesota governor who is in single digits despite a full-throttle campaign.

Romney, a former Massachusetts governor and business executive, claims 23 percent, and Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman and evangelical conservative, garners 22 percent. Neither has done heavy lifting in Iowa.

The rest of the Republican field is at least 12 points behind them.

Cain, a retired Georgia business executive, is the top choice for 10 percent of potential caucusgoers.

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose entire Iowa campaign team resigned in frustration two weeks ago over its perception that his efforts are half-hearted, is tied in fourth place at 7 percent with the libertarian-leaning Ron Paul, a longtime Texas congressman.

Pawlenty is at 6 percent; Rick Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, 4 percent; and Jon Huntsman, a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, 2 percent.

“The surprise here is how quickly Michele Bachmann is catching on,” said Jennifer Duffy, a political analyst with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report of Washington, D.C. “To me, she’s the one to watch, not Romney.”

The poll has a 4.9 point margin of error, so it’s not the greatest poll.

Titanium spine

Bachmann was also interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, where Wallace went out of his way to ask her the tough questions that she will be getting more of as a Republican female candidate. Bob Shieffer also interviewed her on CBS’ Face the Nation show on Sunday.

National Review reports:

 On the eve of her presidential announcement in Waterloo, Iowa, a confident Michele Bachmann made the case that she was a serious candidate, attacking President Obama’s record and parrying tough questions in interviews with CBS’s Bob Schieffer and Fox News’s Chris Wallace.

“Since the debate, people have paid attention and they recognize that I am very serious about what I want to do,” Bachmann said on Fox.

She didn’t shy away from outlining clear differences between herself and Mitt Romney, who is statistically tied with her for the lead among Iowa voters according to a Des Moines Register poll released yesterday.

“What people know about me is I do what I say and I say what I mean. I am a fighter for the cause … People recognize that I’m very sincere in what I say,” Bachmann told Wallace. She later criticized Romney for his “disappointing” decision to not sign the pro-life pledge by the Susan B. Anthony List.

“Mitt Romney has to say what he is, but I will say, if he is saying now that he is pro-life, this was a tremendous opportunity to demonstrate that by signing … the pledge,” Bachmann said.

On CBS, Bachmann hit Romney on his health-care program, calling individual mandates at both the state and federal level “unconstitutional,” and arguing that reliance on free market forces, rather than efforts by state or federal government, was how health-care costs should be brought down.

Asked by Wallace about New York’s legislature’s decision to legalize gay marriage, Bachmann said she acknowledged the state’s tenth amendment right to do so, but said she would continue to push for a federal marriage amendment that would outlaw same-sex marriage.  She said her position was “entirely consistent,” noting that the issue of gay marriage was likely to be dealt with at a federal level in either the courts or the legislature.

In response to Schieffer’s question about whether she believed homosexuality was a choice or not, Bachmann said she was running for president, not “to be anyone’s judge.”

She also defended herself against charges that she was a gaffe-prone politician who had made erroneous statements in the past. Wallace directly asked, “Are you a flake?” a term that Bachmann called “insulting,” noting her extensive career as a tax lawyer and politician. In response to Shieffer’s remarks about her history of “misleading” statements, Bachmann said, “I haven’t mislead people at all.”

“I think the question should be asked of President Obama,” she added, noting that he pushed for nearly $1 trillion dollar stimulus by saying it would prevent unemployment rates from going above 8 percent. “That is what’s serious. Did he mislead the American people? Not only did he mislead the American people, he caused our economy to go down to depths we haven’t seen,” Bachmann pointed out.

Bachmann, who has criticized Obamacare for taking $500 billion away from Medicare, told Wallace that she did not see Paul Ryan’s budget, a budget which Bachmann voted for and which would also cut Medicare, as impacting seniors the same way Obamacare would.

“Let’s be clear: the Ryan budget is really the 55 and under plan. People need to recognize no one under 55 will be touched,” she said, calling Ryan’s plan a “starting point” for a budget discussion.

“My commitment is to make sure government keeps its promises to senior citizens both on Medicare and on Social Security,” Bachmann said of the 55-year-old and older crowd, but noted that those younger would have to face “adjustments.”

She argued that if the nation was going to be serious about its fiscal situation, the debt ceiling could not be raised. Making clear that she was against defaulting, Bachmann said payments on the debt would have to be prioritized if a new, higher ceiling wasn’t authorized and that Congress would have to cut spending elsewhere. Speaking about how the number of federal limos had been increased by 73 percent in the past two years, Bachmann said it showed how Obama wasn’t “serious about cutting spending” now.

If she were president, matters would be different.

“I have a titanium spine to do what needs to be done to turn the economy around,” Bachmann said on Fox.

She will get the same treatment from the misogynists on the left. Can she take it? I think she can.

Learn more about Michele Bachmann

Speeches:

Reactions from her recent debate performance:

Profiles of Michele Bachmann:

Here is the latest comprehensive profile of Michele Bachmann from the Weekly Standard. (H/T Muddling Towards Maturity)