Embassy Attacks Expose Depravity on the Right

The support that some conservatives in politics and the press showed for Mitt Romney’s unsubstantiated criticisms of President Obama amid this week’s embassy attacks confirms that those camps will exploit any opportunity — no matter how dangerous to Americans and others — for personal gain, writes journalist Michael Tracey.

Philip A. Klein, a senior writer for the Washington Examiner, and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus both came to the defense of Romney, abetting the candidate’s claim that Obama supports the ambitions of jihadists abroad over the well-being of Americans at home. This same flimsy thesis is being advanced without shame in theaters across the country by author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza (also known as “Distort the Newsa”) in his summer propaganda film “2016: Obama’s America.”

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

Michael Tracey:

Philip A. Klein, Senior Editorial Writer for the Washington Examiner and reliable Romney/Ryan booster, tweeted Wednesday morning in feigned dismay: “Amazing that the media is gonna turn a story about Obama’s disastrous [Foreign Policy] into a story about whether Romney is allowed to criticize him.” Behold the mindset of the stalwart Movement Conservative: Mitt Romney — in utter defiance of the facts at hand — had just explicitly undermined US interests abroad for personal gain by transmogrifying the murder of our diplomats into a crude political wedge. It would be one thing if this transmogrification was grounded in some semblance of empirical reality. Not the case. Most despicably, Romney had the gall to declare — just as GOP Chairman Reince Preibus did the previous night – that Obama “sympathizes” with the attackers in Egypt. By doing so, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee echoed a theme from Dinesh D’Souza’s dangerously unhinged “2016: Obama’s America” conspiracy propaganda film, which I saw over the weekend; at one point, D’Souza ominously asks viewers if they have noticed that Obama “seems weirdly sympathetic to Jihadis captured in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

… By Philip A. Klein’s lights, the real wrong was perpetrated not by Romney or even Preibus, but the “Evil Liberal Media” (of course!) who are apparently so desperate to reelect the President that they have consciously coordinated with one another to divert attention away from Obama’s foreign policy failures — primarily related to Israel (of course!) — and to Romney’s completely innocuous comments.

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