Down the rabbit hole again: now were seriously parsing the word "terror"
by digby
So the brilliant Darrell Issa went on Fox yesterday and charged president Obama with some kind of crime or malfeasance for using the words "act of terror" instead of "terrorist attack." Yes, they really are still hanging their hats on that nonsense.
But leave it to the "Fact Checker" to give this idiocy more oxygen:
During the campaign, the president could just get away with claiming he said “act of terror,” since he did use those words — though not in the way he often claimed. It seemed like a bit of after-the-fact spin, but those were his actual words — to the surprise of Mitt Romney in the debate.
But the president’s claim that he said “act of terrorism” is taking revisionist history too far, given that he repeatedly refused to commit to that phrase when asked directly by reporters in the weeks after the attack. He appears to have gone out of his way to avoid saying it was a terrorist attack, so he has little standing to make that claim now.
Indeed, the initial unedited talking points did not call it an act of terrorism. Instead of pretending the right words were uttered, it would be far better to acknowledge that he was echoing what the intelligence community believed at the time--and that the administration’s phrasing could have been clearer and more forthright from the start.
Oh for crying out loud. This is navel gazing at its worst. The reason he said "act of terror" instead of "terrorist act" is that he didn't know what had happened yet! Clearly, killing a bunch of people is an "act of terror" no matter what the motivation while while an "act of terrorism" is, by definition, a politically motivated killing. I have no idea if the president would have used that phrase if he'd known who the perpetrators were in the early days of the event, but I do know that the entire intelligence community was still sorting out what happened and that it wouldn't have made one bit of difference to the president's political campaign if he'd said "terrorist attack" or "act of terror" in those early days.
Nobody with any sense gives a damn about that distinction. He was being careful. Normal people consider that to be a good thing. Only the idiot wingnuts want the president howling about revenge and screaming at the top of his lungs that he's "gonna get 'em dead or alive" before he even knows what happened.
This sort of "fact-checking" myopia is how stupid scandals with no basis get traction. There is no context or perspective in this silly item and so it ends up making it look as though the administration was trying to cover up something even though all the evidence suggest otherwise. The only way it makes sense is if the press decides that the Obama administration really, truly decided instantly that this attack was going to ruin their record as terrorist fighters so they had to cover it up or lose the election. If anyone really believed that they are idiots. No more than four people in this country even knew where Benghazi was much less thought that an attack against an embassy in the middle of a war zone constituted some huge, disqualifying defeat in the Great GWOT. I'm pretty sure the administration was well aware of that. If there's one thing they're good at, it's campaigning.
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