Wednesday, October 03, 2012

Fantasy Response to Romney on the Embassy Attacks

So here's what I'd like to see Obama say to Romney if/when he starts pushing crackpot GOP talking points on the embassy attack:

Here's the thing, Mitt. The United States of America is the largest and most complicated undertaking in human history. Even if it weren't the most important and influential nation in the world, and its sole remaining superpower, it would still be mind-numbingly large and complex. And the President has the job of trying to make sure that this enormous, incredibly complex organization, which is faced with myriad challenges every day, stays basically between the ditches. He is bombarded every day with probabilities and hypotheses and guesses about hundreds of things, and all of them are important. Now, you're probably just pushing this criticism to score political points, and you probably don't really believe it, and that's ok I guess. At least I understand that sort of thing, even if I wish our politics were above that. But if you really, honestly believe that the fact that we were not able to instantaneously know every fact about a surprise attack half way across the world is an indicator of fecklessness, or of some kind of imagined cover-up...well, in my opinion, you're simply not ready for this job. It took us months to arrive at fairly solid conclusions about who was behind 9/11, and Republicans didn't bat an eye about that. We figured out who was behind the embassy attacks fairly quickly, and you believe--or are pretending to believe--that this is an outrage, inexplicable. If you really do believe that, let me tell you in no uncertain terms: this job is not for you. It's way more complex, and fraught with about an order of magnitude more uncertainty than you seem comfortable with.

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