Thursday, June 30, 2016
Scotty Moore, Hard-Driving Guitarist Who Backed Elvis Presley, Dies at 84
Guitarist Scotty Moore, left, helped define Elvis Presley's early sound. Moore died June 28.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Scotty Moore, a guitarist whose terse, bluesy licks on Elvis Presley’s early hits virtually created the rockabilly guitar style and established the guitar as a lead instrument in rock ’n’ roll, died on Tuesday at his home outside Nashville. He was 84.
His death was confirmed by James L. Dickerson, Mr. Moore’s biographer and friend.
In 1954, Mr. Moore was performing with a country group, Doug Poindexter and the Starlite Wranglers, and recording at Sun Records in Memphis when Sam Phillips, the label’s owner, asked him to audition a young singer his secretary kept mentioning.
On July 4, Presley showed up at Mr. Moore’s house. Bill Black, the bass player for the Starlite Wranglers, arrived soon after, and the three men began running through a random selection of songs. Mr. Moore was not overly impressed but told Phillips that the young fellow had a nice voice and might be worth a try.
The next evening, at the Sun studio, the trio recorded an up-tempo version of “That’s All Right,” a blues song by Arthur Crudup, known as Big Boy, which Sun released with a rockabilly version of “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on the flip side.
The record caught fire locally, and Presley was on his way, electrifying audiences with a new sound defined in large part by Mr. Moore, whose slashing chords, inserted like musical punctuation, and hard-driving solos inspired future rock guitarists around the world, including Keith Richards, George Harrison, Jeff Beck, Mark Knopfler and Chris Isaak.
“All I wanted to do in the world was to be able to play and sound like that,” Mr. Richards told Mr. Dickerson, who helped Mr. Moore write the 1997 memoir “That’s Alright, Elvis.” He added: “Everyone else wanted to be Elvis. I wanted to be Scotty.”
Mr. Moore and Mr. Black, joined by the drummer D. J. Fontana in 1955, recorded more than 300 songs with Presley for Sun and RCA, including “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog.” Billed as the Blue Moon Boys, they also backed Presley on tour and appeared in several of his films.
“Moore’s concise, aggressive runs mixed country picking and blues phrasing into a new instrumental language,” Rolling Stone wrote in 2011, ranking Mr. Moore No. 29 on its list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time. “The playing was so forceful that it’s easy to forget there was no drummer.
“If Moore had done nothing but the 18 Sun recordings — including ‘Mystery Train’ and ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’ — his place in history would be assured. But he continued to play with Elvis, contributing the scorching solos to ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and ‘Hound Dog.’”
Scotty Moore at the Ponderosa Stomp music festival in New Orleans in 2003. Judi Bottoni / AP
Winfield Scott Moore III was born on Dec. 27, 1931, on a farm near Gadsden, Tenn. He started playing the guitar at 8, and over the years he developed a style that incorporated country, blues and jazz. Mr. Moore was particularly fond of the jazz guitarists Tal Farlow and George Barnes.
"All I can tell you is I just stole from every guitar player I heard over the years,” he told the makers of the television documentary “Elvis Presley” in 2001. “Put it in my databank. And when I played, that’s just what come out."
At 16, he enlisted in the Navy, lying about his age, and served in the Pacific. After leaving the service, he went to work as a hatter at his brother’s dry-cleaning business and organized the Starlite Wranglers, who recorded one of his songs at Sun, “My Kind of Carryin’ On,” when he and Presley crossed paths.
Presley developed a strong musical rapport with his three sidemen and was personally close to Mr. Moore, who played the role of a protective older brother. “I tried to play around the singer,” Mr. Moore told Mr. Dickerson. “If Elvis was singing a song a certain way, there was no point in me trying to top him on what he just did. The idea was to play something that went the other way — a counterpoint.”
When Presley went into the Army in 1958, Mr. Moore became a partner in Fernwood Records, which released a Top 10 hit in 1959, Thomas Wayne’s teenage tear-jerker “Tragedy.”
For a time, he supervised operations at Phillips’s studios in Memphis and Nashville, but he was fired by Phillips in 1964 after he recorded “The Guitar That Changed the World,” an album on the Epic label made up of instrumental versions of Presley hits. He later had a career as a freelance studio engineer, working with Dolly Parton, Tracy Nelson, Ringo Starr and other artists.
Like his fellow sidemen, Mr. Moore, who served as Presley’s manager until 1955, never enjoyed the financial rewards of the Presley phenomenon. The Blue Moon Boys were paid a weekly salary of $200 when they toured, $100 a week when they were idle.
All told, Mr. Moore earned a little over $30,000 from his partnership with Presley, which came to an end after the 1968 special on NBC that reintroduced Presley to a new generation of listeners and revived his career.
Mr. Moore, left out of the equation when Presley embarked on the Las Vegas phase of his career, put away his guitar and barely touched it for nearly 25 years. In the early 1990s, after a tape-recording business he established in 1976 went bankrupt, he began recording and touring again, initially with Carl Perkins and later with performers who had been influenced by his playing.
Mr. Moore, who lived in Nashville, was married and divorced three times. He is survived by a son, Donald; four daughters, Linda, Andrea, Vikki Hein and Tasha; and several grandchildren. “Scotty and Elvis: Aboard the Mystery Train,” a revised and updated version of his 1997 memoir, was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2013.
Throughout his life, Mr. Moore gave a modest account of the momentous Sun sessions with Presley. “We didn’t know we were trying to create something new,” he told The New York Times in 1997. “We were trying to do something with a little different angle from what was on the market.”
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
RALPH STANLEY’S INIMITABLE VOICE
By David Cantwell
,Ralph Stanley in 1998 (Jim McGuire)
The bluegrass musician Ralph Stanley, who died Thursday evening, at the age of eighty-nine, leaves behind an enormously influential—and just plain enormous—body of work. As one half of the Stanley Brothers, a band on the short list of bluegrass originators, he recorded more than three hundred songs over two decades, ending in 1966. In the fifty years after that, working as a solo act in a style he was careful to identify not as bluegrass but as the old-time music that folks today call bluegrass, he recorded about a thousand more songs, spread across some seventy-five albums. That’s all good news.
The bad news is that, when it comes to Ralph Stanley’s voice, there has only ever been the one, and there will be no replacements. Stanley’s voice has been called “a force of nature,” “otherworldly,” “elemental,” “eerie.” Try to describe it and you inevitably tumble into a deep mountain mine of contradictory clichés. Trying to capture its singular tone in a fresh way risks foolishness. (“Like a woodwind crossed with a coonhound, turned up to eleven” is a note I just jotted down, before scratching it out.)
His voice sounded so vital and powerful, and yet at the same time so frail and so very, very old. Stanley recalled more than once that, as a child, he was known in his Primitive Baptist Church community as “the boy with the hundred-year-old voice.” There is a danger, though, in focussing on the strangeness of Stanley’s voice. As with his rendition of “O Death,” the folk song he sang a cappella for the Coen brothers’ 2000 film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” the supposed weirdness of a Stanley vocal performance is easily mistaken for the essence of his art. That something as universal as a man praying for safe passage to another year was deemed exotic and haunting by contemporary audiences, rather than as ordinary and human, says more about us, I think, than it does about Ralph Stanley.
Stanley was born in 1927 in the Clinch Mountains of Dickenson County, Virginia. In his as-told-to autobiography, “Man of Constant Sorrow,” named for the song he continued to consider his signature number even after “O Death” earned him a Grammy, Stanley presents himself as “a backwards kid who could scarcely hand over a howdy,” who was asthmatic and worried about everything—especially the prospect of a life spent working in the coal mines that dominated the region. He learned to sing at church, and his mother taught him how to play the banjo, clawhammer-style.
Music provided Stanley an alternative to working at a sawmill, like his father, or in the mines, as his stepbrothers did. For Ralph and his brother Carter, a year and a half older and gregarious and jocular where Ralph was anxious and tight-lipped, music wasn’t a path out of the hills; it was a safer and less soul-robbing way of staying put in the place they loved. In honor of that place, Ralph and Carter named their band the Clinch Mountain Boys.
They began their career in 1946, not long after Ralph returned home from serving in occupied Germany. One of Carter’s early songs, “The Little Glass of Wine,” popular on the radio program “Farm and Fun Time,” helped the brothers get signed to the tiny Rich-R-Tone label, in 1947. “Glass of Wine” was a poisoned murder ballad performed, like their handful of other early tracks, in the old-time string-band style. The following year they recorded “Molly and Tenbrooks,” a Bill Monroe composition that the brothers played, note for note, in the new Bill Monroe style, which, in a few years, people would start calling bluegrass. Ralph plucked his banjo not in the two-finger style he’d grown up with but in the thrilling three-finger fashion of Monroe’s star sideman, Earl Scruggs; the Clinch Mountain Boys’ Pee Wee Lambert sang lead in precise mimicry of Monroe’s piercing falsetto; and the rhythm swung hard and scooted with driving bluegrass propulsion.
Bluegrass is modern music: rhythm-centric, improvisational, scarcely older than rock and roll. It wasn’t invented until Monroe added the banjoist Scruggs and the guitarist and lead singer Lester Flatt to his band, in the late nineteen-forties. Monroe was not pleased with the Stanleys’ mimicry. When his own label, Columbia Records, signed the Stanley Brothers, in 1950, Monroe promptly left for Decca Records in a huff. But, in a real sense, the Stanleys are the reason that Monroe is remembered today as the father of bluegrass music. Monroe, with key assists from Flatt and Scruggs, invented an exciting sound. As the first to adopt that sound, Ralph and Carter Stanley helped to invent a genre.
Ralph and Carter Stanley began as copycats, but they rapidly became masters of the new sound. Carter Stanley’s songs of earthly separation, such as “The White Dove” and “The Fields Have Turned Brown,” and randy romancers, such as “How Mountain Girls Can Love,” were the equals of Monroe’s most sublime work. But it was Ralph Stanley, singing harmony with his brother or taking a lead, who truly set them apart. Ralph’s phrasing and attack on a lyric, chipping a line off short or stretching and worrying it to death and back, marked him as a Monroe disciple. The unmistakable tone and texture of Ralph’s high tenor—high and devastatingly lonesome, layered with all manner of meaning—were his alone.
To my ears, the finest music the Stanleys ever recorded was the work they cut between 1958 and 1966, for the Starday and King labels. Improved recording technology makes these sides pop more like a live performance, especially Ralph’s banjo and voice. The addition of hot acoustic-guitar picking was a Stanley innovation that is now the bluegrass standard. The period also included the brothers’ only real radio hit, an updating of “The Arkansas Traveler” called “How Far to Little Rock,” which incorporated the vaudevillian humor that was a part of their live sets. Ralph: “Hello, stranger . . . why don’t you cover your house?” Carter: “Well, when it’s raining I can’t, buddy. And when the sun’s a-shinin’ it don’t leak!”
It’s in these years that all those clichés—“force of nature,” “otherworldly”—really attached themselves to Stanley’s voice. On “Rank Stranger,” the Albert Brumley-penned gospel standard that is among the Stanleys’ most beloved performances, that voice blasts like a siren of alienated misery and end-times devastation. He sings but a single line by himself—“Everybody I met seemed to be a rank stranger”—but that utterance, just twice repeated, so dominates the record that it’s easy to forget that “Rank Stranger” is formally a Carter lead, with trio chorus.
Carter Stanley died fifty years ago this December, at forty-one, victim to liver disease and alcohol abuse. Bill Monroe, his feud with the brothers long since laid to rest, performed “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” a cappella, at Carter’s funeral. The inscription that Ralph Stanley chose for his brother’s tombstone read, “Farewell, Carter, for a Little While.”
This past half century, a frequent encore of Ralph Stanley’s live appearances was “The Hills of Home,” a recitation in which Ralph pledged continued devotion to his brother, to their music and their audience. Ralph had quickly determined to carry on after Carter’s death, retaining the band, the name, and the sound of the Clinch Mountain Boys. But he also made key changes, which have proved profoundly influential in their own right. He began to add more old-time ballads to his sets and his albums. He continued to emphasize gospel material as well, but he began performing it more often in the a-cappella fashion of the Primitive Baptist Church.
The backwards boy who couldn’t hand over so much as a howdy became a confident front man and a bandleader’s bandleader. The Clinch Mountain Boys launched Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley to country stardom and made bluegrass legends of post-Carter lead singers Larry Sparks and Charlie Sizemore. The recording début of another recently deceased bluegrass singer, James King, was on a 1986 album called “Stanley Brothers Classics with Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys and Introducing James King.” That’s a mouthful, but it’s also a pretty concise statement of what Stanley saw as his mission all through his solo years: to continue the pioneering bluegrass sound of the Stanley Brothers, to preserve a related but distinct old-time legacy for himself, and to keep an ear out for talent to carry on the work when he was gone.
He kept on recording, and was particularly prized for star-studded duet albums, such as “Saturday Night, Sunday Morning,” in 1993; “Clinch Mountain Country,” five years later; and “Clinch Mountain Sweethearts”—with Iris DeMent, Lucinda Williams, and Dolly Parton, among others—six years after that. He kept up a furious touring schedule, some two hundred dates a year well into his eighties. New fans, who first encountered him via “O Death” or on the subsequent “Down from the Mountain” tour, could be surprised to discover, at a county fair or classic-bluegrass festival—like the one held each June in Bean Blossom, Indiana—that Stanley was not moralistic or humorless. The Stanley standard “Mountain Dew,” a regular of Clinch Mountain Boys set lists, did not proselytize for sobriety or warn of the dangers of drink. “Love Me Darling Just Tonight” was not about hand-holding. Onstage, Dr. Ralph, as he called himself after being awarded an honorary degree from Tennessee’s Lincoln Memorial University, could be chatty and corny and even a little blue: “Giving applause to a bluegrass musician is like making love to an old maid,” he liked to tell audiences. “You just can’t hardly overdo it.”
His voice began to weaken as he aged, but somehow this only seemed to treble its power. “I mourn out my songs more than I did as a young man,” he explained in “Man of Constant Sorrow.” “My voice ain’t what it used to be. My tenor has thinned out some. It’s got more cracks in it and it can get mighty rough around the edges and I can’t hit all the high notes anymore. But . . . I know how to use it better. I can put more feeling in now. . . . I can worry those lines like I never could before.”
Like no one ever could before, he might have said. And, now, like no one ever will.
David Cantwell is the author of “Merle Haggard: The Running Kind” and the co-author of “Heartaches by the Number.”
'Let's move on': Hillary's blithe response after devastating Congress report reveals she lied and lied again about what caused US Ambassador to die in Bengazi
By David Martosko, US Political Editor and Francesca Chambers, White House Correspondent For Dailymail.com
28 June 2016
SOMBER: Obama and Clinton spoke at the 'transfer of remains' ceremony when the victims' bodies were returned to the U.S., as their administration worked behind the scenes to spin the news
Hillary Clinton dismissed a Republican broadside on her and President Obama over the Benghazi attacks today saying: 'Move on.'
The Republican members of the House Benghazi committee issued their 800 page report with excoriating words for her and the president, accusing her of 'shameful' conduct over her secret email account, and the White House of lying about what caused the attacks.
Her 'homebrew' server was only revealed because of the investigation into the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
The blistering 800-page report excoriates the Obama administration, finding that it lied about what caused the attacks which claimed the lives.
It says what went wrong may never be fully known because of a 'shameful' decision by Hillary Clinton not to turn over the contents of her secret 'homebrew' server, whose existence only came to light because of the investigation.
But her response was curt. 'I think it is pretty clear it is time to move on,' she said.
Republicans on the House Benghazi Committee claimed Tuesday that the Obama White House and Hillary Clinton lied repeatedly to the American people about the nature of and reasons for the 2012 terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya, even as they privately acknowledged what caused them.
The report offers no explanation for why it took 18 hours for military assets to reach the Libyan city - many hours after the president ordered every possible measure to be taken, and the then defense secretary testified that he ordered deployment.
A scathing report provides new ammunition against Clinton, then the secretary of state, and turn the assault on an under-protected U.S. diplomatic compound and a nearby CIA facility into the election-year issue it was always destined to be.
Republicans' central argument is that the Obama White House chose to deceive Americans rather than risk the public relations nightmare of admitting terrorists had struck Americans overseas, less than two months before Obama's re-election day.
'They misled the American people and said, "We can't tell the truth. We can't talk about how bad the security situation was.
'We can't talk about the fact that, that this was a terrorist attack. we have to mislead the American people because we are just eight weeks before an election",' Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, one of the committee's Republican members, claimed Monday morning on CNN.
The panel's chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, and other Republicans also accuse the Obama administration of stonewalling important documents and witnesses.
Democrats say the panel's main goal is to undermine Clinton's presidential hopes.
The former secretary of state said Tuesday in Denver, where she held a campaign event, that she would 'leave it to others to characterize this report but I think it is pretty clear it is time to move on.'
'I have said from the very beginning nothing is more important than the security of our diplomats and our development officials to go into dangerous places around the world pursuing American values, interests and our security,' she said.'
'While this unfortunately took on a partisan tinge, I want us to stay focused on what I've always wanted us to stay focused on and that is the important work of diplomacy and development,' she added.
'We cannot withdraw or retreat from the world. America needs a presence for a lot of reasons,' Clinton continued.
'And the best way to honor the commitment and sacrifice of those we lost is to redouble our efforts to provide the resources and support that our diplomats and our development experts deserve.'
Mystery of the missing military
The report provides an extraordinarily detailed insight into the military assets which could have been sent to try to save American lives.
But it does not find a reason why it took 18 hours for help to arrive - by which time the ambassador had been rescued by locals, ironically former members of the Gadaffi regime which the U.S. had helped to overthrow.
It says that AFRICOM - the Pentagon's African command division, which is based in Germany - could have made use of Marine FAST (Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team) platoons, based in Spain, F-16s, based in Aviano, in northern Italy, a special diplomatic assistance team known as CIF (Commander's In-extremis Force), based in Germany but then training nearer Libya, in Croatia, and US-based special operations forces .
But in a painstaking timelines it discloses how it took 13 hours after the attack for the first force to be deployed.
The attack started at 9.42pm local time - 3.42pm in Washington. It was brutal, and prolonged. Calls for assistance began immediately and the first notice of the attack was distributed in Washinton atr 4.05pm, with the White House situation room among those involved.
But it says, it took hours for the White House to convene a meeting to decide what to do - by which time it was 7.30pm in Washington.
'In the four hours since the initial attack on the Benghazi Mission compound, the Diplomatic Security Agents in Benghazi, with help from the team from the Annex, survived the initial onslaught, located the remains of their fallen colleague Smith, franticly searched for Stevens, escaped under heavy gunfire from the Mission compound to the Annex, avoided an ambush along the route, and arrived at the Annex only to withstand and repel additional attacks there,' the report says.
'By stark contrast, in those same four hours, principals in Washington had merely managed to identify forces that could potentially deploy to Libya and convened a meeting to discuss those forces.'
The meeting include Hillary Clinton's State Department chief of staff Cheryl Mills. It should have included the then vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral James 'Sandy' Winnefeld, but he said he could not attend because there was an official dinner at his residence.
Leon Panetta, the defense secretary, had ordered deployment two hours after the attack began, but the people taking part in the White House meeting 'felt the need to "work through" the assets'.
What happened next, the report, says, depends on whether you believe Panetta - who was adamant he had ordered deployment - or a series of other witness and minutes, who spoke about '"getting forces ready to deploy" in a future tense'.
'Another summary described the deployment of assets in response to Benghazi as "likely" and "possibly" that evening,' the report says.
One senior military official testified that forces had not been ordered to deploy but to prepare to deploy.
The report calls the cause of the failure to get properly-equipped forces to Benghazi in time a 'lingering question' and says the failure '—at best illustrates a rusty bureaucratic process not in keeping with the gravity and urgency of the events happening on the ground'.
White House chose to focus on the YouTube video
Almost immediately, the White House went into spin mode, publicly blaming the carnage on local protests over an anti-Islam YouTube video that was made in America.
That turned out not to be the case, and Monday's report includes emails and testimony showing the administration knew it at the time.
Clinton said publicly as her Benghazi facilities were still smoldering that 'some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet.'
But in a phone call with Libyan president Mohammed al Magariaf, Clinton correctly fingered Ansar al Sharia, al Qaeda’s affiliate on the Arabian Peninsula, as the cause.
'[O]ur diplomatic mission was attacked[.] . . . [T]here is a gun battle ongoing, which I understand Ansar as-Sharia [sic] is claiming responsibility for,' a note-taker recorded Clinton telling al Magariaf.
And she told Egypt’s prime minister a day later: 'We know that the attacks in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack – not a protest.'
'None of the information coming directly from the agents on the ground in Benghazi during the attacks mentioned anything about a video or a protest. The firsthand accounts made their way to the office of the Secretary through multiple channels quickly,' the Benghazi committee's majority report concludes.
In one example, a senior watch officer serving at the diplomatic security command of the State Department called the 2012 devastation 'a full on attack against our compound.'
A colleague asked him if saw or heard any protests before the shooting and bombing began, he replied: 'zip, nothing, nada.'
Families of the fallen accuse Hillary of lying to them
Clinton has come under fire from family members of the U.S. personnel killed in Benghazi, who say she personally told them the government would seek justice against the video's creator.
Democrats released a report Monday stating that Clinton never personally denied any requests from diplomats for additional security at the U.S. outpost in Benghazi.
They said after a two-year investigation that the military could not have done anything differently that night to save the lives of four Americans killed in Libya.
But the report itself argues that delays in the Obama administration's response to the deadly attacks were caused by slow decision-making and political considerations.
White House was consumed with politics, not rescue
During a senior level meeting convened at the White House just three hours into the attack – attended by senior deputies to cabinet secretaries, including Clinton's – conversations focused on how to frame the attack as a protest gone bad, not on how to ensure the safe extraction of Stevens.
'Nothing was sent to Benghazi, and nothing was en route to Libya at the time the last two Americans were killed almost 8 hours after the attacks began,' the report concludes.
'With Ambassador Stevens missing, the White House convened a roughly two-hour meeting at 7:30 PM, which resulted in action items focused on a YouTube video,' committee members wrote.
Other 'action items' contained 'the phrases "[i]f any deployment is made," and "Libya must agree to any deployment," and "[w]ill not deploy until order comes to go to either Tripoli or Benghazi".'
The administration's spokespersons later insisted that deploying military rapid-reaction forces based in Italy and elsewhere into the Libyan port city would have been a waste of time given the short duration of the attacks.
But some witnesses told the congressional committee that there was no way to know at the outset how many hours it might have gone on.
White House responds
White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters on Tuesday that he still believes Republicans on the Benghazi committee saw damaging Clinton's poll numbers as their mail objective.
'That was their goal. It remains to [be] seen if that's what they accomplished,’ Earnest said.
He disputed the finding that the military was slow to respond, saying that 'this has been thoroughly debunked by previous Republican-led investigations in the Congress.'
'I'm not going to get into the back and forth because frankly Republicans have already done that. Republicans in the House Intelligence Committee have concluded that those charges are not true,’ he said.'
The congressional committees that have truly been committed to understanding the facts 'have concluded that it was a tragedy,' Earnest claimed.
'But they've also concluded that the variety of conspiracy theories that have been flowering on the Republican side of the aisle are politically motivated fantasies. And it's unfortunate that the death of four Americans would be subject to that kind of political fantasizing. But that is the state of the Republican Party these days.’
Earnest said it would be up to the Clinton campaign – not the Obama administration – to push back.
'I think Secretary Clinton is more than capable of making her own case about her judgement, her successful tenure as secretary of state and what that says about her presidential campaign,' he said. 'But ultimately that's the responsibility of her advisers.'
As for how it will affect her credibility with voters and her White House campaign he said, ‘I think voters will have to decide for themselves.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3663919/Hillary-Obama-administration-lied-Benghazi-video-story-turn-just-8-weeks-election-says-GOP-congressman-Republicans-release-scathing-report-2012-terror-attack.html#ixzz4CxyolmDH
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Benghazi lies were just standard procedure under Obama
June 28, 2016
Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The Benghazi report released Tuesday makes clear that one dreadful constant of President Obama’s foreign policy is simply this: Deflect. Muddy the picture. Question the motivation.
Blame the wrong culprit when naming the right culprit might interfere with your narrative, or if doing so might oblige you to act when you do not wish to act.
In an addendum to the report, Reps. Jim Jordan and Mike Pompeo detail the fact that the administration knew perfectly well in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi that it had been planned and directed by Islamist radicals as an evil commemoration of 9/11.
For example, at 11:23 p.m. on the night of the attack, Hillary Clinton e-mailed her daughter Chelsea to say, “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Quedalike [sic] group”.
The next morning, she said, “We are working to determine the precise motivations and methods of those who carried out this assault.”
Sound familiar? Of course it does. After the attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando by home-grown terrorists, administration officials made a point of refusing to name the enemy publicly — in this case, ISIS, which had not yet come into existence at the time of Benghazi.
On the day following Orlando, the president himself said we had yet to discern “the precise motivations of the killer,” even though everyone knew by that point he had called 911 to swear his allegiance to ISIS while he was killing people.
Two weeks after the Orlando shooting — two weeks — Attorney General Loretta Lynch said, “I cannot tell you definitively that we will ever narrow it down to one motivation. We will look at all motivations.”
With Benghazi, as with Orlando, the reason for these evasions is to make mystery and ambiguity a part of the narrative in order to buy the White House and the administration time and space — the time to control the story and the space to impress upon its supporters the impracticality and uselessness of responding to these acts of war.
That’s why the first administration statement on the Benghazi attacks, made by Hillary Clinton, specifically made reference to the anti-Islamic video “Innocence of Muslims,” which had just created an international scandal — but did not make reference to the Islamic terrorists who perpetrated it. It came only an hour before Hillary e-mailed Chelsea and assigned blame to al Qaeda elements.
At this point, a familiar face pops up in Section 2 of the Benghazi report, which lays out the administration’s actions in the wake of the attack.
Yes, it’s none other than our buddy Ben Rhodes, the man who bragged to The New York Times Magazine about manipulating the press to adopt the administration’s line on the Iran deal.
The report makes clear he was helping to design the administration’s response as he began the work of setting up the echo chamber in which the media would provide Obama exactly the time and space he wanted and needed.
Rhodes did something odd in his testimony before the Benghazi committee. He claimed that the sentence about the anti-Islam video in the “Statement on the Attack on Benghazi” wasn’t really about Benghazi but was about “the region.”
“It’s not intended to assign responsibility for what happened in Benghazi,” Rhodes testified. “It’s meant to describe the context of what happened, what’s happening in the region.” There had been protests in Cairo centering on the video that same day.
His questioner responds incredulously: “So everything in this document is about Libya and Benghazi except you’re saying this sentence doesn’t apply to Libya and Benghazi?”
Rhodes responds with gobbledygook about protecting Americans elsewhere. His strange claim here is telling, because it makes clear the administration seemed to want above all to mention the video in its first words on the attack to direct attention away from it or to include it in a larger list of troubles stemming from a reaction to “Innocence of Muslims.”
All these misdirections and prevarications have taken their toll.
An unambiguous response to a terrorist attack on an American facility in 2012 would have prevented the creation of the Benghazi committee in the first place.
Due to the Benghazi committee’s efforts to secure the facts of the case, the world came to learn about Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of public e-mail — an irresponsible and reckless act that more than anything else jeopardizes her presidential ambitions.
But when it comes to radical Islam and the Obama administration, the truth is always the first casualty. Hillary is hoping her presidential bid isn’t its last.
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