President Obama treats the truth the way Bill Clinton treated blue dresses on interns. In our raucous political system, it’s natural for a president’s policies to insult our beliefs. But only the most arrogant president insults our intelligence on a near-daily basis.
This how-dare-you-criticize-me? president expects us to believe:
* That intelligence professionals watching the Benghazi attack in real time and reading flash messages from the scene weren’t sure an obvious terrorist attack was a terrorist attack. A Cub Scout watching that strike go down would have recognized a planned terror operation.
* That, even now, the attack somehow, magically, might have been partly about that discredited video, after all, since the first phase was sloppier than the crisper second phase. Jeez. It’s obvious the terrorists did what any seasoned commander would do: Used the B-team as bait at the consulate, reserving the A-team to spring the trap on the CIA facility.
* That it was purely coincidental the attack occurred on the 11th anniversary of 9/11.
* That doctoring the early CIA analysis to eliminate any mention of terrorism was purely a bureaucratic quirk (having coped with the interagency process, I assure you it would be easy to identify who neutered the analysis — if the White House wanted to).
* That Obama pal and UN Ambassador Susan Rice is so naïve that, after reading the classified analysis blaming a terrorist operation, she found the unclassified, castrated analysis more convincing than common sense.
* That Rice was the logical choice to dispatch to five Sunday talk shows to blame the video for the violence, even though our president himself stated in last week’s press conference that Rice had nothing to do with Benghazi. (We were also treated to another of Obama’s now-routine how-dare-you-question-me hissy fits as he defended Rice with far greater vigor than he defended our team in Benghazi.)
* That it was another bureaucratic coincidence that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper wasn’t told about CIA chief David Petraeus’s new exercise routine until late on Election Day — even though Clapper was the one person in the entire government with an obvious need to know.
* That despite the general’s Friday testimony under oath on the Hill that the CIA’s analysis identified the Benghazi attack as an act of terror involving al Qaeda affiliates from the start, the available evidence somehow supported the video-did-it narrative, after all.
* That the president personally did all he could to help our personnel in Benghazi, even though the White House can offer no evidence of it.
* That there was no reason to be concerned about security in Benghazi, even though incidents and requests for better protection had stacked up for months.
* That four Americans dead as a result of a planned act of terror on another Sept. 11, just isn’t that big a deal and we need to move on.
Does the president really believe we’re all that stupid?
Yes. And he’s got his re-election to prove it, the establishment media to support it, and his White House goodfellas to enforce it. (National Security Adviser Tom Donilon and counterterrorism chief John Brennan make Nixon’s Haldeman and Ehrlichman seem like Fred and Ethel Mertz.)
On Friday, Gen. Petraeus’ testimony exploded the White House lie about what it knew and when. The media’s focus? Petraeus’s camera-shy entrance to the building.
Meanwhile, “prestigious” media groupies who’ve tied their reputations to the general are campaigning to rehabilitate him by insisting that our “overreaction” just shows what rubes we are. But their “tolerance” only reveals how utterly they fail to understand military and intelligence-world culture: The outrage among veterans and our troops isn’t because Petraeus fell for a stalker dolled up like a chain-hotel hooker, but because of his lack of integrity and his hypocrisy.
He enforced draconian rules on subordinates. The anger isn’t about Petraeus’s bodily urges, but his self-righteous purges of those who didn’t measure up to his touted standards.
(May I suggest that the indisputably gifted Gen. Petraeus use his enforced — and doubtless brief — seclusion to study Britain’s Profumo scandal from the 1960s and the selflessness with which John Profumo served his countrymen after his fall? The general should also read Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure.”)
What can our elected representatives do to expose the administration’s lies? Insist on a rigorous investigation and don’t give up. A lesser scandal, Watergate, took many months to unravel.
Above all, put the players under oath whenever they testify: It worked with Petraeus, who suddenly remembered that the CIA hadn’t blamed the “Big Mo” video, after all.
And President Obama, renowned for his cool (when he’s not seething with phony indignation), needs to chill. Unlike Tricky Dick, he’s safe: He’ll never be impeached. Nobody wants Joe Biden to be president.
Ralph Peters is Fox News’ strategic analyst.