“Winter is coming, but these sweatshirts are perfect for fall.” It sounds like the perfect slogan for the winter front of a department store here in the northern reaches of Maine. Those of us who are beginning to enjoy the cool bite of fall in the air can fully comprehend the message in those words. What is incomprehensible is why the Obama campaign would tweet this campaign message minutes before receiving the bodies from the Libyan consulate attack. Yes, our President had your fall and winter apparel on his mind while the rest of us was recoiling in shock from the brutality of unspeakable monsters.
But it is easy, perhaps, to understand his lack of gravitas in this situation. Three days before the attacks, security officials from these middle-eastern countries warned our Nation that these attacks from terrorists were imminent. The President chose to skip every one of these security meetings in order to keep campaigning and no Marines were sent to protect the Libyan Embassy until after the carnage. Marines at the Cairo Embassy were stripped of live ammunition.
Now his response, in the aftermath, is to blame our freedom of speech. This has prompted the world at large to begin to now openly mock America’s foreign policy. Even liberal columnist, Kirsten Powers, has implored the President to “stop blaming the victims”. This, in light of the fact that the first response from this Administration was to blame a movie for the acts of vile hate, as if someone’s expressed opinion validates a response of murder and hate.
The President and his surrogates have also tried to portray this as an random, spontaneous act, believing that Americans would appreciate rape and pillage better if they felt the terrorists just stumbled into it, forced by the opinions of American filmmaker. Unfortunately, even this silly notion is not founded on any shred of reason or fact. The President of Libya has stated emphatically that this was a coordinated and previously planned attack by Al-Qaeda, meant to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11.
While the President has tried to heap blame on the freedoms and liberties we enjoy in this Nation, Governor Mitt Romney denounced the attacks and refused to apologize for American freedoms, imperfect as the expressions thereof may be. For his show of strength, the President and his media surrogates have vilified Mitt Romney. Imagine a leader doing something so heinous as decrying evil and defending the United States! It might even be thought of as Presidential, for shame!
Sarcasm aside, the Democrat Party has a virulent strain of the blame-anybody-else-but-me virus running through its very core of function. It runs from the White House all the way down to our local Senate Races here in Maine. In Senate District 27, Herb Clark has been trying to convince voters here in the Highlands that he was duped into sponsoring the bill that called for a feasibility study of the East-West corridor. That he was somehow forced to hop in front of the cameras when he desired the publicity at the bills signing. And now that he has jumped off the train, he calls his opponent Senator Thomas a “flip-flop” for calling for a slow down of the train so that all the information can be correctly and clearly disseminated to the people affected by the corridor. Mr. Clark prefers to apologize for the dispensation of truth and knowledge, something we in the Highlands hold in high regard. Truth and knowledge has the ring of freedom to it.
How are we in District 27 supposed to trust the Honorable Herbert Clark with the sacred duty of making decisions that effect our livelihoods if the good Representative can’t even trust his own judgment? People of Maine, we are a people who pride ourselves in our discernment and common sense. If Representative Clark can be so easily “misled”, so easily confused, and can so easily advocate the shut off of information, then we should be certain that he is a poor representation of the voters of District 27. We should never apologize for the Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press and the Freedom Of Information. The Democrats seem more concerned with placating maniacal monsters and hiding from truth than defending the very Freedoms that make this nation great.