Political ploy No. 42

The president takes offense

“The suggestion that anybody in my team would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, Governor, is offensive. That’s not what we do.”

— Barack Obama, debating Mitt Romney.

All the puzzle pieces to the story will come together someday, and we’ll all have a fuller picture of what happened to our men at Benghazi. In the meantime, it has all the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster. It’ll star a president and commander-in-chief who’s in-touch and in-control 24/7. As Joe Biden once said of his running mate, “the guy’s got a spine of steel.”

But that was after the Navy SEALs tracked down Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Unfortunately, the end of the story at Benghazi can’t be changed, not even in a docudrama. Which may be why you needn’t look for it at your neighborhood theater any time soon. This script is starting to look more like Blackhawk Down; the bad guys won.

So when questions are raised about the administration’s conduct of this operation, the president pulls out allpurpose Standard Political Ploy No. 42—he takes offense. It’s the first, and maybe last, response of a politician who can’t come up with any other. It beats having to go into any of the bothersome details. It changes the whole focus of the discussion to how shocked—shocked!—he is that anyone would dare raise a question about his or his team’s judgment and competence in a crisis. Why go into all that when he need only express outrage? Instead of providing clear answers, just get huffy. It’s so much simpler.

It all fits perfectly into an essential theme of this politically correct age: It’s not the facts but how we feel about them that counts.