New York Times' Tom Friedman Contends Benghazi Controversy 'Utterly Contrived'
New York Times foreign affairs columnist Tom Friedman, who three weeks ago derided Mitt Romney for how he “acts...as if he learned his foreign policy at the International House of Pancakes,” on Sunday’s Meet the Press dismissed concerns over how the Obama administration handled Benghazi before and after the attacks. “To me,” he declared, “this is an utterly contrived story in the sense that ‘this is the end of,’ you know, ‘Obama’s foreign policy.’”
Friedman maintained during the panel on the October 21 Meet the Press:
It’s obviously been totally politicized at this point. I lived in a civil war in Beirut for four years, these are incredibly messy situations. People don’t show up with uniforms....You can have a flash mob turned into a planned thing. You can have planned people inside of a flash mob. To me, this is an utterly contrived story in the sense that, “this is the end of,” you know, “Obama’s foreign policy.”
Later, when panelists were asked to elucidate the question they would pose at Monday night’s third presidential debate, Friedman lived up to type, repeating his mantra about the wonders of a carbon tax:
Would you support a carbon tax that will help us be less dependent on foreign oil, strengthen innovation at home and combat climate change and pay down the deficit?
It’s a miracle tax: It solves everything!
(This post is an edited version of one that http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-baker/2012/10/21/friedman-contends-be... ">first appeared on NewsBusters.)
