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Senator Ayotte’s Hypocrisy on Benghazi and Syria

National Harbor–Sen. Kelly Ayotte, third amigo alongside the senate’s most notorious hawks Graham and McCain, just finished her CPAC speech this morning, in which she said this: In Syria, we sat on the sidelines while over 70,000 Syrians were slaughtered, ceding our policy to the vetoes of the Russians and the Chinese in the United Nations, to […]

National Harbor–Sen. Kelly Ayotte, third amigo alongside the senate’s most notorious hawks Graham and McCain, just finished her CPAC speech this morning, in which she said this:

In Syria, we sat on the sidelines while over 70,000 Syrians were slaughtered, ceding our policy to the vetoes of the Russians and the Chinese in the United Nations, to a bunch of United Nations bureaucrats. And in Afghanistan the president has undercut his commanders time and time again. In Libya the administration again led from behind and never took steps to secure Qaddafi’s weapons stash, and you know where those weapons are now? They’re in the hands of Islamic radicals in Mali, Egypt, and Syria, used by terrorists to harm us and our allies.

Anyone else catch that? While castigating the president for not intervening in Syria, Ayotte–who has called for arming the opposition–acknowledged that it is in part comprised of people the United States shouldn’t be associating with, let alone arming. It’s even more galling in light of the climax of her speech–a promise to get to the bottom of the Benghazi scandal.

Surely she knows that the CIA in Libya was somehow involved in the covert transfer of weapons from there to Syria. This isn’t some conspiracy theory, it was covered by the Sunday Times. If that’s news to the senator, why should she be trusted to investigate Benghazi in an honest way? It can’t be though–her speech shows what an incoherent publicity stunt the GOP’s hawks have made out of the murder of four American foreign service officers.

[Update — Also this:

“There is always a temptation to rationalize and discount evil, to disengage, to draw within ourselves, to isolate. And that temptation has existed within every generation. As Ronald Reagan once said, whether we like it or not, it is our responsibility to preserve world peace because no one else can do it. And if there was ever a time in the history of our country to follow the path created by our great president Ronald Reagan, it is now. Ronald Reagan stood for peace through strength.”]


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