FINAL BUNGLES ON BENGHAZI: John King deceives the world!

MONDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2012

CNN’s Smithsonian-ready 20-minute disgrace: Last Friday night, John King presented a 20-minute disgrace on little-watched CNN.

He was guest-hosting for Anderson Cooper. For our initial report on this absolute garbage, click here. To peruse the full transcript, click this.

Today, we want to show you the key part of King’s deception—the grossly misleading quotation he cherry-picked from Susan Rice.

But first, let’s list the four major ways a scam like this can occur. This scam has been conducted all over the press.

Four factors allow this to happen:

Death by lack of certainty: When Rice appeared on those Sunday shows, she stressed a key fact again and again. She was offering a preliminary assessment, she said. She didn’t yet know all the facts. This was just the “best assessment” available.

You simply can’t make a statement like that to the harlequins who pose as our journalists. These life-forms insist on a simple story—and they want their story right now!

If you say that the evidence isn’t all in, they simply aren’t able to process your statement. They’ll simply pretend that you said something different. We’ll offer some gruesome examples of this conduct in the next few days.

Death by complexity: When Rice went on the Sunday shows, she told a preliminary story—and her story had two parts.

But uh-oh! Two parts is one too many for the life-forms found in our press corps!

We know, we know—it’s hard to believe. But these life-forms simply can’t process that degree of complexity! If you tell them a story which has two parts, they’ll simply repeat the part they prefer. The other part gets thrown away.

Two parts is one part too many!

Death by submission to power: In this case, powerful elements quickly appeared insisting on a bogus account of what Rice actually said. The press corps quickly submitted to this assertion of power, just as they did all through the Clinton-Gore years.

Life is easier for these life-forms when they don’t resist or complain. As Grover Norquist correctly explained: “Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are very unpleasant. But when they've been ‘fixed,’ then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful.”

Death by liberal silence: All through the Clinton-Gore years, death occurred in those three major ways—and liberals sat and watched. The same thing has happened in this case. This silence also brings death.

With those principles established, let’s watch King make his central move in last Friday’s segment.

In fairness, this entire segment was pure perfect crap, and it ran a full twenty minutes. But let’s watch King as he cherry-picks Rice, the key move in his maneuver.

Without a hint of irony, King told us at the start of the show that he would be “Keeping Them Honest!” Within a few minutes, he ran tape of Ambassador Rice on September 16—and he cherry-picked what she said:

KING (10/19/12): We begin tonight "Keeping Them Honest" with breaking news about who knew what and when they knew it. All that in connection with the attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, including America's ambassador to Libya.

The time line is crucial, both as a simple matter of fact and because it's become a political bone of contention.

Tonight, there are key new pieces of it. [CNN] has learned that even as the country was waking up to the fact that four Americans were dead, including U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens, top White House officials were in frequent contact with senior intelligence officials, multiple conversations and possibly, we are told tonight, at least one secure video conference involving the CIA director, David Petraeus, the White House national security advisor Thomas Donilon and perhaps the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.

Now, we don't know yet what was said or whether those discussions covered raw intelligence from Libya pointing to terrorist involvement. We have been reporting such early indications existed. And tonight, the Associated Press says some of it was coming from the CIA station chief on the ground. Whether or how it was distributed, we just don't know yet.

Late today, though, Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, had this to say to CNN's Wolf Blitzer:

(Begin videotape)
ROGERS: I want to say we, the committee, were in possession of information that provided by the intelligence community that pretty much said this was a military-style attack within less than 24 hours.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Are you sure—
(End videotape)

KING: Presumably, the White House also had that information. So why then on September 15th [sic] did the United Nations ambassador Susan Rice describe the attack this way?

RICE (videotape): It's important to know that there's an FBI investigation that has begun and will take some time to be completed. That will tell us with certainty what transpired. But, our current best assessment based on the information that we have at present is that in fact, what this began as was a spontaneous, not a premeditated response to what had transpired in Cairo. In Cairo, as you know, a few hours earlier, there was a violent protest that was undertaken in reaction to this very offensive video that was disseminated.

KING: The “spontaneous and not premeditated” is the important part. That was four days after raw intelligence was available contradicting that. And three days after the intelligence community may have apprised both lawmakers and the White House that such intelligence, preliminary though it may have been, in fact existed.

So why then did Susan Rice say that?

There you see it—the classic cherry-pick! It’s the cherry-pick which has defined this event right from the start.

In this excited report, King offered tape of Rice’s appearance on ABC’s This Week. He presented the first part of what she said—and he disappeared the second!

Excitedly, King wondered why Rice didn’t say the sorts of things to which Mike Rogers alluded. But as we showed you in our last post, this is what Rice went on to say on This Week.

King left the highlighted part of this statement on the cutting-room floor:

RICE (9/16/12): Well, Jake, first of all, it's important to know that there's an FBI investigation that has begun and will take some time to be completed. That will tell us with certainty what transpired.

But our current best assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as was a spontaneous, not a premeditated, response to what happened transpired in Cairo. In Cairo, as you know, a few hours earlier, there was a violent protest that was undertaken in reaction to this very offensive video that was disseminated.

We believe that folks in Benghazi, a small number of people, came to the embassy to—or to the consulate rather—to replicate the sort of challenge that was posed in Cairo. And then, as that unfolded, it seems to have been hijacked, let us say, by some individual clusters of extremists who came with heavier weapons, weapons that, as you know, in the wake of the revolution in Libya, are quite common and accessible. And it then evolved from there.

King played the first part of that tape, dumped the part we highlight. “Keeping them Honest,” he then wondered why Susan Rice didn’t say the very things Susan Rice actually said!

We have some questions to ask ourselves today:

Do you really think King has never gone back to review the actual transcripts and tapes? If so, why is he paid seven figures to strut and fret on the air?

Do you really think that King’s producers—and the pitiful Cooper himself—don’t know what Rice actually said? Do you really think they’ve never looked? Do you think they don’t understand?

King’s entire twenty-minute segment was a disgrace. It ended with that astonishing statement by the burned-out old hack, Paul Begala. (With “liberals” like that...)

But King created a classic moment at the start of that segment. It ought to go to the Smithsonian, so future scholars can study the work of modern life-forms like King.

That was a classic cherry-picked quote! But tonight, as you watch The One True Channel, none of the children will say a thing. The clown Chris Matthews won’t say boo.

Lawrence certainly won't say a word. People! King is from Dorchester too!

Darlings, it simply isn’t done! Susan Rice can go hang in the yard! The children aren’t paid to care.

A requisite part of the cherry-pick: Please note the way the cherry-pick works:

King played tape of the first part of Rice’s statement—the first part of her two-part story. He introduced the tape like this:

“So why then on September 16th did the United Nations ambassador Susan Rice describe the attack this way?”

But that isn’t the way she described the attack! That’s the way she described what was happening before the heavily-armed extremists arrived and the attack began.

Do you really think King doesn’t know that? Do you think our adorable children should complain tonight about what this "journalist" did?