Just before 1 p.m. ET, Rush Limbaugh said the following about CNN's Candy Crowley and her performance as "moderator" last night in the second presidential debate: "In the real world, she would have committed career suicide last night."
Well, Rush, don't discount her ability to self-immolate just yet. The Washington Post reports that Crowley is backtracking on her backtrack (HT PJ Tatler):
Candy Crowley: I didn’t backtrack on Libya in debate
CNN’s Candy Crowley denied Wednesday morning that she had moved away from her own comments on Libya when she moderation the previous night’s debate.
... On ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan said that Crowley had already taken back the first part of that statement. “The moderator said that she — that he was right in the main on this, that she wasn’t correct in pointing out that he made reference to this being a specific terrorist attack,” he said.
What Crowley said on CNN after the debate: Romney “was right in the main, I just think he picked the wrong word.” But on the same network Wednesday morning, she said she was in no way taking back her original interjection.
“Listen, what I said on that stage is the same thing I said to you actually last night,” she told Soledad O’Brian. “[W]e got hung up on this ‘yes he said,’ ‘no I didn’t,’ ‘I said terror,’ ‘you didn’t say terror.’ … So I said, [President Obama] did say ‘acts of terror, call it an act of terror, but Governor Romney, you are perfectly right that it took weeks for them to get past the tape.’”
Asked if that was a backtrack, Crowley said, “No. The question was — we got so stuck on that ‘act of terror.’ Now, did the President say this was an act of terror? The president did not say — he said ‘these acts of terror,’ but he was in the Rose Garden to talk about Benghazi, so I don’t think that’s a leap.” (The exact phrase Obama used: “no acts of terror.”)
Here is what Obama said in the Rose Garden on September 12:
No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.
She still doesn't get the basics right. She thinks it's "these acts of terror," when he said "no acts of terror."
As I wrote at my home blog this morning:
He did not — did not — did freaking not — call Benghazi an “act of terror.” Additionally, moments later, he deliberately avoided calling the attack terrorism, only saying that “We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act.” That’s “terrible,” not “terrorist.”
Candy Crowley's ad hoc "fact check" was wrong.
And of course, all of this begs the question of why Obama would have allowed his apparatchiks to run around for at least seven more days telling everyone they could that Benghazi resulted from a "spontaneous" protest (when there really was no protest) about a video which virtually no one had ever seen or heard of.
What do you have to say about that, Ms. Crowley?
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
