In the 1967 film, “A Guide for the Married Man,” a worldly businessman, played by Walter Matthau, takes a younger man, portrayed by Robert Morse, under his wing to teach him how to cheat on his wife. In one scenario, Matthau’s character describes how a philandering husband should always deny his adultery, even when caught in the act. To illustrate this point, a skit is enacted wherein a man, played by Joey Bishop, is caught by his wife, in bed with his mistress.
The wife screams, “What are you doing?” To which the husband and the mistress simply get up, get dressed and make the bed as if nothing has happened. Meanwhile, the husband, in response to his wife’s growing hysteria and incredulity, calmly asks, “What woman?” “Where?” By the end of the scene, the husband is sitting in his easy chair, smoking his pipe, while the mistress has left the apartment, leaving the bewildered wife wondering if she is losing her mind. Finally, questioning whether she has imagined the whole thing, she asks her husband, “What do you want for dinner?”
In the ongoing fiasco that is United States foreign policy in the Middle East, Barack Hussein Obama, 44th President of the United States, has become Joey Bishop, with the American people playing the role of the beleaguered wife. In a stonewalling lie that would make Richard Nixon and his Watergate crew gasp with envy, the president and key members of his administration have been trying with all their might to run out the clock before they have to face the wrath of voters next month.
For weeks after the fact, Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, and a host of others, tried to convince the world that a cheaply made video trailer was the catalyst behind the destruction of the American Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, and the murder of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens. We were supposed to believe that spontaneous protestors were armed with hand-held rocket propelled grenade launchers and automatic weapons — and that this spontaneous protest just happened to occur on the anniversary of September 11th. President Joey Bishop obviously thinks we really are that stupid.
Now, of course, from the halls of Congress to the air waves of talk radio and across the Internet, the ugly truth is spilling out, despite the panic at the White House to contain it and the determination of the mainstream media to ignore it.
Given Mitt Romney’s complete rout of the president in the first debate, it is hard to imagine how Obama can avoid having to answer hard questions in the upcoming confrontations about why his state department denied Ambassador Stevens the additional security he urgently requested prior to the attack. What possible explanation can the president invent for his utter failure to secure our embassy and its personnel? How could he and his advisors have so badly misjudged the outcome of the “Arab Spring” when they armed the rebels who now appear to be terrorists themselves? And what justification can he offer for the outright lies that emanated from his administration after what was clearly known to be a terrorist attack?
Barack Obama’s only hope — and it is now a pathetically slim one — is to continue on the path he has set for himself in this campaign, hoping that his fawning sycophants in the national media can somehow continue to bury the biggest story since they refused to cover Operation Fast and Furious. Meanwhile, as Romney, the serious candidate, discusses Benghazi, Obama, the small-minded community organizer, runs ridiculous parodies about Big Bird that look as if they were produced by the Tonight Show or Saturday Night Live.
As then-Sen. Obama said in Denver when he accepted his party’s nomination for president in front of those silly Greek columns in 2008, “If you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters. If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things.”
I could not have written a better line to describe the president’s re-election campaign.
Doug Patton describes himself as a recovering political speechwriter who agrees with himself more often than not. Now working as a freelance writer, his weekly columns are syndicated exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Astute supporters and inane detractors alike are encouraged to email him with their pithy comments at dpatton@cagle.com.