Timeline For The Various Official Versions of the bin Ladin Kill Story

Many people have noted:

The thing that Obama had no role in crafting, only authorizing -- the planning of the military strike -- went beautifully. (With the exception of a mechanical glitch downing a stealth copter.)

The thing that Obama had a primary role in crafting -- the PR and reportage about the military's spectacular raid -- has been nothing but glitches, walkbacks, mistatements, blown opportunities, and -- this is now becoming a pattern with Obama -- screwing up everything so badly and so... oddly that people begin doubting the most basic facts reported to them.

Given that, I'm really not sure I'm ready to credit Captain GutsyCall.com with having meticulously oversaw the mission's planning. The one thing I know he meticulously oversaw -- the one thing that he really cares about, and is best at (as far as his limited capabilities) -- he completely screwed up.

So here's the official timeline of All The President's Men screwing up, again and again, the easiest thing in the world, the Victory Lap and Photo Op.

I'm not going to quote the timeline because it all hangs together -- a series of errors, exaggerations, flubs, mistatements, walkbacks, new Narratives clumsily displacing old, clarifications and re-clarifications and re-re-clarifications with corrections appended.

Read it all; this is the real Obama White House. This is their part of the mission, just telling the public and the world what happened. And they made just about every mistake possible.

But here's the sum-up:

“I don't have any updates on the narrative,” Carney said wearily. He mounted another defense of his efforts to dispense information as quickly as he could, under trying circumstances – a process, he admitted, that had “resulted in the need to clarify some facts.” But Carney allowed as how it “is to our credit that when we discovered that clarification was needed we did put them [sic] out.“ But the White House has not clarified this point on the record, the reporter pressed. Carney, unwilling to be pushed into divulging information again, punted. “As I said yesterday, the Defense Department can take questions you have about further details on the mission or clarifications. We're still in a process of gathering all the facts of that operation.”

One individual who had stood where Carney was... was Dana Perino, the last White House press secretary under President George W. Bush.

“In a crisis or an unfolding news situation, first reports are almost always wrong,” she explained...

“I am perplexed how they got so much wrong,” she added. “I don't think it takes away from their achievement. I think that criticism will be relatively short-lived. However, for those people who might be critics of the administration, or have a little bit of distrust for the stories that are coming out of the White House, this will feed that. And it doesn't help build credibility.”

I'm not perplexed. Obama is a failure.

Thanks to gg.

posted by Ace at 12:38 PM

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