This are the exact words of Candy Crowley during that infamous TV second presidential debate:
"CROWLEY: He -- he did call it an act of terror. It did as well take -- it did as well take two weeks or so for the whole idea there being a riot out there about this tape to come out. You are correct about that."
Her wording is confused and ambiguous, but to me it sounds like she was so anxious to save Obama's face when the discussion reached the hot-potato topic of the President's farcical - and tragic - treatment of the Libyan consulate assault, that she rushed to confirm that Obama did call it a terror attack before adding, as an afterthought, "it did as well take two weeks", which was the whole point of Romney's statement.
The media did not carefully listen to her words, they just picked up her attitude which was clearly on Obama's side as if that meant anything more than a bias on her part, as if instead that solved the issue in Obama's favor.
At first I doubted if I had heard correctly, since nobody else seemed to have heard or paid attention to those crucial words: "it did as well take two weeks or so".
When I saw the above video in which Crowley herself confirmed what she had actually said, I realized that I was right the first time around.
All this post-debate obsession with who won and who lost, as if this were a football or boxing match, is missing some of the most important points.
Being in England, I watched the presidential debate on Sky News, left-leaning as nearly all British mainstream media. The minute the debate ended Sky News jumped to the conclusion that Obama had won, among other things because - and this is hard to believe but true - the moderator Candy Crowley of CNN confirmed Obama's lie that the President had called the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi an act of terror the day after it occurred, whereas the truth is what Romney said, i.e. that Obama's first response to the attack and murders had been to blame them on 'spontaneous' protests against the Youtube Muhammad video and it took him several days to admit the truth.
Do these mean scoring points, a moderator wrongly taking a candidate's side on a point of fact, like a referee determing the result of a soccer match with a wrong decision, really matter more to our deranged media than the substance of what the debaters, potential future US Presidents, said? This is not a game.
I do not fault Romney with anything in the Benghazi violence part of the debate, except that he could have attacked Obama's policies in the Middle East much more forcefully than he did, explaining that Muslim-raised Barack Hussein's support for the 'Arab Spring' was in fact aiding and abetting the very wintery rise of Islamists like the Muslim Brotherood and strengthening of Al Qaeda in North Africa, the very same people behind the Benghazi attack.
I realize, however, that the time he was given may have been too limited for him to do that in full.
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