The Romney campaign spent Tuesday criticizing Obama for referring to the riots and embassy attacks across the Muslim world as “bumps in the road.” But now the mother of one of the former Navy SEALs killing in Libya said she agrees with the road-bump characterization, and is sad to see the incident politicized, according to the Boston Herald:
The mother of a former Navy SEAL from Winchester killed in Libya said it is “very sad” that her son’s death was being used as political theater yesterday — and she agreed with President Obama’s controversial assessment that the latest round of deadly troubles in the region constitute “bumps in the road.”
She said every day, men like her son are making a difference for those who live in that region.
“Those people, not only there, but other places, are under horrid dictatorships,” Barbara Doherty told the Herald yesterday. “They’re very angry. They’re poor. It is a little bump in the road. They are making progress. You can’t expect it to happen in one night. Progress is slow.”
That will probably settle it for the media, which, as John wrote in his New York Post column, was already trying to ignore Obama’s indelicate comment anyway. How long do you think it will take for the press to turn this into a Romney-gaffe story? Maybe we can look forward to another round of breathless “did Romney jump the gun?” headlines.
Nobody is arguing that the attack in Benghazi is an insurmountable setback in the country or the region. But when the Commander-in-Chief describes it as “a bump in the road,” he’s suggesting that it was minor, unavoidable and inconsequential. That’s not what we’ve seen so far. This was the first assassination of a U.S. ambassador in over thirty years. For most Americans, that’s not a minor concern. There is evidence that we lost a massive amount of intelligence in the raid — again, not impossible to overcome, but something that will have consequences in the region. As for whether the attack could have been avoided, there are serious concerns about why the State Department failed to secure the consulate and the ambassador.
