Outrage! Assassination Attempt on Issa, Panetta, etc. Anyone Out There Care?

A just-published report indicates, their Islamist blood-lust apparently unslaked by the slaughter of four Americans in last year’s Libyan consulate assault, more Benghazi baddies had recently fixed the cross-hairs on Republican Congressman Darrell Issa. The California politician, chairman of the House Oversight Committee pursuing an inquiry into the September 11, 2012 terror-attack, has just returned from a fact-finding trek to the North African nation. A leaked State Department email revealed officials were deeply concerned about Issa’s safety abroad.

The Daily Caller: “CBS News reported Thursday … a Libyan national shar[ed] ‘his concern … that Representative Issa should not come to Libya for his own safety … [T]he people who would harm Rep. Issa are the same people who conducted the Benghazi attacks.’ ”

It’s surely no surprise the jihaidst primitives who massacred US Ambassador Chris Stevens, Information Officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs/embassy security personnel Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods would nurse fantasies about taking down a prominent “infidel” investigating the massacre. The dogging question is: What’s the US Government doing about that ongoing, reprehensible reality?

“The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government,” Thomas Jefferson penned to early 19th-century Maryland Republicans. Also ascribed to TJ — probably inaccurately, but still a potent sentiment: “The purpose of government is to enable the people of a nation to live in safety and happiness.”

Clearly, chief among Washington, DC’s limited but sacred, God-ordained duties is protection of its people “against all enemies, foreign and domestic”. Individuals should be otherwise left alone to pursue their God-ordained responsibilities  and potential. The prioritizing of the US Military and Federal law enforcement is, thus, not merely appropriate; its indispensable — in this terror-ridden, WMD-bristling day, perhaps more than ever.

And when unacceptable loss of American life does occur? The State must respond convincingly, in a manner consonant with its sacrosanct obligation.

Glaringly, that’s not happening in efforts to unearth exactly what enabled the Benghazi bloodbath to unfold the way it did twelve months ago. Barack Obama’s administration,  State Department and cronies all around impudently tergiversate and stonewall the matter.

It’s right that God-and-Country-loving citizens should demand the nations’ elected and appointed officials ruthlessly scrutinize the Benghazi atrocity. It’s wildly unreasonable, however, to assume the Obama posse will expend any  meaningful energy doing so. The literal deaths of a quartet of public servants, in fact,  have elicited only scandalous lack of co-operation, delays and cover-ups from their side.

In a government system dizzying in its dysfunction, nothing’s more execrable than its failure to cherish Americans’ lives and mounting dereliction in safeguarding them.

The late Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein’s April 1993  revenge-assassination designs on then-retired-President George H.W.Bush were cited as one in the sprawling constellation of  factors inspiring President George. W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of that country.  Ah, the good old days! Would that outrage, all by its lonesome, supply a defensible pretext for ground-pounding, military retaliation? Evolved sophisticates will drolly insist not —  in my book it comes pretty close.

And by the way, had it been President Bill Clinton — cosmic disgrace though he be —  who’d been the Baghdad Butcher’s target instead of his predecessor? The ethical calculus would remain the same: International bad guys who take a run at an American leader compel that we — to borrow from my favorite movie (Gladiator) —  “Unleash hell.”

This is not about party membership, not about partisan preference. This is about any sober-minded government’s condign response to threats against one of its own.

In March 2012, Barack Obama’s then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was the intended object of a suicide/car bomber at Britain’s Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. Fortunately, the plot misfired, but so what? Pray tell, what persistent steps is Panetta’s former employer taking to identify, stalk and prosecute  — by  whatever means necessary —  all those behind the would-be hit?

Feel free to grunt or giggle contemptuously at the question — it’s a rhetorical one.

A little infuriated indignation — issuing in predictable and practical reprisals – would be appreciated toward cretins who set their sights on Washington officials, our uniformed servants, or simply vanilla, American civilians who are out and about. Instead, too commonly we get suave ennui – supine attitudes along the lines of: This is the way the world is. What’re ya gonna do? No use getting  exercised over it….

An adult civilization, contrastingly, hews to a principle that is simple and chillingly intolerant: international predators get nary a pass on menacing those it represents -– period. It’s a brutal standard, concise, no-nonsense; and for perpetrators who disregard it: lethal. Again, that’s adult, civilizational policy. Increasingly uncertain is whether it any longer prevails in this country.

Diplomatic personnel. Republicans Issa and Bush 41. Democrat Panetta. Private So-and-So or Lt. Anonymous Soldier in Afghanistan. Or, maybe, just Joe Average Vacationer who’s ventured beyond U.S. borders. With scandalous frequency, we’re notified of their near misses or, worse, demises, carried out by global blackguards who pant after Americans’ deaths. We disgracefully react with pro-forma but impotent head-shaking, taking a cue from leaders who might offer a theatrical glower or growl, but not much else.

“Big government” is a noble idea in at least one narrow regard: the big, governmental hammer coming down – mercilessly, somehow or another, every-time — on creeps who think they can jeopardize Americans with impunity. A few decades’ foreign policy of that timbre, delivered consistently, unflinchingly? I’m confident we’d all be shocked at how dramatically would dry up the current, fetid pool of eager “martyrs” and tough-talking jihadists.

Would all terror possibilities evaporate? Nope – the evil seed in human nature scotches that option. The survival instinct beating within even maniacs, though, guarantees not a few wanna-be warriors would make this self-interested calculation: When it comes to their homicidal inclinations, they’d best keep them far away from anyone carrying the status “American”.

Image: Modified from original: Congressman Darrell Issa; author:The Office of Congressman Darrell Issa; public domain