Andrew Sullivan channels what I believe many of us are thinking right now.

The obvious responsible thing to do when American citizens and public officials are under physical threat abroad and when the details are unknown, and events spiraling, is to stay silent. If the event happens on the day of September 11 and you are a candidate for president and have observed a political truce, all the more reason to wait to allow the facts to emerge. After all, country before party, right? American lives are at stake, yes? An easy call, no?

But that’s not what the Romney camp did. What they did was seize on a tweet issued by someone in the US Embassy before the attacks in order to indict the president for “sympathizing” with those who murdered a US ambassador after the attacks. Unfuckingbelievable.

…

These people are simply unfit for the responsibility of running the United States. The knee-jerk judgments, based on ideology not reality; the inability to back down when you have said something obviously wrong; and the attempt to argue that the president of the US actually sympathized with those who murdered his own ambassador in Benghazi: these are disqualifying instincts for someone hoping to be the president of the US. Disqualifying.

Read the whole thing.

Thoughts and Prayers go out to Chris Stevens, him family, and everyone working in the Libyan and Egyptian embassy.

Update

The Benghazi consulate was set on fire in Libya, and not the Embassy. The embassy is located in the capitol Tripoli.

Let’s get something straight from the off. Obama is not a socialist, neither in words or in deeds. These are an empirical facts.
However, for many people, there is a gut feeling that he is.

However, Derek Thompson of the Atlantic has compiled a few handy graphs which unequivocally show that not to be the case.

Measuring per capita growth in government spending for the last seven presidents’ first term in office we find the following:

As Mr. Thomson points out:

For all the talk you hear about Obama’s historic spree, government spending actually hasn’t increased so dramatically under this president. The stimulus was big, but it’s over. It’s been replaced by, if not austerity (which has struck our states and cities) then a hard correction to the center.

In fact, President Obama has presided over one of the “greatest periods of government austerity in recent memory”. Total government employment - that’s federal, state, and local — has indeed fallen by the sharpest annual rate since the 1940s. It’s now at 2006 levels and declining:

Total government spending has fallen by the sharpest rate since the 1970s. It is now at 2008 levels and declining:

At the same time “federal spending (which has grown every year since then 1960s) is increasing at its slowest pace in half a century, and federal employment is in true decline”:

But wait, you might reply!
What about my taxes! Obama is taking more than ever before!

Well, actually, no he isn’t. In fact:

“The tax burden on middle-class Americans has decreased during Obama’s presidency. More than one-third of the 2009 stimulus bill consisted of tax cuts, including expanded tax credits for workers, people with children, college students, homebuyers, and the unemployed. In 2010, Obama proposed and Congress accepted a substantial temporary reduction in the payroll tax, which was recently extended through 2012. Meanwhile, the Bush-era income tax cuts were also extended through 2012.”

This will of course not end the myth, or the hysterical calls that President Obama is a stealthy Marxist loon hell-bent on turning America into the Soviet Union or North Korea.
But it is important to remember that, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts.”

Update

The plunging green line tracks change in nondefense state and local spending since Obama took office:

Source