The Audacity of--eh, just The Audacity.

Trust me, I'm a President.

Thanks to their natural intelligence and perceptiveness, readers at Commentarama already know something basic about Obama: He's a liar. Not only that, he evades difficult questions whenever he has to. This was on full display in the debate, when he was asked about Libya. How did he do this? Let's find out.

On Tuesday night, an audience member asked POTUS a very simple question about the attack on our embassy. Who authorized reductions in its defense, and why? As we saw, Obama did everything but answer this question. He talked about how much he cared about our ambassadors, and how terrible Romney was for politicizing the attack in Benghazi, but the actual question asked went unanswered. And unfortunately, Romney didn't get into the issue either, becoming bogged down in who said what (more on that later).

Thanks to the wonder that is the Internet, however, getting to the bottom of this isn't too difficult. It's clear that the State Department stuck the late Chris Stevens with some below-average security in an area with above-average levels of danger. They outsourced embassy security to some private contractors (I thought Obama wasn't a fan of this), who in turn did a pretty lousy job of screening the local help. Two Libyan employees were arrested in April for tossing a bomb into the place. Then in June, an attempt was made on the life of Britain's ambassador, in response to which all the U.K.'s consular staff were withdrawn from Benghazi. All this time, even a week before the attack, according to British and Israeli newspapers, our staff was making repeated requests for reinforcement in security from State, which were not only ignored but actively declined. Do note that verbs like "ignored" and "declined" mean something different from "weren't aware of." And certainly no reflective person believes that Obama wasn't aware of the situation. Yes, Hillary may be "taking responsibility" for what eventually happened, but let's be serious--as the Commander-in-Chief admitted, the buck stops with him.

Romney didn't get into all this, though he probably will in Monday's debate. Instead, he focused on what Obama had said about the attack in its immediate aftermath. "It took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror," he said, at which point of course Crowley jumped to the Prez's defense and said that he'd identified it as an act of terror the day after it happened, which Obama confirmed. Only, that's not what really happened. Obama did say "acts of terror" on Sept. 12 in a Rose Garden address; however, he wasn't really referring to Benghazi as a terrorist attack, merely lumping it in with general "acts," mainly those of 9/11/01. He might have been including Benghazi in that as well, but remember his line: “We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. But there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence.” So, if it was an act of terror, it was a spontaneous, non-deliberate one. Except, we now know intelligence sources were ID'ing Al-Qaeda as the responsible agent within hours after it happened. Yet not until September 28th did anyone in the government admit that this was a premeditated assault. Obama said to Univision, the hosts of The View, and any one else putting a camera to his face that it was all over a YouTube video. It took his administration sixteen days to own up to something they'd found out within sixteen hours.

Even Candy Crowley herself admitted this, saying two days later,

"There's a back and forth now about why didn't this administration -- why did it take them until Friday {the 28th} after a September 11th attack in Libya to come to the conclusion that it was premeditated and that there was terrorists involved....didn't the administration shoot first? Didn't they come out and say, listen, as far as we can tell, this wasn't preplanned?"

Why the disinformation? It would be reckless to say Obama had malicious intent in leaving the embassy, as it were, stranded. He's a lot of things, but murderous is not one of them. But let's recall the line his campaign has been actively pushing most of the last year: "Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive!" The last part of that is debatable, but true enough, bin Laden is no longer with us. But if the insinuation is that Al-Qaeda (and the terrorist threat in general) is dead just because Obama ordered a military operation in Pakistan, well, that's demonstrably false. And the more he has to admit to serious terrorist acts since, the more demonstrable it becomes. Better to deny it as long as possible and let people think things are hunky-dory, rather than admit that the meme being pushed is full of holes. Which, I imagine most people would agree, is a bit more "offensive," to use President Foreign Policy's indignantly-uttered words, than Romney's suggesting Obama's not fully committed.

But what do I know? I'm just a hack blogger.