How Chris Christie Could Use the NSA Playbook

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Conor Friedersdorf has written a tongue-in-cheek article in The Atlantic advising New Jersey Governor Chris Christie how he can use the NSA playbook to successfully defend himself of the charges that a senior member of his staff was involved in shutting down George Washington Bridge traffic, a stunt meant to punish the mayor of an affected town for opposing his reelection. Christie's NSA-inspired explanation would include the following points: There are almost 9 million people in New Jersey, and only one was targeted for retribution, an impressively tiny error rate lower than .001 percent; The bridge closure was vital to national security because [redacted]; Since the George Washington Bridge is a potential terrorist target, everything that may or may not have happened near it is a state secret; Going after a political rival is wrong but it's important to put this event in context; Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich was the only target of non-compliant behavior. No other Fort Lee resident was ever targeted for retribution, and any delays that any Fort Lee resident experienced were totally inadvertent and incidental; Finally a panel will be formed to figure out how to restore the public's faith in Chris Christie. "To some readers, these talking points may seem absurd or deliberately misleading," concludes Friedersdorf, "but there isn't any denying that so far they're working okay for the NSA.""

Comments

beacon of freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

it is really telling that the public official closed the bridge illegally and nobody is sitting in jail for this.

Re:beacon of freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

“Chris Christie is dealing with a scandal after it was revealed that a top aide shut down access to the George Washington Bridge to get back at a Democratic mayor for not endorsing him. Christie was furious when they blocked the bridge because he thought they said they were blocking the fridge.” –Jimmy Fallon

http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/republicans/a/Chris-Christie-Jokes.htm

Re:beacon of freedom

[ebno-10db]

It is really telling that your entire list refers to a certain Democratic president, and mixes in things that (in your opinion) are bad policy. There are plenty of legitimate complaints about corruption in government, and then there are partisan shills. By acting as the latter, you demonstrate that you have no real concern about the former.

Re:beacon of freedom

[cold fjord]

By labeling that poster a "shill" you are obviously attempting to delegitimize the criticism over policy matters. Should we likewise label you a "shill" acting in defense of the administration or its policies? Apparently nobody here can hold an opinion without being a "shill." That does get to be tedious.

Re:beacon of freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe the president for the past couple of years has been a fucking democrat and recent examples are the first ones that came to mind?

Re:beacon of freedom

[_KiTA_]

It is really telling that the ATF gave over 2500 guns to Mexican drug cartels, and no one from the ATF, DOJ, or Obama Administration is sitting in jail.
It is really telling that the IRS targeted political opponents during an election year, and no one from the IRS, DOT, or Obama Administration is sitting in jail.
It is really telling that Obama campaign donors at Solyndra got $500,000,000 of tax payer money, promptly went bankrupt, and no one from the DOE is sitting in jail.
It is really telling that the Fed prints $75,000,000,000 a month, totaling over $4,000,000,000,000 in the last 5 years, and no one from the fed is sitting in jail.
It is really telling that the president himself breaks the PPACA on a daily basis by announcing parts he will be temporarily or permanently not enforcing, and he's not sitting in jail.

Wow, that's a fun list. I count 3... 4? outright lies, 4 completely made up scandals, 1 thing taken completely out of context, several words that don't mean what you think they mean, and a complete lack of understanding as to how civics works.

It's always fun to debunk these kinds of lists, because I always learn something new, usually something that makes me proud of what our country is doing.

The only sad thing is that it takes me hours and the people posting them will either blindly ad hominem them ("YOU LINKED DAILYKOS THAT MEANS YOU ACTIVATED MY TRAP CARD~!~!"), call me a "liberal commy fagg 'MERICA hater", or ignore me and go right back to posting about how Obama was raised by Karl Marx on the Socialist Moonbase on the dark side of Mars or something. Or go back to quoting from the sites those guys run. Same difference, really.

Anyway, lets go!

1. Fast and Furious was made up. The entire thing was based on one right wing ATF source, who was discovered to be lying. It has been debunked so often that even the actual GOP doesn't mention it, only ultra-far right idiots in the Tea Party talk about it nowadays.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/irs-scandal-democratic-acorn_n_3785717.html

2. Ditto for the IRS scandal, which was also made up. Darrel Issa asked the investigator to ignore the fact that the IRS was looking at all groups claiming to be charities, as they are REQUIRED TO DO BY LAW, and merely provide him talking points on Republican ones. The real scandal? The IRS failed to notice 10 out of 11 of the Koch brothers fake charities were fake charities. You'll note that Issa doesn't even bother talking about this one anymore, he's too busy trying to use Benghazi to kneecap President Hilary Clinton before her 2016 victory.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/26/1219172/-Here-s-how-Darrell-Issa-manufactured-the-IRS-scandal

3. Solyndra's loan was one of Bush's projects, not Obama's, and there's a HUGE difference between George Kaiser (a billionaire who raised a whopping 50-100k for Obama) and the Kaiser Family Foundation (a charity he started). There's a whole boatload more of made up crap about Solyndra, it's a very transparent manufactured scandal to try and drive us away from Solar and Wind technologies -- because oil will never run out or anything. I'll just leave this link as an exercise to the reader:
http://ourfuture.org/20120926/the-phony-solyndra-solar-scandal

4. Literally not true. The "Fed prints $75,000,000,000" is such a common meme that there are so many Tea Party sites shatting it out that it's hard to discover it's source. Took a while, but I found it - The fed is buying back a bunch of T-Bonds and Mortgage Bonds at the rate of 75 billion a month as part of the stimulus package, but that's not "printing money." The Feds have a FAQ entry up on it here, for those who don't roll

Re:beacon of freedom

[cold fjord]

It is really telling that your entire list refers to a certain Democratic president, and mixes in things that (in your opinion) are bad policy.

If you're going to criticize the President that is actually in power you are stuck criticizing Obama at the moment. Don't you think it is fair to criticize him for the policies and actions of his administration?

You call him a "shill," and yet you are attacking the commenter for criticizing the only president in power he can comment on, not the comments. What does that make you?

Can we store your comment until after the next election and flip "Democrat" to "Republican" to use on you? It will probably be just as applicable.

Re:beacon of freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with the OP comments, but I like to read rebuttals.

I read the one about fast and furious that you said was completely made up (Over 200 dead Mexicans disagree), so I followed you link, even though it was Huff Post. I figured the Huff Post would have a link to where the information that it was fake would be. It didn't even MENTION Fast and Furious.

Were you just posting random links hoping people wouldn't follow them? It talked about the IRS scadal, and I've read the DNC talking points on that and they are all lies. No right wing group got tax exempt status for over 2 year, a process that is not to take longer than 90 days. Because of that many donors could not donate until they got the status. I've yet to find a source to debunk that bit of fact.

So I stopped following your talking points because they appear to be just made up with random links.

Re: beacon of freedom

[JWW]

Your point for 4 is no better than what was originally stated. It's still very bad monetary policy.

And for 5 you're the one spreading bullshit. The republicans have been unable to pass anything to actually get in the way of Obamacare. Sure republican governors have opted out of building exchanges but the law gave then that choice. What the law didn't do was allow insurance to be sold across state lines, which would have only required a federal exchange. It was a colossal miss by the law. Oh and the gp post is correct Obama's constant executive changing of the law is sure as hell completely illegal.

Re:beacon of freedom

[Attila Dimedici]

You are correct that he should not have brought the Fed's stimulus into this discussion and probably not Solyndra or PPACA (at least not the way in which he did). However, the point to note is that the media have already spent more time covering the bridge closing than it has the IRS targeting Obama political opponents (both in slow walking applications for non-profit status and starting audits against those who have spoken out about problems with PPACA), or on the Fast & Furious gun running by the BATF to Mexican drug cartels.

Re:beacon of freedom

[inode_buddha]

Its called "intelectual honesty". Try it sometime.

Re:beacon of freedom

[readin]

So you use a bunch of left-wing websites to "debunk" the news?

I don't have time to go into everything, and in fact most of the list doesn't interest me that much.

But the IRS scandal wasn't hatched a couple days before the national press finally noticed. The IRS behavior was being noticed and complained about for many many months before it became widespread knowledge. You probably heard about the IRS being used as a political weapon in spring of 2013.

From July of 2012, "Even worse, the IRS has responded to dozens of tax-exemption applications by tea-party groups with astonishingly intrusive document demands, seeking not only donor lists but also lists of volunteers." http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/310384/obama-s-sunshine-policy-david-french

Mr. French is referring to a DailyCaller article from February 2012, http://dailycaller.com/2012/02/22/congressional-investigations-sought-over-irs-assault-on-tea-party-groups/

Yes it's true that these are all conservative websites, but who else was going to cover news at that time that was negative to President Obama and wasn't already high profile?

Anyway, here is a non-conservative site debunking your debunking http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/05/14/irs-tea-party-progressive-groups/2158831/

Re:beacon of freedom

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

1. Fast and Furious was made up. The entire thing was based on one right wing ATF source, who was discovered to be lying. It has been debunked so often that even the actual GOP doesn't mention it, only ultra-far right idiots in the Tea Party talk about it nowadays.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/irs-scandal-democratic-acorn_n_3785717.html

That link is to a completely unrelated story about the IRS. I was hoping you had some proof, because that was the first time I've heard that Fast and Furious was all bullshit. So I searched the same website for more info and didn't find anything to support your claim. What I did find was an article from july 2013 talking about two more deaths in mexico linked to those guns - not something I'd expect to see from "huffpo" if the scandal had been debunked.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/06/fast-and-furious-gun_n_3554854.html

Re:beacon of freedom

[guises]

He's a shill because he's phrasing his criticism of the president (in the middle of a conversation about the governor of New Jersey) in a way that implies neutrality. He claims to be talking about corruption in government, and yet for some reason every one of his examples (other than "the fed") is either related to the president or is claimed to relate to the president. Again, in a conversation that has nothing to do with the president.

The reason he ignored GP's comments is because it's been done to death. Anyone reading this who doesn't know the reasoning behind each of those is blinded by partisanship.

Briefly though, because the Solyndra BS pisses me off more than any of the others:

I would fucking *love it* if the federal government would start making solar panels and selling them to people directly, but certain agitators would start screaming about socialism if the money isn't given to private interests instead. When you give money to to private companies there's always the chance that they'll go bankrupt. That's how it works. If you look at the whole program, rather than just at Solyndra, most of the companies did fine - a better success rate than most programs like this one.

Re:beacon of freedom

[readin]

If I had made that list it would focus on two events
* The closing of national parks, blocking of scenic overlooks, etc. that were often unnecessary and in fact more expensive than not doing them during the government shutdown. The President was attempting to blame Republicans for pain he was inflicting.
. * The IRS targeting of conservative groups that effectively prevented them from having a strong effect during the 2012 election.

Re:beacon of freedom

[Goldsmith]

I think you're mixing politics with ethics.

Does anything you brought up matter to the overall point that government is in the habit of breaking it's own laws?

Fast and Furious lost "strength" as a scandal because gun walking was revealed to be a "standard" technique implemented at a local level. There's questionable legal and moral basis for this, regardless of whose fault it is politically. There's a big difference between something seen as a "fake scandal" and something which "didn't happen." Gun walking does happen and it shouldn't.

It was still wrong for the IRS to delay applications the way they did; the IRS still insisted on information they weren't entitled to. The IRS did share information with people outside government that they shouldn't have. It's not ok that these things happened just because it hurt people evenly across the political spectrum.

It's not ok for any president to ignore implementing a law. Does the fact that Bush's administration ignored environmental law make it ok that Obama's administration ignores the health care law? This doesn't make any sense. Can the next administration pick a new set of laws to ignore? It's silly. We don't want a system where that kind of behavior is ok.

Your arguments are part of the problem here. (PART, not the whole problem, calm down...) We have to stop looking at things in terms of who is winning and losing politically. The root problem in our country is a pattern of poor governance. Regardless of who is in power, we need to expect and receive competent and ethical government. We are not getting that. (And the point of this discussion is that Christie is part of the problem, not the solution.)

There were many moderate Republicans and Independent voters who recognized after Bush that the Republican party had "lost" the ability to effectively govern (I was one of them). There will be many moderate Democrats and Independents who now come to the same conclusion about the Democratic party. As you point out, government is more than just the person at the top, it's the infrastructure, culture and people installed in the hundreds of administrative positions under the president. Now though, we have few (no?) credible alternatives to turn to...

Re:beacon of freedom

[superwiz]

Unlike Christie, Obama hasn't fired anyone responsible though. So unlike Christie, Obama is guilty.

Re:beacon of freedom

[khallow]

All they did was fuck up tracking guns that were sold to known drug runners by people whose idea of tracking gun sales is to write them on rolls of toilet paper and whose idea of background checks is to look behind the guy.

No, it's worse than that. They simply didn't track these weapons or notify Mexican authorities that they were doing this (Mexican authorities learned about Fast and Furious when the scandal became public via whistleblowers after the death of a US Border Patrol agent involving two guns from the program), and the gun sellers were in on the alleged sting and were authorized by the ATF agents involved to sell those weapons as they did.

In addition, the Sinaloa Cartel got a free ticket for at least a year to smuggle guns and who knows what else into Mexico in addition to those 2000 or so guns. Maybe it was a sting and maybe it was substantial aid for a favored cartel.

He's half right, Solyndra started the process to get the loan in 2007. Should Obama have known to cut them off halfway through? Who knows... They didn't get the money then "promptly go bankrupt" though.

Yes, he should have cut off the process. And yes, they did go promptly bankrupt since they were out of cash in about 15 months of getting the loan money and bankrupt in two years.

Re:beacon of freedom

[khallow]

I would fucking *love it* if the federal government would start making solar panels and selling them to people directly, but certain agitators would start screaming about socialism if the money isn't given to private interests instead.

Why? It's not the federal government's job to make solar panels. And given how incompetent they are about anything else, I can't imagine why you'd want them to.

Re:beacon of freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we store your comment until after the next election and flip "Democrat" to "Republican" to use on you?

I suppose this is a rhetorical question, and my answer is irrelevant, but still, I suggest you do not.

The left/right paradigm makes all proper debate useless, and makes people entrenched in one of two positions, forever allowing such things like this to happen in the first place. Like the goats in Animal Farm, people who do these things kill all discussion.

Therefore, it was wrong to bring up the left/right paradigm when this guy did it, and it will be wrong to do it when the other group of puppets are in position as well.

Re:beacon of freedom

[guises]

Government programs are usually, not always, more efficient than private counterparts. Medicare, for example, operates at an 8% overhead, while insurance companies were complaining that the 15% overhead that the Affordable Care Act allows them was untenable. The advantage that private industry has is in innovation, not efficiency.

It's the government's job to promote the economy and maintain public resources. In this case that meant pushing clean energy, both as a long-term economic goal and as a means of environmental conservation. There are many ways that the government can work towards objectives like this one, one way is to give money to private organizations and another is to simply go ahead and do it. You're asking me why I have the preference that I do: one factor is that giving public money to private companies is one avenue, the most traveled avenue, for corruption. So this always makes me pause. Even when everything is above board, this isn't taking advantage of the system that we've set up for ourselves - the market and private companies are there as a source of innovation. Innovation can sometimes lead to efficiency, and that's great and all, but when you're looking to just get something done as smoothly as possible you're not looking for new methods and creative ways of thinking about the problem. If we're looking to flood the country with solar panels then we can do it ourselves, there's no need to go through some roundabout public/private process.

Re:beacon of freedom

[ganjadude]

really? you mean you didnt hear about the NSA breaking into EVERYONES office?? I mean hell nixon only invaded 1 office, the sitting president, and previous president have been invading EVERYONE

Re:beacon of freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

Medicare's policy is indeed pay first, check second.

This is due to lobbying by private providers who don't want Medicare being dilatory, to the point of not wanting Medicare to do any diligence.

Why do you attribute this failure to government, and not to the persons who lobbied for it?

Alternate reason for closing the bridge

[plasticquart]

... a stunt meant to punish the mayor of an affected town for opposing his reelection.

It is now suspected that this might not be the motivation for the bridge closure.

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/maddow-nj-bridge-scandal-was-political-revenge-but-maybe-not-for-the-reason-you-think%E2%80%A6/

Re:Alternate reason for closing the bridge

[Anonymous Coward]

From your link:

In 2010, Christie took the unprecedented step of refusing to reappoint a New Jersey Supreme Court justice for another term, which set off the New Jersey Democrats, who got back at Christie by shooting down all the other Supreme Court justice nominees he put forward.

So when a Republican member of the New Jersey Supreme Court came up for reappointment last year, NJ Senate Democrats promised to make it a brutal fight, so Christie decided to stop the reappointment. He was furious at Senate Democrats, and held a press conference getting really angry with them.

That press conference, expressing much anger with Senate Democrats, was held on August 12, 2013, a day before the Bridgegate e-mail was sent. And Fort Lee, the town that got backed up, is part of the legislative district represented by Loretta Weinberg, the leader of the Senate Democrats.

Random satire

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm struggling to understand how this qualifies as "News For Nerds" or "Stuff That Matters".

Re:Random satire

[cffrost]

I'm struggling to understand how this qualifies as "News For Nerds" or "Stuff That Matters".

I believe it was meant to foster a discussion about NSA's post-Snowden propaganda campaign, but we don't seem to be having that discussion, as far as I've read.

are you serious?

[lemur3]

this 'article' is a load of cynical sarcastic crap.

and im a cynical sarcastic crap myself... i dont get it.. what exactly is the point of this?

Re:No need to use the NSA's playbook...

[amiga3D]

Too late for all that. Christie allready apologized at length and fired the staffer involved. I don't get it anyway. How was closing lanes to a bridge going to hurt the mayor of Fort Lee? It inconvenienced a lot of the people in the area but they overwhelmingly voted for Christie anyway. The whole thing sounds idiotic. Is he hiring 7th graders for his staff or something? I would have broken his legs or something if I was angry with him. A traffic jam? Really?

Re:Not news for nerds

[rmdingler]

I look forward to the posting of mainstream stories on the green line site (my son's colloquialism).

Often they arrive after being picked apart by the news media, but there are still moments of insight in this forum that I can't find anywhere else.

All that,AND they talk about computers here.

there's a better NSA link here:

[circletimessquare]

how did those emails and texts get to the media?

i'm not saying the NSA did it. but how easy would it have been for it to do so?

i'm not even saying the NSA would be pursing this as policy. the NSA is not an iron machine, it's composed of people. there's greed and corruption everywhere. for every virtuous edward snowden, there's another guy like edward snowden who knows a political operative and would do what snowden did, but for the motivation of cash instead. sell this kind of info for six or seven figures

that's how dangerous the NSA is to democracy. infiltrate the NSA, abuse its powers as an employee, destroy the legitimacy of our government with the leaks and manipulations you are now capable of

we live in a world where the NSA can decide presidential elections, or any elections. right now. everyone has dirt on them. focus on the candidates you want to weed out, get dirt like this bridge fiasco on them, leak it to the media, and voila: you decide elections

this is why the NSA has to be curtailed. it is incompatible with democracy. the NSA will destroy this country, make everyone believe their government is fake

the NSA must be made transparent, congressional oversight bolted on, its scope of powers severely reduced, etc. secret courts? what the fuck? no! not acceptable

It wasn't to punish someone who wouldn't endorse

[_KiTA_]

It wasn't to punish someone who wouldn't endorse him. That's just a flashpoint scandal, nothing big. I half suspect it to be one that's being sent out intentionally to exhaust the media's attention before the real scandal starts getting out.

Basically he screwed over some Democratic Judge, and the Dems in his area announced they would be very critical of a Republican Judge that was coming up for reconfirmation in retaliation, so he pulled the same screwjob on that Republican Judge to prevent her from being questioned by the Dems. The next day he pulled the bridgegate crap in the home district of the head Democrat.

Rachel Maddow has done all the work and has an interview with said head Dem.

Or you could turn to Fox News, where somehow it was Obama's fault because Benghazi.

this had nothing to do with the endorsement.

[nimbius]

the mayor of Fort Lee has nothing to do with this:

Recently Christie had unloaded on Democrats in a particularly angry press conference concerning the renomination battle of a N.J. Supreme Court judge, a battle that had been several years in the making. The woman who headed the state Senate committee causing embarrassment for Christie at the time was N.J. state Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg (D), who happens to represent Fort Lee.

Re:No need to use the NSA's playbook...

[ebno-10db]

Is he hiring 7th graders for his staff or something?

Take that back! I have a son in the 7th grade, and I assure you that most 7th graders are more mature than politicians.

I would have broken his legs or something

So you do understand NJ.

If you want to know a child, look at his friends..

[Proudrooster]

So by looking a Chris Christie's friends what can we determine from him? All of his friends seem to be petty, vindictive, bullies. Then when things go bad, it is every man for themselves which shows a lack of loyalty since everyone except Christie has had to resign. It won't be long until one of his friends turns on him, but then it will be an all out character assassination against that old friend.

This little stunt happened on the first day of school, messing with kids and communities on a stressful first day, the people of NY & NJ, interstate commerce, and possible security and emergency services.

Some of the friends are going to need a timeout, where big people go for timeout. A little jail time.

Re:Not news for nerds

[Capt.Albatross]

This should be posted on a political forum. Maybe slashdot could create a second site for stories like this.

I think you have misunderstood the target of the referenced article. It is not actually about New Jersey politics, it is about the weakness of the NSA's justifications for its recently-revealed actions. Those actions seem to have attracted a lot of interest on slashdot.

Actaully Fox News is.

[Anonymous Coward]

When Rupert Murdoch and couple of other billionaires started their own network in the 1980s and Fox News in the 1990s, they intentionally wanted the network to be on the right side of the political spectrum because they felt that part of the US market was being under served by other news outlets. After all, Regan was big then, the DEmocrats still had a strangle hold on Congress and the Conservatives had non outlet that catered to them.

Flash forward 25 years and the country as a whole has moved more to the right. So, hows does Fox News differentiate itself now?

By being so wacky right wing that they have become a parody of themselves. Colbert is making a real nice living by just accentuating some of the rhetoric - not adding too much to it, BTW.

That's how ridiculous they have become.

When I see commentators and anchors talk out of their ass; like blaming the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 on the financial meltdown; which it turns out it had nothing - zero - contribution to the financial meltdown.

Fox News narrative is now scaring old white people. My doctors office has it on (all those old white people live it) and the BS that comes out of those people's mouths makes me wonder how these people can keep a straight face - actually I can - they millions of dollars a year to read the BS the Fox writers come up with.

Also, notice how all the "anchors" are pretty MILFs with short skirts and hooker/stripper heels?

All of the women on Fox News look like strippers.

Infotainment, baby! with shitty half truths and lies.

And parroting what they see on that shitty lying network. I've actually talked to people who were convinced that we the US will become just like Greece and they put their life savings into Gold - when it was pushing $2,000 an ounce (it since has fallen 40%). Guess where they got that idea from?

Re:Actaully Fox News is.

[Voyager529]

Also, notice how all the "anchors" are pretty MILFs with short skirts and hooker/stripper heels?
All of the women on Fox News look like strippers.

I sense that the viewership of Fox News by the Slashdot demographic is headed for an increase.

Not "working well"

[jodido]

The NSA's "defense" is not "working well." Except maybe with Democrats and Republicans who wish Snowden never existed. For a lot of the rest of the population NSA excuses are making things worse for them, not better.

why does he need to defend himself?

[stenvar]

This sort of thing is what politicians do every day. There is essentially no legal way to hold the guy responsible.

The only people who can punish Christie are voters. Hopefully they will do just that, although the fact that both Bush and Obama got reelected doesn't make me very confident that voters care about abuse of power.

Christie in 2016 - how will this play out.

[germansausage]

As a non-USA-citizen, I don't have any stake in the outcome, but I'm really curious to see how this affects Christie's run for the White House. Is this a big enough problem to derail his carefully crafted "Pragmatic, bi-partisan, get stuff done" persona, or will it blow over?

My personal take, FWIW, is that he either knew and is lying, or he didn't and is a schmuck because his whole team leadership lied to him for months and he didn't catch on. If I was a voter I would be asking myself, "What if this guy is elected president, and then one day gets mad at me?"

Re:What's more amusing here...

[cffrost]

Let's compare how much media time this gets [with that].

If you're talking about coverage via the "big six" US corporate news media, coverage depends partially on the political and economic interests of the parent corporation, and partially on the projected profitability of the coverage. The former could be determined somewhat by the legal bribes a corporation has given to political candidates. I'm not interested, as I don't share interests with any of those corporations. Thus, I don't get any of my news from them, instead preferring mostly foreign outfits with a smaller stake in determining what is fit for someone in the US to read about.

[...] American state dept official being left out to be lynched by a planned assault on our consulate when help was available? Does it really matter if it was planned or spontaneous?

I don't know, but maybe if the US hadn't participated in overthrowing Libya's government, there would be a police department there to investigate murder cases. Other than "many dead, many injured during protests/riots/attacks coinciding with anniversary of 9/11 attack on US," I remember and care little about those small uprisings through 2011-2012, except for my continual belief that the US should quit meddling in the affairs of sovereign states in which a US presence is unwanted by the majority of the populace.

There are other misdeeds, crimes, and atrocities being committed by the Obama administration that I'm far more concerned with right now, like the indiscriminate mass execution of civilians abroad via remote control (Obama: "I'm getting very good at killing people."); the mass surveillance of myself, fellow citizens, and fellow innocents across the globe; the ongoing suspension of habeus corpus under the NDAA 2012; banksters walking free, while incentivized to crash the economy for fun & profit again, as spending for assistance for this nation's most-in-need is cut; the "most transparent administration in US history" waging a war to punish/silence whistle-blowers throughout the federal government and military; and so on and so forth.

Are you concerned about any of those things? Do you consider any of them more important than the attack that occurred in 2012?

When I read about something bad that's happened, my foremost concerns are: "In what way is this event affecting the lives of vulnerable civilians now, and in what ways may this event affect the course of future events that may cause them and others harm in the future?" When you read about something bad that's happened, be it the passing of bad legislation or some natural or intentional harm affecting many people, what are your foremost concerns?