Mark Steyn: Obama Hits Romney For 'Politicizing' White House Failure

'The entire reason that this has become the political topic it is is because of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan."

So said Stephanie Cutter, President Obama's deputy campaign manager, speaking on CNN about an armed attack on the 9/11 anniversary that left a U.S. Consulate a smoking ruin and killed four diplomatic staff, including the first American ambassador to be murdered in a third of a century.

To discuss this event is apparently to "politicize" it and to distract from the real issues the American people are concerned about. For example, Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki, speaking on board Air Force One on Thursday:

"There's only one candidate in this race who is going to continue to fight for Big Bird and Elmo, and he is riding on this plane."

She's right! The U.S. is the first nation in history whose democracy has evolved to the point where its leader is provided with a wide-body, trans-Atlantic jet in order to campaign on the vital issue of public funding for sock puppets. Sure, Caligula put his horse in the Senate, but it was a real horse.

And this:

That's the funny thing about Big Government: The bigger it gets, the more of life it swallows up, the worse it gets at those very few things it's supposed to be doing. So on the first anniversary of 9/11 in a post-revolutionary city in which Western diplomats had been steadily targeted over the previous six months, the government of the supposedly most powerful nation on earth entrusted its security to Abdulaziz Majbari, 29, and his pal, who report to some bloke back in Carmarthen, Wales.

In the days before the attack, Joe Biden had been peddling his Obama campaign slogan that: "Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive." The first successful terrorist attack on U.S. sovereign territory since 9/11, and on the very anniversary and by al-Qaida-linked killers, was not helpful to the Obama team.

And so the nature of the event had to be "politicized": Look, over there — an Islamophobic movie! "Greater love hath no man than this," quoth the president at Chris Stevens' coffin, "that a man lay down his life for his friends." Smaller love hath no man than Obama's, than to lay down his "friend" for a couple of points in Ohio.