Obama aide: “Irrelevant” where president was during Benghazi attacks

Obama aide: “Irrelevant” where president was during Benghazi attacks. Must’ve been someplace really embarrassing politically, eh?

This post was last modified on January 26, 2021

Bonfire of the Absurdities: After 35 year career writing software for IBM mainframes, am now self-employed contractor thinking of joining a union and striking for higher wages. Cured morbid fear of heights when I learned to look at them as lengths standing on end. Uncompromising in refusal to accept browser cookies. Amateur investor who has accumulated a small fortune in the market after starting out years ago with a large one. For recreation, I run, hike, kayak and play tennis but will not consider synchronized swimming under any circumstances.

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  • I listen to a sorry, unpatriotic bastard like this and I think, "Where is Joseph Stalin when we need him?".

    Just sayin'. :)

    Oh - I put the smiley face in this message so when the IRS or CIA or DIA or any other anti-American organization of the government reads this, they will think I was just kidding. Hope it works!

    • My guess is that Stalin is buried in Chicago. Before you laugh to hard, his only daughter lives in Madison,WI & no, I do not visit her when I'm in Madison...

      http://host.madison.com/news/local/doug_moe/lana-about-svetlana-stalin-s-daughter-on-her-life-in/article_85ebc5d0-4978-11df-b181-001cc4c002e0.html

      Stalin's daughter and Wisconsinite Lana Peters dies at 85

      Lana Peters — who was known internationally by her previous name, Svetlana Alliluyeva — died of colon cancer Nov. 22 in Wisconsin.

      Doug Moe: Lana Peters, Stalin's daughter, a political prisoner to the end

      Lana Peters, the only daughter and last surviving child of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, died of colon cancer Nov. 22 in Richland County.

      She lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Richland Center, surrounded by photos of her beloved daughter.

      "I am quite happy here," she said.

      She was seated in her living room, having positioned herself away from the window. The sunlight hurts her eyes.

      She was asked: "Do your neighbors know your background?"

      "I don't know," she said. "Probably they will now."

      Lana Peters, 84, is the only daughter of Josef Stalin, the brutal dictator of the Soviet Union who died in 1953.

      Her defection to the United States in 1967 - when she was known as Svetlana Alliluyeva - made headlines around the world.

      Peters first came to Wisconsin in 1970, and while she has lived elsewhere, sometimes for extended periods, she has always returned. She moved to Richland Center from Spring Green within the past three years.

      Peters is a small woman. She uses a cane and has some difficulty walking, but her mind is lively. She smiles often. She likes to sew and read, mostly non-fiction. She listens to public radio and doesn't own a television set.

      While insisting she is not reclusive, Peters rarely gives interviews. She granted this one, she said, because she wanted to try to clarify a comment attributed to her - taken from a documentary film on her life - that appeared in an Associated Press story in Monday's Wisconsin State Journal.

      The film, "Svetlana About Svetlana," directed by Lana Parshina, plays the Wisconsin Film Festival on Sunday.

      Lana about Svetlana

      Parshina interviewed Peters in Spring Green in the summer of 2007. According to the Associated Press story on the film, Peters talks in "Svetlana About Svetlana" of how, in retrospect, she might have been better off living in a neutral country, like Switzerland, rather than coming to the United States.

      This week, Peters said she's glad to be here.

      "I am quite well and happy," she said. "Richland Center has a hospital and good social services for seniors."

      Peters continued: "I have an American-born daughter. The only unhappiness of my life is that I would like to live closer to her."

      The daughter, Olga, who now goes by the name Chrese Evans, lives in Portland, Ore.

      The daughter was the result of Peters' 1970 marriage to William Wesley Peters, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright.

      It was through Wright's widow at Taliesin that Peters met her future husband. After her defection to the United States, she said, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright invited her to visit Taliesin West in Arizona and Taliesin in Spring Green.

      "I was snowed by letters of invitation," she said. "For six months they kept inviting me. I was never very anxious in the beginning. Finally I could not refuse her because she was an old lady and she wrote me very sweet letters."

      The payoff was a whirlwind romance - just a few weeks - ending in a brief marriage to Wes Peters, and a daughter.

      Peters thinks now that she was invited to Taliesin because it was thought she had personal wealth through her late father.

      "This is completely ridiculous," she said. "My father was a very old-fashioned man. He believed that children should have no money. He never gave, even allowance, to me or my brothers. He lived completely on state expense. He never acquired private wealth."

      Stalin a tough father

      Peters was asked if she thinks often of her father.

      "No," she said. "He broke my life. I want to explain to you. He broke my life twice."

      She said she had fallen in love with an older man, a writer and filmmaker named Aleksei Kapler. Her father did not approve.

      "I was 17," she said. "He put to jail, and then to labor camp, the man who I loved. I saw for the first time that my father could do that."

      Kapler had introduced her to the arts - giving her books, taking her to galleries - and Peters said the second time her father "broke" her life came when she applied at a university to study the arts.

      Josef Stalin scoffed. "Bohemians," Peters recalled him saying. "You want to be with Bohemians?" He insisted she study history and become "an educated Marxist."

      Peters was asked: "Do you think your father loved you?"

      "Oh, yes," she said. "I looked like his mother. I had this red hair, which I still have. It's not colored. It's my own hair. I have freckles all over, like her."

      She continued: "He was a very simple man. Very rude. Very cruel. There was nothing in him that was complicated. He was very simple with us. He loved me and he wanted me to be with him and become an educated Marxist."

      She said her father could never imagine her living outside of Russia, but she has, for 43 years, apart from two years in the 1980s when she moved back.

      Home

      Now Richland Center is home. "I have many friends here," she said. "People who I recognize."

      She wouldn't mind relocating to Portland to be nearer her daughter, Peters said. But moving is expensive and her daughter enjoys coming to Wisconsin to visit.

      They speak most nights on the phone. The Associated Press story Monday said Peters' daughter worries that the documentary film is an invasion of her mother's privacy, but Peters has reconciled herself to one unshakable reality of her life.

      "Wherever I go," she said, "here, or Switzerland, or India, or wherever. Australia. Some island. I always will be a political prisoner of my father's name."

  • Where the Obummer was during the Benghazi attack is irrelevant, it's what he didn't do to try to save American lives that matters. I wouldn't care if he was poking Moochell at the time as long as he answered his phone in mid-stroke and authorized someone to do something.

    • Personally I believe he was the pokee. That's why he hustled off to bed, Reggie was there. Or, maybe Tingles, in which case Obozo was most likely the poker.

    • Poking HER? Bwaahahahahahahahahahaha! He may have poked her once - for the older daughter, though my guess is test tube. He definitely didn't do the second - the one they never show pics of since she doesn't look even a bit like him. Shame though, because the little one is cute.

        • Ok that was cute. Really. When I see this family together, I really WANT to like them. Maybe I do, a little bit. But O is so toxic that I just can't allow myself to admit liking anything about him, and his arrogant, racist wife. It's a shame, because he COULD have been such a good role model for young black men, who desperately need some good role models.

          • This man guarantees 50 more years of the same welfare poverty cycle that blacks have been experiencing since the Great Society.

          • Johnson was his name right? Didn't he promise 200 years of Blacks voting Democrat? I don't know what is going to take to break that curse so to speak, but if it is broken, I can assure you that Democratic power will wane... however with that said, Democrats may not care since they have hooked Hispanics and Hispanics are now the greatest minority group in the country.

  • Now we see yet again another example of their executive hubris. This ass-clown states Susan "Fried" Rice is owed an apology, since she is not the one who altered the talking points. Never mind the White House Obama-zealots who commanded the Intelligence Community to change reality and whichever moron sent Fried Rice out to spread the LIE. IF she is owed an apology, its from those who set her up, probably on the promise of a promotion to SOS. These pukes all drink from the Alinsky Kool-Aid trough. Unmitigated arrogance.

  • What a smug dick head. Ol president quagmire was right there in the situation room when SEAL team 6 was taking care of Bin-Laden. When 4 Americans where left to die, he could not be found and could not be bothered with such a minor thing.

    As I've said before, Benghazi is the one thing that this administration fears most. The other two scandals are to distract and try to run out the clock on Benghazi and hope that it all goes away. All other things need to come to a complete and utter stand still. There should be full blown hearings, with those testifying being read the Miranda rights. Put every last one in the seat and let the story be told.

    Quagmire wanted the job and the perks. He just does not wish to deal with those issues that truly are the mark of a man and what they are made of. He is nothing more than a CHICKEN SHIT president who only can be bothered when he is going to look good. The stink coming from 1600 Pennsylvania most be over whelming to the residents around it.

  • Spot on comments above. When O said "there's no there there" he must have been referring to his performance during the attack. and the losers like this weasel in the link are zeros just like their idol.

  • He went to bed because he couldn't be bothered by the situation, he had to go to Vegas the next day. That's what they don't want us to know.

    • That's it exactly. He probably wasn't doing anything exciting at all. We know from reports that came out soon after that he went to bed, and then jetted off to the Beyonce/JayZ thugfest in Las Vegas the next day.

      It was absolutely infuriating back then that no medic would touch it. Even if no one had died, it was absolutely inappropriate for the president to go fundraising after an attack on US soil. I remember how mad people were, remembering and comparing the level of vitriol and condemnation from the media when GWB finished reading the story to the children after 911, but THAT was clearly a case of compassion, and not wanting to frighten children.

      Compare that to the coverage of Obama's glitterfest after Benghazi, and no one in their sane mind could fail to see how incredibly biased the media is. Or how incredibly egocentric and ill-suited a "leader" Obama is.

      • Seriously can you imagine if George Bush got up in haste and just left the room? The media would be all over him. The situation with GB is all about damn if he did and damn if he didn't. Obama is getting way too many passes. All in all the truth of the matter is, someone told him, he simply did not care, gave the order to do nothing and let it play out and went to sleep. No one probably had the guts to call him when the second wave started and just let it played out again. Seriously this is one of the worst Presidents we ever had and in this case is due to inaction which proved to be deadly.

  • He was in his Fortress of Solitude, contemplating his awesome coolness, and the staff have strict orders not to disturb him when he's there.

  • Where he was is less important than what he was doing and what he knew at the time. Either way, all we're getting is media back wash.

  • It's irrelevant as long as he was not were he was supposed to be. If he was where he was supposed to be that means he did make the call to stand down letting those men die.