Lara Logan Calls Obama a Liar

It’s not something you hear very often from the mainstream media. It’s not even something you have been hearing very often from the Romney campaign.

CBS News correspondent Lara Logan says it flat out: Obama is lying to the American people.

Reporting on Logan’s speech in the Chicago Sun-Times Laura Washington declares that it is refreshing to see a journalist step into a policy debate.

One hates to have to say it, but Logan earned her right to speak out against Islamic fanaticism. She discovered the reality of the Arab Spring last year when she suffered a violent assault in Tahrir Square.

Washington reports:

[Logan’s] … ominous and frightening message was gleaned from years of covering our wars in the Middle East. She arrived in Chicago on the heels of her Sept. 30 report, “The Longest War.” It examined the Afghanistan conflict and exposed the perils that still confront America, 11 years after 9/11.

Eleven years later, “they” still hate us, now more than ever, Logan told the crowd. The Taliban and al-Qaida have not been vanquished, she added. They’re coming back.

“I chose this subject because, one, I can’t stand, that there is a major lie being propagated . . .” Logan declared in her native South African accent.

The lie is that America’s military might has tamed the Taliban.

“There is this narrative coming out of Washington for the last two years,” Logan said. It is driven in part by “Taliban apologists,” who claim “they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban,” she added sarcastically. “It’s such nonsense!”

Logan stepped way out of the “objective,” journalistic role. The audience was riveted as she told of plowing through reams of documents, and interviewing John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan; Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and a Taliban commander trained by al-Qaida. The Taliban and al-Qaida are teaming up and recruiting new terrorists to do us deadly harm, she reports.

She made a passionate case that our government is downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: “You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.”

Our enemies are writing the story, she suggests, and there’s no happy ending for us.

At a time when Barack Obama is crowing about how he kept his promise to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is good to have someone from the media point out that he is merely ending American participation in those wars.

Note that Obama does not talk about winning wars, but ending them. And he does not talk about how he ended them.

If the only thing you care about is ending a war as quickly as possible, the best way is to surrender and walk away.

There’s nothing to boast about in that.  .