1. Benghazi Terror Attack
In a nation that enjoys freedom of the press, there is a certain liberal bias in the American mainstream media that is very much alive today. Last year, in the midst of our last major election cycle, they sanctified Barack Obama with stories about his upbringing, boasting his two major accomplishments of his first term in office (the killing of Osama bin Laden and the passage of health care reform) and providing in depth profiles about his basketball game. At the same time, it vilified Mitt Romney with every single skeleton it could possibly find, including every foreign investment, every business deal overseas, embarrassing stories from his prep school days, and even a rather strange story of him putting his dog on the roof of his car. I say this because I blame the media for this Benghazi debacle just as much as I blame the President, having basically swept this under the rug during the 2012 reelection campaign save a select few journalists who have been warned to back off, including the great Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News and several Fox News correspondents, who are seen as biased anyway (oddly enough by the same people who watch MSNBC for their primary news source). On September 11, 2012, the 11th anniversary of the deadly attacks in New York City, Virginia and Pennsylvania, the United States embassy in Benghazi, Libya was attacked by mortar fire over the course of several hours, leaving U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other State Department employees dead. In the days following the attack, the President and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice came out and condemned the anti-Islamic film that sparked the protests that lead to the deadly attack. The only problem? According to CIA talking points released later on, it was known very early on that this was nothing more than a vicious, premeditated terror attack and had absolutely nothing to do with any such video. So what is the controversy here regarding the President when this story mainly implicates the CIA, Susan Rice and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton? Well, nobody really knows what Obama was doing the night of the attack. Even former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta testified before Congress that he only spoke with Obama once during the entire attack and then didn't hear from him again until some time after the cease fire. Some say he was briefly apprised of the situation and let his team "do their thing," if you will, some say he was briefly apprised and then went to bed, some even say he was on the campaign trail in Las Vegas with Jay-Z and Beyoncé, a debate which senior White House officials have called "irrelevant." You read that right. Irrelevant. Whichever you believe, there is absolutely no reason that the American people should have any doubt of where their President is or what he is doing at a time like that. When we got Osama bin Laden, for which I extend my never ending praise, there was that famous photo taken of Obama and co. hunkered down in the situation room watching the live feed from Abbottabad. Where was that prowess when terrorists attacked our embassy in one of the most dangerous nations in the world, where requests for additional security were repeatedly denied, a charge for which Hillary Clinton infamously asserted "what difference does it make?" Why was this asserted to be a response to an anti-Islamic video for so long by Obama administration officials before it was finally dubbed a blatant act of terror? I guess my entire point of this piece is this: what if all of this had happened under George W. Bush? There would be even farther reaching Congressional oversight and investigative journalism into the Benghazi attack, calls for impeachment over the drone strike on a U.S. citizen as well as the PRISM program, a program which even the author of its blanket bill, the Patriot Act, John Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin argued was never the intention of his bill. Barack Obama was the candidate of change, but what's really changed since the Bush era? The government is still analyzing our phone calls more so now than before, Guantanamo Bay is still very much alive and well, Detroit is bankrupt and GDP is struggling to grow at even a fraction of a percent out of the worst recession in our history from the Bush era. I'm proud of President Obama for proving with his election to office that in America, anything is possible and that the dark days of segregation are largely behind us, but our nation is tacking on $16 trillion in debt, a figure that is expected to only rise with the implementation of the health care overhaul as it stands now. That on top of all of the problems I've listed in this article, I say again, what's changed?