Fatal Errors

In the early days of computers, everyone had to use command prompts to accomplish their task. If you gave an impossible command, the computer would flash the words, "Fatal Error" in big red letters on the screen and the entire program would stop. The computer was protecting itself from the incompetence of the operator by keeping that operator from taking another step in a direction that could potentially destroy the entire hard drive.

In order to proceed, someone with the proper authorization codes had to override the warning and make the necessary corrections before the computer would go back online. Sometimes the only possible correction was to restart the entire system.

We need those flashing red letters now.

In the Vice-Presidential debate, we discovered that the American embassy in Paris has an entire detachment of Marines guarding it to ensure the safety of our ambassador and the rest of our delegation. The embassy in Benghazi had no such protection.

The Obama administration has been trying to sell the story that the reason is because the Republican House would not provide more funds.

This is, to use the Vice-President’s favorite word, malarkey.

The issue at hand is not how much money the administration had to work with, the issue is how they chose to allocate the resources at their disposal.

It’s the kind of budget decision that every one of us makes every single day. We look at what we need, and then decide how to spend what we have based on the relative importance of each item on our list. We may need new tires for the car, and new curtains for our windows. We can only afford one, so we purchase the tires because safety is more important than appearance.

The Obama administration needs to ensure the safety of our foreign delegations. They decided that it was more important to put our Marines in Paris than in Libya, so they spent the funds they had based on that decision.

With that decision, they are telling us that they considered the situation in Paris to be so much more dangerous than the situation in Libya that they had to deny Marine protection to Libya to send an entire detachment to Paris.

The Americans in Libya knew that they were in danger. In fact, they were flashing big red letters across the State Department’s screen over and over again. But the administration’s State Department used its authority and overrode the warnings.

This is not a funding problem – this is a judgment problem.

And those judgment errors literally WERE fatal because four Americans were brutally murdered.

Any administration that allocates more resources to protect to Paris than to protect Libya is beyond "correcting". It needs to be shut down, as soon as possible.

This November we have the opportunity to do just that. It’s time to end the Fatal Error that is commonly known as the Obama Administration. No other American should have to pay the ultimate price for their incompetence.