Did Saul Alinsky’s Rule #8 fail Barack and Hillary?

One of the ideological mentors to both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was Saul Alinsky, the modern day founder of Community Organizing who dedicated his most known work – Rules for Radicals – to Lucifer. Though Obama never met Alinsky, he was an enthusiastic acolyte. Hillary not only met uncle Saul but she did her senior thesis on him at Wellesley. The current Secretary of State so impressed Alinsky that he offered her a job, though she turned it down to pursue other goals.

When it comes to the decision to point to the anti-Muhammad video as the cause for violence in Benghazi, Alinsky’s Rule #8 is interesting indeed:

Rule 8: Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”

Consider that sometime after the 9/11/12 attack in Benghazi and the early morning hours of 9/13/12, a decision appears to have been made to blame the anti-Muhammad video for the attack. Here is an excerpt from a pre-recorded interview Obama gave to CBS’ Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes. According to CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson, this interview was recorded 14 hours after the attack. Note how Obama’s comments here don’t appear to be consistent with the meme that the anti-Muhammad video was responsible:

Also on the 12th, in the Rose Garden, the narrative that the video was responsible hadn’t fully developed yet. Though Obama made comments about not denigrating other religions, the video’s exploitation relative to the attack in Benghazi specifically doesn’t seem to have been complete by then (though it had been pointed to as the cause for storming the U.S. embassy in Cairo).

At some point thereafter, a decision appears to have been made by someone in the Obama administration to stretch the Muslim world’s identification of the video as the cause for the Cairo attacks to what happened in Benghazi.

On September 13th, Hillary pointed directly at the video. On September 14th, at Andrews Air Force Base, the attempt to connect the video to the Benghazi attack was visibly more pronounced as Clinton pointed to the video while the caskets of four Americans were on display. We later learned that she told Charles Woods, the father of the fallen Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, that the filmmaker would be arrested and prosecuted.

As Hillary was pointing to the video while speaking at Andrews Air Force Base on the 14th, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was making a forceful proclamation in front of the White House Press Corps. – on that same day – that the video was responsible. Notice the leap, here. Up until this point, the only attack that was being blamed on the video was the one in Cairo. When Carney makes blames the Benghazi attack on the video, ABC’s Jake Tapper calls him on it, largely because it was such a significant leap at the time.

Keep in mind that as Carney was walking out on this limb, Hillary was at Andrews doing the same thing… in front of four caskets.

September 14th may have been the date at which the administration passed the point of no return when it came to the anti-Muhammad video narrative. If that wasn’t the date, September 16th certainly was, when U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice pointed to the video five separate times on five separate Sunday shows, as the cause for the Benghazi attack.

On page 24 of Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote:

“The end is what you want, the means is how you get it. Whenever we think about social change, the question of means and ends arises. The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work…. The real arena is corrupt and bloody.”

If Obama and Hillary decided to go to the Alinsky well by pointing to a video as the cause for the Benghazi attack, thinking that they could use “all events of the period” for their purpose, their mentor appears to have let them down.

I’m not sure what they expected.

After all, their handbook was dedicated to the prince of darkness.

Ben Barrack is a talk show host and author of the book, Unsung Davids, which features a chapter on Walid Shoebat

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