"Not optimal"

By

Joe Chiarenzelli

President Obama with running mate (we can dream) Jon Stewart.

If you watch the news closely, and I do, you see a lot of stories blow up that are out of context and dadaesque. For instance, that dude who bit another person’s face off on bath salts. That totally didn’t happen; he wasn’t on bath-salts.

Tonight I was able to catch an overblown story in its infancy and I’ll be damned if I don’t point it out.

On tonight's Daily Show, Barack Obama said, “Here is what I will say, if four Americans get killed it is not optimal." Seems obviously cold and calculating right, almost as if he doesn’t care about the lives of Chris Stevens and the others killed in Libya?

Before the conservatives get their "mitts" on this one: it's completely nonsense.

Leaving aside matters of semantics let’s all of us think about what we learned in school. When a question is asked on a test, what do you do? You reuse the terms established in the question as part of your answer.

So, when Jon Stewart asks a question asking if the handling of the Libya situation is optimal, I think we can all expect President Obama to respond and use the term in that response.

Thank you CNN:

Stewart pressed the president on the aftermath of the terror attack that killed four Americans at a U.S. consulate in Benghazi last month. The administration has faced scrutiny over why the post was not more robustly staffed with security.

The comedian said the administration's response did not play out in an "optimal" way.

"I would say, even you would admit, it was not the optimal response, at least to the American people, as far as all of us being on the same page," Stewart said.

The president replied: "When four Americans get killed, it's not optimal. We're going to fix it. All of it."

Now, when we eventually see this in a Romney campaign ad, look at it in context and meet it with your knowledge of the situation, not with the knee-jerk emotional response it’s asking for. I don’t care what political opinions you hold but this nonsense where everyone gets all riled up for an innocuous sound bite has to stop.

Unless of course Romney says he needs another wife... or a binder of them.