Here’s what Susan Rice said:

“Our current assessment is that what happened in Benghazi was in fact initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo… Almost a copycat of the demonstrations against our facility in Cairo, which were prompted, of course, by the video.”

Here’s what the talking points said:

“The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the United States embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault.”

Anything else?

It’s not about whether the CIA substituted “extremists” for “Al Qaeda”, it’s about the video claim.

I’ll be very happy to drop it, when I see the cover story included in the “talking points”. Right now it looks like you and whomever else are trying to sweep it under the rug by simply denying there’s an issue.

And the entire rightwing view on this is preposterous and the shifting target has become impossible to coherently follow on a day to day basis.

Amazing how that keeps bouncing off you. The classified briefing was much less ambiguous, and was available to the President, his Cabinet, and the State Department.

Note that you have now simultaneously subscribed to two contradicting premises:

1) Obama knew it was a terror attack and immediately said so (the Rose Garden debate controversy)

2) The administration honestly thought it was all about the video, and spread that meme far and wide.

I have more of an “Occam’s Razor” analysis:

Obama knew damn well what happened within a few days of the attack, if not hours. An organized terrorist attack on a U.S. embassy would have blown the bottom out of Obama’s “Al Qaeda is on the run” meme prior to an election, so he decided to make it all about the video, confident (for whatever reason) that no further information would ever come out and that the compliant media would spike the story for him if it did. His Cabinet did what they were told.

I can’t get at the WSJ article without a subscription.