THE FACTS: At no point has Clinton said--or even implied--that it makes no difference whether Americans died in the Benghazi attacks. Clinton's well-known quote came at a January 2013 Senate hearing when she was pressed about the motive for the attack. Her point was that it was less important to understand the reason for the attack than in knowing what to do about it. Republicans have persistently criticized the Obama administration for initially and wrongly blaming the attack on an anti-US protest.
Whether Clinton as secretary of state acted properly in that crisis is a matter of enduring debate. But she was not, as Pence suggested, cold about the fact that Americans died.
Trump bashed Jeb Bush on education, who Trump said was "in favor of common core."
"I thought Romney could do it," Trump, who backed the candidate during the last election, said. "I don't want what happened to Mitt Romney to happen again."
STEIN: It's very clear that there is blowback going on now across the Middle East, not only the unrest directed at the Libyan embassy. 75% of Pakistanis actually identify the US now as their enemy, not as their supporter or their ally. And, you know, in many ways, we're seeing a very ill-conceived, irresponsible and immoral war policy come back to haunt us, where US foreign policies have been based, unfortunately, on brute military force and wars for oil. Under my administration, we will have a foreign policy based on international law and human rights and the use of diplomacy.
STEIN: The tragedy in Libya, I think, is a very good case in point that really shows how this "get tough" international policy has really been extremely unproductive, has really produced the opposite effect of what was intended. And we're seeing this now not only in Libya, but in the demonstrations against U.S. embassies across the Middle East, in the fact that the Afghanistan army is shooting at U.S. soldiers. The war effort really is not being turned over to an Afghan army. The Afghan army itself has a very high desertion rate. We need a foreign policy based not on "tough guy" militarism, but on international law and respect for human rights, not on wars for oil.
RYAN: It took the president two weeks to acknowledge that this was a terrorist attack. Our ambassador in Paris has a Marine detachment guarding him. Shouldn't we have a Marine detachment guarding our ambassador in Benghazi?
BIDEN: With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. The congressman here cut embassy security in his budget by $300 million below what we asked for.
Q: What were you first told about the attack? Why were people talking about protests?
BIDEN: Because that's exactly what we were told by the intelligence community. You know, usually when there's a crisis, we pull together as a nation. But even before we knew what happened to the ambassador, the governor was holding a press conference. That's not presidential leadership.
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