Fat chance

I generally shy away from trumpeting my son’s fine writing over at Mother Jones, but this graphic from his latest post caught my eye:

For those who may wonder what the relationship is between American presidents and attacks on U.S. diplomatic targets, that’s just the point:  there is none, even if it looks to me as if the numbers might support the thesis that democratic administrations suffer fewer such attacks on average than their predecessors.  But the Romney campaign is claiming its man would prevent such attacks by projecting strength.  Fat chance.

Note to Paul Ryan:  Marine guards are not trained to protect ambassadors.  Their primary responsibility is to protect the information in the embassy.  In a crisis, they help protect the embassy itself, but primary responsibility for that lies with the host government.  If host government protection is inadequate, the embassy beefs up private security guards and the ambassador gets a personal security detail of people trained for that purpose (usually private contractors), not marine guards.