Paul Ryan made the link last night while chatting with Greta Van Susteren on her Fox News show, On the Record.
"This [embassy attack] is a tragedy; this is outrageous. And of all the things we need in a moment like this going forward is we need peace and constraint.
Our adversaries who are tempted to test us need to know that America is strong militarily, that we’re not going to have these devastating cuts that I think questions the resolve and the strength of our military and our president needs to speak with force and with clarity for our principles."
As it happens, that fits perfectly with the Romney-Ryan campaign's attack on Barack Obama over potential defense cuts from sequestration-- an attack that began before the embassy crisis and one that showed up in a series of swing state ads that launched earlier this week.
Via Fox News, here's the transcript.
VAN SUSTEREN: If you were vice president working with a President Romney, what would he be thinking today?
RYAN: Well, I’d want to get to the bottom of it, number one.
Number two, I would not speak in equivocal terms. I disagree with the original statements that the embassy put out, that the administration put out in Cairo, sympathizing with the people who were storming the embassy. We should stand up for our values. We should stand up for our free speech rights.
And so I think that statement was wrong. And the administration was right to walk it back after they had stood by that statement a couple of times. Now what happened in Benghazi afterwards, we’ve lost four of our diplomats. Our ambassador was killed. This is a tragedy; this is outrageous. And of all the things we need in a moment like this going forward is we need peace and constraint.
Our adversaries who are tempted to test us need to know that America is strong militarily, that we’re not going to have these devastating cuts that I think questions the resolve and the strength of our military and our president needs to speak with force and with clarity for our principles.
VAN SUSTEREN: (Inaudible) several issues. One is how you achieve peace and restraint. Two, we have this issue of sequestration and, three, Afghanistan. What are we going to do about Afghanistan? So you want to sort of pick off which one?
RYAN: Sure. So peace and strength, what we mean is don’t gut the military. The president, don’t forget, gave us a big cut to the military, $478 billion, which we think goes past the bone, compromises readiness, force strength. We need to give our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines the equipment they need to do their job as safely as possible.
Sequestration, I know you’ve talked about this; it’s kind of a wonky word. We passed the legislation in the House; I authored it to prevent it from happening by cutting government spending elsewhere. There’s a lot of waste in Washington; let’s get after that.
Now there’s waste in the Pentagon. We definitely have to go after that. But this goes far past that. And by doing this, by having these reckless defense cuts coming down the pike, that’s coming under President Obama’s lack of leadership or his proposals, that we (inaudible). That is not (inaudible) strength.
