Why Benghazi? Message: they care
by digby
For those of you trying to figure out just what in the hell the wingnuts are pretending to be all upset about with Benghazi, Jon Podhoretz runs it down in simple terms. Basically, it’s that they’ convinced the administration knew it was a terrorist attack and tried to cover it up in the early days of the raid. Blah, blah, blah.
We don’t know why the Obama administration chose to do this. We can speculate. We can guess it did so because it had developed a story line for the 2012 election in which al Qaeda was dead, and this muddied that story line.
But there’s a very good counter-argument that, politically, Obama missed an opportunity: He could have gotten up and said, “I’m the man who got bin Laden, and we’ll get these men, too.” That would’ve rallied the country. Who would’ve objected? Who would’ve criticized?
The point is, all we will have is speculation until someone on the inside gives up the goods in a memoir, if anyone ever does.
Is this an impeachable offense? No. Will Hillary Clinton’s evident involvement in the revision of the administration’s line on Benghazi harm her presidential chances in 2016? No.
Will this be of great political utility to Republicans? No. Will this harm Democrats terribly? No — even though Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings did say, “Death is a part of life,” in response to the fact that four Americans were slaughtered by terrorists.
One might wonder, then, why the Republicans have worked themselves up into full-blown hysteria over this. I have my theory — that Roger Ailes and the boys are dusting off the old Clinton scandal playbook, which can most accurately be described as making chicken salad out of chicken shit.
But that’s not the official story among the so-called intellectual right at least as represented by J-Pod:
We can say it’s a big deal because of the testimony of Eric Nordstrom, the regional security officer in Libya at the time of the attacks. “It matters to me personally and it matters to my colleagues at the Department of State,” Nordstrom said as his voice cracked with sorrow and he paused several times to choke back tears. “It matters to the American public for whom we serve and, most importantly, it matters to the friends and family of Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods, who were murdered on Sept. 11.”
Those old softies.
Update: Mark Ambinder spells it out
Consider me as confused as Terrence Jeffries. The voluble conservative gadfly let it slip on Sean Hannity’s radio program today that he really doesn’t know what possible motivation the Obama administration would have for altering talking points about the Benghazi terrorist attack, or in forcing Hillary Clinton to go along with a conspiracy to somehow cover up something having to do with the death of four American diplomats and intelligence officers.
A few seconds earlier, Jeffries had described a statement that went out from the U.S. embassy in Egypt attempting to calm passions amid the firefight. (He directly attributed the statement to Hillary Clinton, but hey, why let facts get in the way?) Said Jeffries: “They need to explain that Sean. They haven’t done it yet. The root of it is Hillary Clinton.”
Hannity isn’t quite ready to move on. “I think Hillary was running interference for Obama but I’m convinced that the talking points had to go through the re-election campaign that was located in the White House.”
But Jeffries must make sure that the blame lies with Hillary Clinton; the buck must stop with her, because she’s going to run for president in 2016, and Jeffries needs to raise money off of her, and he needs to begin to draw a caricature of her as uncaring, unfeeling, and willing to let four Americans die rather than face up to the fact of an al Qaeda renaissance.
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