Benghazi comedy and some keen insight
by digby
The Colbert Report and Daily Shows both had hilarious takes on the 60 Minutes debacle last night. Here’s Stephen:
Stewart takes on Huckleberry Graham’s refusal to change his view in light of the “correction”:
On a more serious note, this piece on the hoax and its meaning by Amy Davidson gets to the point I’ve recently come to understand is at the heart of this controversy: Lara Logan’s mediocre journalism (which is informed by her highly romantic, Manichean worldview):
It’s a sad aspect of this story that Logan claims the segment was more than a year in the making. Where did the time go? In the fairly long piece, Logan fails to offer any real statement about the Administration’s perspective. Only two other people are interviewed on camera. One is a military man who doesn’t understand why the diplomats didn’t get out of Benghazi months earlier. Another is a diplomat who doesn’t understand why, at the critical moment, significant military forces didn’t move into Benghazi from across the border. Davies, who is somehow supposed to tie these threads together, doesn’t understand why, on the first day he first arrived in the city, he found Libyan guards “inside, drinking tea, laughing and joking” rather than looking sharp, and why everyone didn’t heed a private contractor, like him. Not that Davies is identified as such: he’s a “security officer,” Logan says. “A former British soldier, he’s been helping to keep U.S. diplomats and military leaders safe for the last decade.” (Nor does she mention that his book, promoted in the segment, was published by Simon & Schuster, a unit of CBS, something she has admitted was a mistake.) But who knows what Davies said before or during the attack. His account is about as good as a spilled cup of tea, making the rest unreadable.
Those military and diplomatic questions deserve better answers, ones about policy choices rather than half-discerned conspiracies. You wouldn’t know from Logan’s report that the United States was engaged at the time in a historic and violent transition in Libya, in which the Qaddafi regime was overthrown with the help of our forces, or about that revolution’s disordered denouement, or about the Obama Administration’s decision to ignore the War Powers Act. Libya is presented as nothing but a place with a diplomatic mission and Al Qaeda’s black flags in the street. Brave men swinging rifle butts are thwarted by craven ones in Washington who won’t move their “military assets” into the country.
And as she points out, nobody’s bothering to tell the real story:
Benghazi the scandal is full of absurdities. Libya, the real country, is the scene of its own national tragedy, and an American one, the walls of which have barely been scaled.
Logan’s not interested in such panty-waist navel-gazing so unless that story can be told through stories of brave mercenaries saving Western Civilization from the forces of darkness, I wouldn’t count on 60 Minutes to do it. You’ll get a much more grounded understanding by watching Colbert and Stewart.
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