Huckleberry and Benghazi!™
by digby
For those who have been puzzled by the right’s obsession with Benghazi!™ this ad should clear it all up:
This is a traditional Republican appeal to patriotism. It’s been subdued for a few years because of the Iraq disaster but it always comes back. It’s a huge part of the GOP’s sales pitch and extremely important for a large part of their Southern base.
Fox hasn’t been pimping the Benghazi!™ story for no reason. The word has been repeated so often that it’s now just a brand name, like “Whitewater” — or “Obamacare.” The details don’t really matter — just saying it in front of a GOP crowd is guaranteed to evoke a hostile response in the audience. Graham is going to use it in his Senate race and the GOP candidate for president will most certainly use it against Hillary Clinton in 2016. They need to have something to hang their patriot flag on and I’d guess Roger Ailes thought it would be smart to ensure that Clinton could be personally smothered in it.
Whether this will actually help them win in the near term is another question. But they’re going to be banking on making something of the fact that a woman can’t have a big swinging foreign policy and I suppose this is one way to do that. That Huckleberry Graham is deploying it is a delicious irony.
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