Benghazi and the Right

I keep hearing about this Benghazi incident when I speak with my friends of the conservative right.  It seems to me like it has become the talking point for those against Obama's foreign affairs.  I find it strange that, despite several stories from news sources, such as NPR, CNN and the BBC, the right feels that there has not been enough coverage of the intelligence failure, or cover-up of the Benghazi incident, despite continued violence there and elsewhere in the Middle East.  

If you don't know what I'm talking about, and blinked your eyes during September 2012, there's a good chance you missed the stories.  So, to summarize, I will relate the story.  Late on the evening of September 11th, 2012 - amid the presidential election - an attack on a US Consulate in Libya occurred, killing four Americans, including the ambassador.  The car bomb strike was, at first, claimed to be part of a riot taking place over a video made by a right wing extremist about the "truth" of Mohammed, the prophet of Islam.  The video made such a mockery of the religious leader, it sparked outrage and violence across the Islamic world. At first, people on the right raced to defend the man's free speech - but then, some other reports began coming out of the White House.  The CIA now informed the president that it was, in fact, an attack by a terrorist or insurgent group specifically targeting the US Consulate.  Hillary Clinton resigned as Secretary of State, Obama said it was a mistake on the side of Intelligence because lots of things were happening at the same time, and several news outlets had to retract stories when the new evidence came out.

Here's the timeline of the actual events, from factcheck.org.  As evidence shows, the White House knew more than they let on.  Awesome.  So, of course, they say things to make it seem okay without apologizing, as every politician does.  As the information came to them, clearly in a controlled stream meant to trickle out so it would seem less of an impact on the presidential race, they began to clarify exactly what took place.

Great, so now we know what happened and now we can start going after the people in Libya who planned and coordinated the attack - right?  No, now we spend two years in a committee talking about what really happened and what the White House knew.  We create several sub-committees, and then a special panel on the attack, all over what's being called an intelligence failure.  Why?  Oh, yeah, politics.

Politics.  It's why we never truly got the whole story from 9/11/01.  Hundreds of witnesses refute the evidence posted by the White House, who was clearly warned of the attack prior to the event.  The White House said the planes incinerated the infrastructure of the Twin Towers buildings - something everyone has heard a hundred times over by now.  But the steel beams showed evidence of melting into molten metal, and steel does not do that until it reaches 1200 degrees F.  Jet fuel reaches a maximum of 990 degrees F.  There must have been people inside the building who planted bombs - whether US citizens or otherwise.  There was no debris from any plane at the Pentagon crash site.  What did the administration claim?  Vaporized.  Really?  A plane was just vaporized into nothing?  With all those cameras around the Pentagon, we only have one video of a plane crashing into the side of the building?  I find that hard to believe - there must have been a cover up.  But where was Fox News and the conservative right during that time?  They were worried about pointing the finger at Osama Bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.

And what about those weapons of mass destruction?  What about the 'definitive proof' that Hussein had chemical and nuclear weapons, regardless of the IAEA's countless reports that Hussein was impotent in that area of influence?

John Stewart explained the situation very well in these two clips from his Daily Show      

I just think it's very hypocritical, to mirror Stewart's sentiment, that the right wing would be so outraged over the deaths of four individuals, when they worked so hard to cover up and forgive the mistakes of a previous administration, and the thousands of human lives, both counted and ignored, that were laid at the feet of the people who made those mistakes.  How can they compare Benghazi to 9/11, or Afghanistan, or Iraq?  How can they compare Obama's mistake to the myriad of Bush's?  Oh, yeah, politics... money... people who want power.

Benghazi is a classic case of the person with the plank in their eye trying to point out the splinter in the other person's.  They make themselves look like a fool to people who know the whole story - but that's just it isn't it?  They're counting on people forgetting.  The party of Watergate, the Iran Contra, Desert Storm, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Patriot Act, and the bail out of Wall Street (because remember that Obama did not take power until 2009) rides on the fact that people will forget about all their past mistakes and focus on the here and now - Benghazi, Obama's mistake.  Do democrats make mistakes?  Yes - in fact Gore probably lost the 2000 election because he wanted to distance himself from the legacy of Clinton, who had the Monica Lewinsky catastrophe, Whitewater, and Somalia.  Carter had the Iran hostage situation that ended when he left office.  LBJ had the Gulf of Tonkin.  But no one has had as many mistakes in office that got covered up and forgiven by high ranking officials than George W. Bush.  To call for the same outrage on Obama over Benghazi the way people got outraged at Bush over his misdeeds is ludicrous.