Charles Krauthammer @ NRO:
Note to the GOP re Benghazi: Stop calling it Watergate, Iran Contra, bigger than both, etc. First, it might well be, but we don’t know. History will judge. Second, overhyping will only diminish the importance of the scandal if it doesn’t meet presidency-breaking standards. Third, focusing on the political effects simply plays into the hands of Democrats desperately claiming that this is nothing but partisan politics.
Let the facts speak for themselves. They are damning enough. Let Gregory Hicks, the honorable, apolitical second-in-command that night in Libya, movingly and grippingly demolish the president’s Benghazi mantra that “what I have always tried to do is just get all the facts” and “every piece of information that we got, as we got it, we laid it out for the American people.”
On the contrary. Just hours into the Benghazi assault, Hicks reported, by phone to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself, on the attack with absolutely no mention of the demonstration or video that was later to become the essence of the Susan Rice talking points that left him “stunned” and “embarrassed.”
But Hicks is then ordered not to meet with an investigative congressional delegation. And when he speaks with them nonetheless, he gets a furious call from Clinton’s top aide for not having a State Department lawyer (and informant) present. His questions about the Rice testimony are met with a stone-cold response, sending the message: Don’t go there. He then finds himself demoted.Get the facts and get them out? It wasn’t just Hicks. Within 24 hours, the CIA station chief in Libya cabled that it was a terrorist attack and not a spontaneous mob. On Day Two, the acting assistant secretary of state for the Near East wrote an e-mail saying the attack was carried out by an al-Qaeda affiliate, Ansar al-Sharia.
What were the American people fed? Four days and twelve drafts later, a fiction about a demonstration that never was, provoked by a video that no one saw (Hicks: “a non-event in Libya”), about a movie that was never made.
The original CIA draft included four paragraphs on the involvement of al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists and on the dangerous security situation in Benghazi. These paragraphs were stricken after strenuous State Department objections mediated by the White House. All that was left was the fable of the spontaneous demonstration.
That’s not an accretion of truth. That’s a subtraction of truth.
And why? Let the deputy national-security adviser’s e-mail to the parties explain: “We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities” — fancy bureaucratese for “interests of the government agencies involved.” (He then added, “particularly the investigation.” But the FBI, which was conducting the investigation, had no significant objections. That excuse was simply bogus.)
Note that he didn’t say the talking points should reflect the truth — only the political interests, the required political cover, of all involved.
For some reason this Benghazi scandal brought to mind the ORIGINAL definition of the term, “tragedy.”
Today the leftist press and Obama et al., use the term incorrectly to describe out of man’s control things like a natural disaster.
But the Greeks were the first writers of tragedies, so they had the right to define it.
They did.
Tragedy: a horrid outcome that was foreseen but yet the players continued to march toward that outcome.
The Benghazi outcome was forseen but yet Obama, his underlings, his minions, the press, all marched toward it anyway.
Some of them paid more than others, like how bacon requires more of a life-commitment to breakfast for a pig than eggs do for a hen.
But, it seems, that others are finding their payments are not in full just yet.
Gallup Poll: Americans’ Attention to IRS, Benghazi Stories Below Average
Most Americans, however, say both deserve continuing investigation
I just heard JUDGE JEANINE grilling OBAMA ON BENGHAI,
she is the best of all to expose the failures,
he cannot hide from her, now she’s switching to the next scandal.
she is super.