The wingnut
Washington Free Beacon crowed on Tuesday,
“Documents obtained by Judicial Watch from their May 2014 Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits filed against the State Department and
the Department of Defense revealed that the Obama administration knew
about the attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi at least 10 days
before the attack.”
Judicial Watch self-identifies
as “a wingnut, non-partisan educational foundation” Unfortunately,
“wingnut” and “nonpartisan” cannot co-exist in the same sentence,
and Judicial Watch’s appeal to its own “high standards of ethics” is
questionable at best.
To back up their assertions, they trot out people like wingnut blogger Jennifer Rubin, who likes to talk about Democrats’ “ethical contortions,” (without mentioning that she’s a wingnut) and Brett Bair of Fox News, the folks who invented ethical contortions.
Maybe “nonpartisan” is synonymous with “fair and balanced.”
To take just one example, Judicial Watch – and you almost require a drum roll here – warns readers that, “Other documents show that State Department officials initially described the incident as an “attack.”
Oh no! Foul deeds afoot! Terrorists attack the Benghazi Mission and it is somehow NOT an attack? THAT would be news!
Whatever will be next? President Obama taking to the Rose Garden to refer to “an act of terror” when it was actually a terrorist attack?
Wait…was it an attack or not an attack? If you say
it was a terrorist attack, why can’t the State Department call it an
“attack” or does “attack” mean something different if the administration
uses it, and oh by the way, how is an attack not an act of some kind?
Let’s face it: GOP problems don’t revolve so much as what was said as who said it.
Jerome Corsi writes at Wing Nut Daily
that it is “the Hillary terror lie.” Supposedly, Hillary knew from the
moment it happened that terrorists were attacking the Benghazi Mission
on September 11, 2012, not a bunch of protesters upset by what the National Review refers to dismissively as a “supposedly offensive video,” or as one wingnut media source called it, “a video no one had ever seen.”
As though the motivation of the attackers matters
all that much. President Obama identified the attack as a terrorist
attack from the very beginning. Republicans want to make that
distinction, but there is no distinction to be made. An act of terror is
an act of terror, whatever the motivating factors.
You would think the video itself had never existed, but had been invented by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Greta Van Susteren tweeted last night, suggesting sinister plot lines:
But it really was an offensive video – “The
Innocence Of muslims” – not supposedly but actually, and it did
actually offend muslims, and it did actually play a role in the attack
that left four Americans dead.
As David Kirkpatrick of
The New York Times, who actually talked to people and examined actual evidence rather than just inventing stuff from his desk,
wrote in 2013 in his analysis of the events that night,
Anger at the video
motivated the initial attack. Dozens of people joined in, some of them
provoked by the video and others responding to fast-spreading false
rumors that guards inside the American compound had shot Libyan
protesters.
Kirkpatrick went on to write that,
There is no doubt that
anger over the video motivated many attackers. A Libyan journalist
working for The New York Times was blocked from entering by the sentries
outside, and he learned of the film from the fighters who stopped him.
Other Libyan witnesses, too, said they received lectures from the
attackers about the evil of the film and the virtue of defending the
prophet.
Republicans have decided that the Obama administration should have seen the attack coming – and in fact did see the attack coming – and that Obama and Hillary decided to blame it all on a video.
The National Review speaks of
“a well-orchestrated disinformation campaign by the Obama
administration” which “managed to put the press off the story and
mislead the American people,” and claims that, “The brazenness and scope
of the disinformation would make any KGB colonel sigh with admiration.”
Red State says,
“Now that we know that the White House was actively involved in pushing
a blatant lie about the genesis of the Benghazi attack in order to
deflect blame it is only fair to ask who came up with the story to begin
with.”
Who indeed? Just ask yourself. Who do Republicans
fear more than any living human being? Who do they really, really, not
want to see running against them in 2016? (and with all due respect,
it’s not Bernie Sanders).
It isn’t enough to start a movement to retroactively impeach her
as Secretary of State, apparently. It is a shame Republicans were never
this interested in how it came to pass that al Qaeda was able to slip
past President George W. Bush’s watch to kill not four, but three thousand Americans on a previous September 11.
Or how the Bush administration was able to
orchestrate a completely unnecessary and illegal invasion and occupation
of Iraq on the pretext that Saddam Hussein, who was an enemy of al
Qaeda, had something to do with the attack on 9/11, or that he had
mysterious “weapons of mass destruction,” or simply because, when all
else failed, we just wanted to export freedom at the point of a bayonet.
Sidney Blumenthal
warned in the released Clinton emails that Republicans would use Benghazi to attack her. As
Wonkette
deadpanned with more basis in fact that any right wing source we’ve
looked at here, “so gross Sidney Blumenthal is looking like a goddamned
prophet at this point.”
Apparently, there is some law somewhere or another
that Blumenthal is not allowed to give Hillary Clinton his opinions on
what’s happening. But listening to the right wing media, you would think
these are all impeachable offenses. But then again, this is coming from
people who think they can impeach President Obama for not doing what
they want.
Republicans are no more going to let go of Benghazi
than they are going to pay more than lip-service to the idea that the
Iraq War was a mistake. And this latest example of Hillary Derangement
Syndrome won’t be the last.
I
suppose the next one will revolve around how Obama himself planned the
Benghazi attack, just so he could make himself and Hillary look bad.
Can’t wait for it! Who needs Game of Thrones when you have Fox News and people like Greta Van Susteren for fictional intrigue?
