It turns out that all the talk about Benghazi over the last two years was a giant waste of time, there just never was a cover up.
One of the recurring “in jokes” that experience Washington hands like to make is the idea that there is some sort of tradition of “dumping” potentially troublesome stories on a Friday so they will get ignored as everyone has better things to do than read the newspapers on the weekend. There’s not a whole lot of evidence out there that this really happens and in the age of the internet it quite frankly doesn’t make much sense as doesn’t really matter when a story goes live on a website.
If one was looking for evidence of the practice however the House Intelligence Committee final report on the 2012 attacks on Benghazi, and basically said that there was no cover up or governmental wrong doing at all.
This isn’t to say that there’s nothing to talk about when it comes to Benghazi. There are lots of interesting issues it raises such as when America should become military involved in foreign conflicts or what the proper role of diplomats in a post 9/11 world should be. But the media narrative pitched by Republican politicians and conservative activists for two years now has basically been a bunch of nonsense.
Which raises to whole question of why the huge focus on a non-scandal scandal in the first place? Personally I think it’s just a symptom of the post-policy nature of the modern Republican Party. To put it another way the modern GOP is far more interested in inventing a fake scandal to try and get political mileage than it is in trying to deal with the effects of the actual policy disaster and trying to prevent it from happening again. Combine this with the preexisting incentives of the conservative media marketplace and it makes sense you get two years of nonsense that leads nowhere.
All of which makes it harder to prevent future disasters and easier for wrongdoers in the executive branch to get away with making mistakes. After all if Congress is going to investigate nonsense as a rule then real wrongdoing is that much more likely to get missed.
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Ummm…interesting. One hand,House Intelligence Committee found no wrong doing ….YAY!!!!! Grand Jury found there wasn’t anything to prosecute …. Boooooo!!!! Doesn’t your head feel like it’s spinning sometimes?
Wow. Obama must be really conflicted inside. He’s supposed to be a wealthy Muslim AND a radical Marxist? Not sure how that works…..
The people who talk about “impeachment” the most tend to be the ones who understand it the least. (I hate to admit it, but that was also true during the Bush presidency as well.) Probably 99% of Americans think “impeachment” means “removed out of office.” That ain’t what it means, people.