The 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi was a national tragedy, but it isn’t going to doom Hillary’s presidential ambitions.
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I’m a big fan of Dave Weigel, he’s a great reporter who can make a lot of the nuts and bolts stuff of politics quite interesting, so I was a little annoyed to see that he’s jumped on the whole Benghazi-will-doom-Hillary bandwagon. He did so in a recent post about the newest round of hearings by House Republicans in to the 2012 terrorist attacking in Libya.
According to Dave, Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy, the newest in a long line of Benghazi inquisitors, humbled the “Hillary Clinton State Department” with his brilliant production of a memo from 1999:
“Your answer mirrors what the 1999 ARB further said,” countered Gowdy, “which is first and foremost that the secretary of state should take a personal and active role in carrying out the responsibility of securing the safety of U.S. personnel. Is that being done now, and was it being done prior to your tenure?”
“I have heard every secretary talk about the importance of security,” said [assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security] Starr. “I have heard every secretary state the personnel department that security is their function. That goes for Secretary Albright, Secretary Clinton, Secretary Rice.”
Not good enough. “I think words have consequences, and they have meaning, and that people use words intentionally,” said Gowdy. “A personal review is not simply talking about it.”
Yeah, take that Star!
Look, it’s perfectly reasonable for Republicans to say, “Benghazi was a national tragedy and it happened on Obama’s and Hillary’s watch so they are responsible.” What isn’t reasonable, indeed what is downright silly, is a lot of the strange conspiracy theories that have been coming out of the Republican Party and conservative news organs of the last few years. The very worst thing you can accuse Obama of is spinning a national tragedy for political ends, but sorry that’s not illegal, indeed it’s pretty typical presidential behavior.
Furthermore, there’s no evidence that these sorts of “revelations”, or whatever a back bench member of Congress pulling out a memo from 15 years ago is, are going to have any sort of impact on the 2016 election. After all if the Benghazi attacks were so damning against Hillary why was Obama, her boss, reelected in the first place!
Oh sure the GOP and their allies might run a bunch of ads attacking Clinton about Benghazi in the fall of 2016, but they are going to attack her over something, and there’s no evidence that this would be any more effective that attacking over her famous “sniper fire” comments.
Hillary Clinton has been in the national spotlight for over two decades at this point. Anyone paying attention to politics already has a very firm opinion about her and her record. Yet another boring Washington hearing isn’t going to change that.
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