Tuesday, August 13, 2013

The Mother of All Scandals

Works and Days » The Mother of All Scandals:
A False Campaign?
The election of 2012 may well have been altered by the Benghazi cover-up, in ways that transcend debate moderator Candy Crowley’s puerile and unprofessional efforts to shield Obama from Romney’s questioning about the deaths. 
Imagine the fallout on voters had we been told from the very beginning that an al-Qaeda affiliate had stormed our consulate — ill-prepared and unable to obtain needed beefed-up security, reliant for safety on local suspect tribal militias, in a country that had deteriorated into a failed society after our Libyan bombing — and slaughtered four Americans, apparently stationed in Benghazi to help in some way a covert CIA operation.
So here we have it: a beleaguered “consulate” that was refused additional security and relied on local militias, apparently due to administration worry over destroying an Obama campaign narrative of a reborn Libya and dying al-Qaeda. 
A CIA operation of some sort supplied something to someone, but what and why and to whom, we are not supposed to know.
Four Americans, the very best the country had to offer, are dead, denied assistance when assistance could have saved them — the why and the how and the when of it all we are not told. 
We fear it might have been a crackpot cost-benefit analysis: four lives versus another Mogadishu and an Obama November defeat.
We know only that the dead were far more heroic than the leaders who chose not to aid them.
And in reaction to all this, we jail a petty video maker, who makes the perfect scapegoat as a supposedly right-wing Islamophobic hate monger whose take-down advances our president’s politically correct narrative of Muslim outreach. 
That yarn required a president, secretary of state, and UN ambassador to lie repeatedly. 
When we ask questions, witnesses are browbeaten, the knowledgeable fade into the Washington woodwork, the luminaries have all left their offices, and we are left with “phony” scandal and “what difference does it make.”
All in all — the mother of all scandals.

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