New at Skewed News is my essay trying to explain “Why No One on the Left Cares About Benghazi.” Teaser:
The way Benghazi has been framed as a story has been tailored to trigger right-wing rage, and to elicit big fat yawns from the left.
Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy set up the GOP framing in today’s introductory speech: “Why were there so many requests for security equipment and personnel and why were those requests denied in Washington? What did our leaders in Washington do or not do, and when?”
On the right, this is red meat. It’s a war movie image. Four Americans desperately calling for reinforcements as Islamist terrorists affiliated with Al Qaeda swarmed over the walls of their isolated mission in the middle of a war zone — and what do they get? Not the cavalry. A bunch of bureaucratic jibber jabber about budgets and these-things-take-time. Which leads to these frontliners being brutally murdered by thugs.
In this narrative, Hillary was the commander-in-chief. She was in charge. Whether or not she saw those requests for additional security staff is irrelevant. The responsibility was hers and now so is the blame.
33 Comments.
Nice one, Ted – an interesting counter-question might be “Why did the GOPranos cut funding for embassy security?”
Another might be, “Why does anyone take the GOPranos seriously any more?” They’ve spent far more time & money investigating Benghazi than they did on The Biggest Terrorist Attack on American Soil [TM]
The Bush admin used private email for government work – where was the outrage then? The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy is alive & well in Washington.
For your second question, if many people fail to take an important issue seriously, it would take more and more time and other resources to attempt to change that. And since action has failed to materialize on Benghazi, it fuels the (accurate) perception that the Left holds institutional power.
Your third strikes me as silly since to my knowledge using private email was not yet against the rules.
I mean really anyone who supports Dubya might as well have a neon face tattoo proclaiming “I am not a real conservative.” Exploding federal debt, medicare expansion, amnesty for illegal aliens, and No Child Left Behind do not a conservative make.
@jack, you commented on another thread that perhaps one of our contributors is approaching his twilight years.
That may be true, but if so then the kind thing for both of us to do is to back off & let him be.
Political soap-opera. Hillary’s private server was an open book to ANY cyber-spy looking for “deeper-than-Snowden” quality secrets. For a perceived political advantage, was she selling them? Meanwhile, instead of searching out national security crimes, the Dem/Pug crowd are contesting a “Days-of-Our-Lives” drama. Our government is being buried under a bread-and-circuses implosion.
More than just a tea-pot tempest.
DanD
An analogy to Rome is penultimately salient.
The Alt Right is largely against interventionism and often argues against all the stupid wars of the neocons (and progressives). Even a good number of mainstream conservatives have criticized Iraq for years. Some opposed the Libyan war. As a classical liberal (and therefore a “right-winger”) I fully endorse framing Benghazi as you suggest. Anyone should have been able to guess Libya would fall apart entirely. And upon hearing that US embassy personnel had been killed, I was stunned they were still there…
I can hardly agree with the characterization that “Lefties tend to think big while rightie politics are more granular.” Maybe if you’re talking about neocons and hicks. However, most Lefties easily miss the big picture–I must conclude purposefully oftentimes. When the leftie wants to raise the minimum wage, the rightie points out that those very employees the leftie wants to help will instead be subject to possible layoff. When the leftie wants to expand federal loans for college the rightie points out that that will further fuel tuition cost growth. When the leftie wants Europe to take more Syrians, the rightie points out that yet more will risk the journey and drown. And so on and so on.
Give us the list of “mainstream conservatives” who “criticized” Iraq BEFORE the criminal invasion with references to their public pronouncements of same.
At this point, it is quite possible to have have criticized Iraq for years after having waited, also for years, to see how it was going to turn out.
It’s the syndrome I call: “G.W. Bush was a terrorism expert … on 12 Sept 2001.”
I’ll agree with you on Libya. Those who really need to be grilled by the Benghazi select committee are some generals and one Davis Petraeus. http://tinyurl.com/m2uoey3
That would be a very short list.
I did not mean to suggest that mainstream conservatives opposed Iraq beforehand. I suppose there must’ve been a couple but don’t know of any. It was an incredible case of media conformity and officialdom worship as all here are aware. Many lefties were in on it as well. I did oppose Iraq from the get-go but was a leftie at the time. I meant that they did after the invasion and before some prominent Democrats at that.
To Jack Heart:
So your observation, as a “leftie,” that you were absolutely correct about opposing Iraq led you to become a “rightie”?
Re: mainstream conservatives seeing the light on Iraq “after the invasion and before some prominent Democrats …”
To that I would say you need to manufacture and market that revolutionarily fine and sharp hair splitter.
…You’re good at finding connections that don’t exist. Any sane leftie or rightie could tell that Iraq was a mistake from the beginning. I only mentioned that I identified myself as leftie at the time so I could be honest that I myself was not one of the conservatives that opposed the Iraq invasion beforehand. I have only been “right-wing” for about a year through cumulative experiences and revelations.
And I don’t get it. Are you saying you don’t believe there were Republicans criticizing the war in the years following the invasion while Dems were still defending it? I have to say I am not going to comb through all those years for you! The point is that the Left does not have a monopoly on condemning dumb wars.
“When the leftie wants to raise the minimum wage, the rightie points out that those very employees the leftie wants to help will instead be subject to possible layoff.”
The righty dogma espoused here ignores the fact that layoffs are a consequence of low sales of, and low demand for, a good or service. Cut the wage and demand will be further cut, unless supplemented by consumer debt. But then consumer debt will not be repayable by the unemployed in a recession, and so the house of cards tumbles again.
Low wages are the flip side of high profits. High economic growth is a consequence of high demand. When wages are low, demand needs to be supplemented by high consumer debt to be maintained.
This is why capitalism regularly needs to be saved from itself, such as in the 1930s and in 2008 on, and is sure to happen again. To repeat the same process (austerity) and expect a different result is Einstein’s definition of “insane”.
Capitalism needs to get off the government’s teat and spend down some of its idle capital by increasing wages.
Of course, Big Finance owns the government and the election process, so this is not likely to happen via the means provided within, and by, the CCCP (Central Committee of the Capitalist Party).
There are so many false assumptions and leaps of logic here I quite literally don’t know where to start.
> I quite literally don’t know where to start.
“ECON101”
I’ll keep it simple with this: both 1929 and 2008 were caused by a failure of monetary policy of central banking in particular and fiat currency in general neither of which is a necessary component of capitalism. IOW every time this CENTRAL PLANNING fails, leftists blame the “free” markets and argue for increased central planning. Quite ironic really.
Ch, talk to me once you’ve familiarized yourself with Bastiat, Hayek, and Friedman.
I’ll keep it simple – in 1929 we were still on the gold standard.
Glenn, what you are really explaining is the failure of Keynesianism. It is not possible for growth to continue forever, but instead of allowing the markets to reach equilibrium, they push hyperconsumerism via fiat debt. And it never ends as you said.
You’re welcome.
JH,
When the owners of this country, Big Finance, had their debt blow up they got bailed out in the TRILLIONS.
Whatever capitalism you claim allegiance to doesn’t exist but in some scammer’s dreams.
Glenn, a rigged game is not a free market.
Jack,
You are correct. Free markets exist only in the sense that those who rig it are FREE to take without limit from those who produce the goods everyone wants to buy.
This is no free market and it’s totally rigged. Upside for Big Finance Insurance and Real estate, and downside for the people who pay the price of bailing them out in bad times and get ripped off by them most of the time.
A free market, for a start, is free from the unearned revenue accumulated by the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate sectors, those who produce nothing but debt for the millions of people who have to sell their labor to live.
Great column. As you wrote, the Obama/Clinton-bots have a completely different ‘reality’ from the Republicans. Neither ‘reality’ has much connection to the world that we actually live in.
From the Obama/Clinton-bot perspective, the president and secretary did a great job liberating Libya from a heinous dictator, and the death of an ambassador in a consulate where he’d unknowingly hired al-Qaeda as guards was unfortunate, but Secretary Clinton could not have prevented it.
From the Republican perspective, the US military did a great job liberating Libya from a heinous dictator, with no support from the President or the Secretary who were both vehemently opposed to the killing of a fellow Muslim even though he had joined with Osama and was responsible for 9/11, but then, with a division of Marines ready with their helicopters running, less than 5 minutes away from the consulate, the Marines were prevented from rescuing the ambassador by a criminal order from the Secretary.
Neither perspective has much to do with facts or evidence, but the American people, both Republicans and Obama/Clinton-bots, ‘know’ that their press has the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Epistemic closure, anyone?
I think Ted gets to the whole crux of the matter when he asks “What was Ambassador Stevens doing in Benghazi to begin with?” Everyone knows the embassy is in Tripoli. Why was he in the eastern part of the country that was a known haven for jihadist inspired groups for many, many years even before the fall of the Colonel?
I don’t know if this is some Alex Jones/Truther/grassy knoll type of story but is there any validity to the buzz that he was in Benghazi to funnel arms and jihadists from Libya to the new battlefront of 2012 in Syria? That he was there to try to re-collect all of the looted arms from the Libyan bases that had since fallen into the hands of local warlords and militias with the intent to send them clandestinely, Iran-Contra like to the “moderates” in Syria? And that the attack on the compound was something of a double cross on the part of the jihadists whom the Ambassador was trying to enlist the help of?
During yesterday’s testimony, Hillary said that the Ambassador was in Benghazi to “investigate the situation”. This is such a vague, curious open ended euphemism for any type of activity. It allows Hillary to play loose with the truth while not outright lying. I think if the reason he was there was to act as a conduit for arms and fighters to Syria then the Republicans know they have a scandal on their hands. Their hatred of the Clintons pushed them to act on it. However, they have been skirting around the edges of the story and going after minor or non issues since they would be implicated in the scheme if it were to fully come to light. They want to nail her on it but can’t fully pull the trigger. In the testimony yesterday, one of the Republicans started to ask Hillary about supposed meetings between State department staff and Al Qaeda operatives 48 hours before the attack on the compound. He curiously relinquished the floor after barely broaching the topic. I didn’t listen to all 11 hours, so I do not know if the topic was picked back up again.
On the otherhand, the story may have as much validity as any half cocked 9/11 conspiracy theory. I don’t know how much weight to put behind it.
Yeah, it’s not like your government ever lied to you befo ….
uh, never mind.
🙂
Jack,
“Glenn, what you are really explaining is the failure of Keynesianism”
The failure of Keynesianism is that we have a permanent Military Keynesianism. A tactic useful to restore market dynamics was, and is, used as a permanent policy and so instead of using it judiciously to ease capitalism’s periodic collapses, it is part of the collapse dynamic.
Sorry. Posted in the wrong place.
Not only does it pump up the economy in such a way to reward the MIC, it also disposes of many of those young hotheads who might otherwise try to disrupt the status quo.
Not only that, but us old farts get to console the young widows.
Everybody wins!
Mmm…young widows are delicious.
Look up the “Broken Window Fallacy.” The idea that destruction can stimulate the economy is bunk.
I’m not sure Benghazi was an embassy. Isn’t the capitol Tripoli? Does anybody know why those State Dept. people were even there? I saw a guy say this was probably about a CIA operation. The operation was about securing the weapons and getting them shipped to some rebels fighting Syria.
The whole Libya thing looked like another CIA destabilization; their specialty ever since Iran in 1953. “We” don’t want any of these small country guys getting too cute and trying to take to big a cut out of the oil profits. It sets a bad example.