I see that Karl Rove is going after Obama on Libya. God I hope that after this election—no, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s stick to the topic at hand.
My colleague Eli Lake has another interesting piece up today about the warning signs around the Benghazi consulate. It was bombed twice, and the bad guys issued warnings on Facebook. “Bombed” should be considered loosely. A couple of guys, in one case, threw a device over the wall, and no one was injured. Still. It’s an incident. Also, an extremist group posted ominously on Facebook that it knew Ambassador Stevens’s regular jogging route. He stopped jogging for a week and then resumed his normal route.
As I wrote previously, we have four dead Americans, and a full investigation, followed by steps to address the very serious problems of diplomatic security, is absolutely imperative. But sorry, wingers, this doesn’t have legs as a campaign issue.
Let me put it this way. If Benghazi, an attack that killed four people, is Obama’s Watergate, what was 9-11? In the former, we have no evidence that any warnings ever came to Obama’s desk, and it seems high unlikely that we ever will. It’s not as if holes in diplomatic security, a chronically underfunded enterprise, are going to raise deep-red flags. It's a well-known and hard to address problem. I guess this may have made it to the secretary’s desk, but the president’s?
Meanwhile, we know for a fact that Bush had explicit advance warning that 9-11, an attack that killed 2,800 people, was coming. Now. If Benghazi is Watergate, what was 9-11?
They’re such naked propagandists, these people. The same people who spent years making excuses for why Bush shouldn’t have taken that August 6 PDB seriously are now trying to argue that an attack that was about 1/700th as cataclysmic should be Obama’s undoing? You've got to be kidding me.
If you want to talk about why we need to get to the bottom of Benghazi for substantive reasons, I’ll join the conversation. If you are trying to use the deaths of these people as a political cudgel to get Obama because every other piece of crap attack you’ve tried has failed, you are doing something that’s both contemptible and ineffectual. And, if you insist on doing this, then to be consistent you must acknowledge Bushian culpability for 9-11. There's no way out of that.
