Lindsey Graham Plans To Block Chuck Hagel, John Brennan To Get Answers On Benghazi (Huffington Post)

It’s hard to believe that we’re less than a decade removed from when Republicans, then in charge of the Senate, threatened the so-called “nuclear option” to do away with the filibuster for good, all because Senate Democrats were holding up six of President Bush’s judicial appointments. Republicans cried that Democrats were abusing the filibuster like it had never been abused before, and looked to be on the verge of removing the long-treasured tool designed to stop the “tyranny of the majority” until a group of six senators worked out a compromise to allow three of the appointments to go through, in exchange for taking the nuclear option off of the table. Imagine how the health care debates in 2009 and 2010 would have gone without any possibility of a filibuster; we probably would have gotten a public health care plan to choose from at the very least, and perhaps President Obama wouldn’t have been so averse to putting single-payer health care on the table during the initial negotiations.

Instead, the filibuster became both sword and shield for Republicans to rely on for the first two years of the Obama presidency, when their numbers in the House were shrinking and they had to rely on Blue Dog Democrats to join them in filibusters for those tense months when the Democrats had a supermajority in the Senate. Even in the past two years, after Republicans took control of the House back, the filibuster was still an effective tool for Republicans to stymie President Obama’s agenda whenever possible. Despite widespread cries to reform the filibuster — even if just to bring back the requirement that senators talk on the floor of the Senate and say why proposed legislation is just so onerous that they can’t allow it to come to a vote — the changes in the filibuster we got at the start of this most recent Congress were so ineffectual as to be not worth the paper they were printed on.

Now we’re in the opening weeks of a relatively popular Democratic president’s second term, and it sure feels like 1997 all over again. In the wake of Bill Clinton’s re-election, Republicans were all but foaming at the mouth to get Clinton out of office by any means necessary because Bob Dole couldn’t get the job done. When Ken Starr’s investigation of the Whitewater land deal didn’t reveal anything that could be used to prosecute the Clintons, all of a sudden every little thing Bill Clinton did was put under a microscope to find something, anything that might be grounds for impeachment. What we got was years of national scandal and a full-blown impeachment trial that basically boiled down to  Republicans trying to throw a president out of office because he couldn’t keep it in his pants. For all of Clinton’s shortcomings — and the impeachment unquestionably tarnished his legacy — it’s hard to look back at the zeal with which Republicans tried to impeach Clinton and not see it as one of the silliest political exercises of its generation, particularly when it came out that Newt Gingrich was cheating on his (second) wife during the whole fiasco.

The echoes from then are all too clear now in the attempts by some on the far right to turn what happened in Benghazi last year into the next impeachment-level scandal. (Funny how these people seem to assume that they’ll get to install the Republican of their choice as the next president — Mitt Romney? Sarah Palin? Glenn Back? — instead of having to deal with President Joe Biden until 2016.) One right-wing columnist’s misinterpretation of a news report on how President Obama was being informed on the attack on the Benghazi consulate in Libya got picked up by Sean Hannity, and now all of a sudden it’s gospel truth among many on the right that President Obama watched live on television as Americans were being killed and didn’t do a thing about it, except maybe crack a smile because, you know, he really hates America because he’s a secret Muslim atheist Kenyan socialist anarchist communist whatever.

It’s bad enough that four Americans died in last year’s attack on our consulate at Benghazi. Hillary Clinton made sure a full investigation into the attack and response were completed before she stepped down as Secretary of State, and even though the final report cleared her personally from the problems in the State Department that led to those deaths, she still took full responsibility for what happened, and didn’t pull any of the “where mistakes were made, the responsibility lies with me” doubling down on passive voice that’s been a hallmark of Republican leaders in my lifetime. If I could believe for even one moment that Lindsey Graham was threatening to hold up two high-level defence appointments for President Obama out of genuine desire for more information about the Benghazi attack, I would gladly get off my soapbox and let this whole matter take its course, but I have been through too much of this posturing over the past twelve years to believe that this is nothing but the basest of political posturing.

These are the same Republicans, after all, who never scrutinized any of the attacks on our embassies and consulates during Bush 43’s presidency — when they happened much more frequently, and with more fatalities — with even a hundredth of the energy they’ve put into Benghazi. These are the same Republicans who turned a blind eye when our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan said they were being ordered into combat situations with insufficient body armour. These are the same Republicans who went deaf when some of our troops were electrocuted to death after the Republican-leaning contractor who built army barracks in Iraq failed to ground the water pumps used for the showers. These are the same Republicans who, as more and more evidence came out that showed we were lied into that war in Iraq, not only stonewalled congressional Democrats’ attempts to investigate the lies, but then turned around and opened full hearings into Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl nip slip.

Kanye West rather famously said “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” after Hurricane Katrina, but that’s rather myopic (although, by Kanye’s standards, far from the dumbest thing he’s ever said). The reality is that Republicans only care about people who can make them money. If a gay transsexual Kenyan atheist socialist could guarantee that theywould get Republicans the presidency and the Senate back in 2016, Fox News hosts would be making out with that person every night on prime time from now until the election. The shift of some Republicans towards immigration reform after last year’s election is based on little more than self-interest, a realization that unless Republicans start eating into Democrats’ historic advantages among minority voters that the only way they’ll get another president elected is if Democrats mess up and put up an unelectable candidate. (Given the history of the Democratic Party, this is more than a little likely, which makes Republican panic over future elections seem kind of silly.)

Hence the saturation coverage of Benghazi in right-wing media and the constant nitpicking of conservatives looking for the smallest speck of something resembling evidence that could possibly be used to make Barack Obama and/or Hillary Clinton look bad. (They asked Leon Panetta if he knew when Obama went to bed the night of the Benghazi attack. Seriously.) When the evidence hasn’t been there, they’ve selectively cut videotape to lead their audience into incorrect conclusions. If the standards aren’t there to warrant impeachment of President Obama — they aren’t, and even if the House were to pass articles of impeachment, they’d never come close to achieving the two-thirds majority in the Senate they’d need to get Obama out of office — then the least they can do is put an earworm in conservatives for 2016, so the Republican presidential candidate can just say “Benghazi” and provoke a guttural response from right-wing voters who will associate the word with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama deliberately allowing Americans to die, because that’s what they’ve been led to believe. All of this so the big money interests who keep the Republican party afloat might have some chance of winning the presidency back in four years.

I wish I could feel some sense of outrage that Lindsey Graham seems willing to take it upon himself to create all this political theatre for the sake of feeding conservatives’ bloodlust for Obama and Clinton. Unfortunately, next to the debt ceiling showdowns and other filibusters on major legislation of the Obama presidency, this barely registers as a blip on the radar. It is still a hogtying of the democratic process for nothing more than partisan purposes, though, and I still think liberals in this country are far too passive in allowing right-wing media lies and distortion to go unchecked, even when the lying is so ludicrous as to be unbelievable, because there is a sizable chunk of this country who will believe anything Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly tell them. If President Obama and the Democratic Party will not hit back hard enough on the nonsense surrounding the politicizing of the Benghazi attack — and what happened to Susan Rice seems to indicate that this is indeed the case — then it is up to the rest of us, regardless of political leanings, to speak up for the truth about Benghazi and Republicans’ real motivations for continuing to beat that dead horse. I have next to no desire to see Hillary Clinton elected president, but she doesn’t deserve to lose the presidency based on the lies of, to borrow one of her most famous phrases, the massive right-wing conspiracy.