Benghazi Schools Obama In The Politics Of Scandal (npr.org)

The beginning of May is the start of what’s known as the “silly season” of American politics. Most states have held their primaries, and until we get closer to the election — around September or October — there’s a sense that there won’t be much in the way of “serious” politics done until then. (This isn’t so much the case in presidential election years, thanks to the increased importance of the parties’ annual conventions and vice-presidential announcements and all that hullabaloo.) In addition, fewer people tend to pay attention to the news because they’re out enjoying the nice weather, so many news outlets delve much deeper into the sensational and insubstantive than they normally do in an effort to keep their advertising revenues up through increased viewership/readership. Sometimes the results are laughable — in both good and bad ways — but this year it looks like it will be no laughing matter.

We’re now months into the first round of sequestration cuts, and the stories that at one time were on some people’s radars — devastating cuts to Head Start with some schools literally holding lotteries to determine which kids have to leave, funds for WIC and meals-on-wheels for elderly and infirm people being slashed, furloughs of government employees and kicking homeless people out of shelters and putting them back on the street, among others — have slipped from people’s minds, in part because news outlets stopped talking about them and “news” outlets instead blathered on and on about how cutting White House tours was the Worst Thing Ever. Given that both major political parties just voted overwhelmingly to ease the sequester for air traffic controllers so business travelers wouldn’t face delays, this is a genuine “pox on both of your houses” story with deep human interest roots that touches most of us. Congress voting to ease air travel for the rich but still taking food out of the mouths of poor children and the elderly? Any journalist worth their weight in sweat would be driving across the country right now, collecting and publishing stories of how devastating these cuts are at a time when the economic recovery is still failing to reach the working and middle classes like it is big companies and their executives.

Instead, House Republicans just yelled “Benghazi” en masse this week, and a press corps desperate for juicy scandal to boost their profit margins seems all too eager to go along with them just to get some extra money by fluffing up a far-right conspiracy that has so little substance behind it that any reputable news organization should have dismissed it months ago. As long as our press is governed by profits and not journalism, though, this is the crap we’re going to have to put up with.

I don’t want to get into a full elaboration on why the whole Benghazi controversy is a load of hot air because I’ve done so already, but in short, the errors made during the Benghazi attack and its immediate aftermath have already been investigated and shown to have been accidental, not deliberate in any manner. Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama were both proven to have had no culpability in the matter, but they still took responsibility anyway because that’s what you do when you’re the boss. The only way conservatives’ logic for impeaching President Obama (or effectively disqualifying Hillary Clinton from a 2016 presidential bid) is to begin with what is both their first premise and ultimate conclusion, the same as it’s been for every issue from Cash for Clunkers to Fast and Furious — that President Obama (and Secretary Clinton by extension) “hate America” and are “evil.” Remove that premise — and it’s so absurd that only the blindest of political partisans would even attempt to believe it — and nearly every conservative argument about Benghazi falls to pieces on the elementary question of motive.

Their new tactic is to focus instead on an alleged cover-up after the attack, going back to White House e-mails following the attack that Republicans have literally had their hands on for months, and using some kind of super-secret decoder ring they’ve constructed in the meantime to show how President Obama allegedly tried to conceal the mistakes made in the response to Benghazi. On the plus side, this is one argument where people don’t have to buy into the “Obama is evil/hates America/is a secret Kenyan Muslim America-hating freedom-abolishing socialist atheist whatever” line, because the only claim being made is that Obama tried to hide his mistakes. That reaction is human enough, and one Americans are certainly prone to believe their politicians of doing a lot of the time.

However, when the Republicans rolled out this new line in their congressional hearing this week, there were so many red flags to raise about how it was presented — Democratic committee members not allowed to call witnesses who could have refuted claims Republican witnesses made, and not gaining access to said Republican witnesses — that the hearing shouldn’t have registered as more than a blip anywhere but in the right-wing media bubble. It was pure show trial, Republicans polishing a turd of an argument so well that it provided just enough substance that journalists, tempted by the lure of scandal, have presented it as the political equivalent of a summer blockbuster movie. It’s the hit of the summer! Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in Benghazigate. You don’t even have to buy a twelve-dollar ticket to see it; just tune in to your political show of choice.

We have seen this repeatedly since the earliest days of the Obama Administration. Just like Republicans leaped on every small thing they could find about Bill Clinton when he was president that they could scandalize, until the whole Monica Lewinksy thing finally stuck, they have tried to turn President’ Obama’s every word and action into a possible cause for impeachment. If Democrats had put in even a tenth of the effort Republicans have put in to make Bush 43 pay for the very real scandals of his time in office — not paying enough attention to their own intelligence that said months before 09.11 that al-Qaeda was planning on attacking targets within America, Vice President Cheney and oil company executives rewriting the country’s whole energy policy in secret, lying the country into a war that cost thousands of American lives and trillions of American dollars, outing Valerie Plame as political payback for her husband debunking one of the administration’s lies for that war, Bush pretending to play guitar with John McCain while the New Orleans levies broke, among others — Bush would have been out of office, and probably in prison, long before his second term was up. For every real scandal of a Republican president, conservatives froth at the mouth to create an equivalent scandal for a Democratic president, usually with “evidence” and reasoning that doesn’t pass a basic smell test because they pulled it straight out of their asses and it still stinks like what it is — total and complete crap.

The worst part is that this is coming in the wake of a very real scandal that conservatives have every right to seize on, the IRS admitting that they hassled Tea Party-affiliated groups since the dawn of the Tea Party movement, targeting them for special scrutiny. Tea Party groups have been making this claim for years, and they have now been proven completely right. So far this is looking like the work of unscrupulous low-level employees — the IRS has only two positions that are filled by political means because the IRS is supposed to be apolitical — but this is exactly the kind of thing that should never, ever happen to any group. This demands no less than a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of how this happened, who was responsible, and what safeguards need to be put in place to make sure this never happens again.

Perhaps the IRS story will pick up steam in the days to come, but right now Benghazi continues to dominate the news. Like the old journalism saying goes, “If it bleeds, it leads,” and the lives lost as a result of the Benghazi consulate attack are “sexier” than a tax scandal, much less poor kids going hungry or getting kicked out of Head Start. It is unspeakably shameful that the press has turned a blind eye to the millions of victims of the sequester, those who already had so little going for them before the illogical and tragic butchering of the social safety net at a time when it is needed most, but time and time again the American press has shown that profits trump actual journalism in their eyes. All we need is a semen-stained dress from Benghazi to make the whole wretched spectacle complete.