GOP goes Benghazi on Boston

Columnist Frank Rich. (photo: NYT)

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

25 April 13
readersupportednews.org

Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: the GOP calls for an "enemy combatant" in Boston.

enators John McCain and Lindsey Graham called for the Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be held as an "enemy combatant." There's no agreed upon legal precedent for holding a U.S. citizen as an "enemy combatant" or even holding a foreign fighter captured on U.S. soil under that distinction. (Both the "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui and the "Blind Sheikh" were successfully tried in civilian court.) What are McCain and Graham up to here?

There's no such thing as farcical relief from a horror as painful and raw as the terrorist bombings in Boston. But the attempts by McCain, Graham, and some of their colleagues to find some way, any way, to politicize these attacks border on dark farce nonetheless. There have already been at least three waves in the GOP effort to turn Boston into the new Benghazi.

First, Chuck Grassley implied that the bombings be used as a pretext to delay immigration reform. That political strategy died when some members of his own caucus remembered that immigration reform is at the top of the Republication rebranding to-do list following the party's 2012 debacle with Hispanic voters.

Then came the "enemy combatant" push -  an illegal nonstarter for the reasons you cite and instantly shut down by the White House.

Now there's Plan No. 3: Susan Collins and Peter King, among others, have started exploiting Boston to attack presumed Obama administration "intelligence failures." Yet from all accounts thus far, there's little to suggest that the FBI (the operative agency here) did anything wrong except follow the letter of American law in tracking the Tsarnaev brothers in response to the information it had from the Russian government.

What will be Plan 4 to politicize Boston? Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's Twitter feed showed a fondness for Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones. Perhaps Hollywood can be held to blame for this terrorist incident much as it is, in the right's reckoning, for Aurora and Newtown. Even now younger staffers for McCain and Graham may be prepping them for Sunday talk-show appearances in which they will be required to be conversant with the noble houses of Lannister and Stark.