House Oversight And Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa is striking out on Benghazi (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
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House's Inspector Javert, Congressman Darrell Issa, held a hearing on
the Benghazi attack yesterday at which a State Department official,
Gregory Hicks, charged the administration with incompetence and worse. Mike Huckabee said
that Obama will be impeached for Benghazi. Others suggest it'll badly
damage Hillary Clinton's presidential prospects. Is anybody, Fox News
included, going to be talking about this story six months from now?
It's not entirely clear that anyone is talking about
it even now once you get beyond the Beltway and the GOP's Fox News base.
Even Hicks's emotional testimony yesterday was overshadowed on
television by a different kind of horror story
emerging from Cleveland.
Why are the Republicans getting so little
traction with this story? After all, they have been pounding it for
eight months. They believed that Benghazi was figuratively as well as
literally the 9/11 of 2012, and that its fallout would usher Romney into
the presidency. In fact, it barely registered as a concern in any
polls.
Now they believe (in Lindsey Graham's characteristically
understated judgment) that Benghazi is "every bit as damaging as
Watergate," a gateway both to the president's impeachment and to a GOP
victory over Hillary in 2016. Yet no one else does. There are several
reasons: Clinton has taken responsibility for the systemic failures that occurred on her watch; Republicans in Congress have not been able to deflect their own share of the blame,
the budget cutbacks that shortchanged embassy and consulate security;
Susan Rice's endlessly parsed talking points notwithstanding, no one to
the left of Sean Hannity seriously believes that the Obama White House
was trying to cover up a terrorist attack.
But the main explanation for
Benghazi's inability to catch fire with the public has to do with the
American intelligence failure that led to the original 9/11 in which
3,000, not four, Americans were killed: Bush and Cheney's inability to
heed such warning signs as the President's Daily Brief of August 6, 2001,
"Bin Laden determined to strike in US." Many of the same voices who are
pounding Obama and Clinton on Benghazi - Graham, for instance - are the
same ones who defended that lapse and then cheered on an Iraq War that
drained resources from the battle against Al Qaeda and the search for
Bin Laden.
They have no credibility. And they are overselling the
failures of Benghazi much as they oversold Saddam Hussein's nonexistent
WMD. If you read the intricate conservative briefs vilifying Hillary in
the aftermath of yesterday's testimony - check out this one
- you can see that the Hillary-haters have not found another Watergate
but another Whitewater. It should keep them very busy through 2016 even
if the public continues to turn a deaf ear.
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