The right’s Benghazi insanity reaches new depths

No amount of facts can convince the right of reality. Here's how politics, racism and sexism guide their lunacy

JOAN WALSH

Hands down the biggest news story of the 2013 holiday season was the New York Times opus on the 2012 Benghazi attack. The Dec. 28 story debunked every single right-wing conspiracy peddled by Fox News (and also promulgated briefly by CBS News’ “60 Minutes”): the attack was, in fact, heavily motivated by an anti-Islam movie, as the Obama administration claimed; its militia ringleaders were independent of al-Qaida, and there was nothing the administration or Hillary Clinton’s State Department could do to protect the four men who died at the underdefended Benghazi compound.

Given the holiday, you may have missed the story. The folks at Fox may as well have. They continue to push their old lies: that the tragedy was the result of Obama and Clinton ignoring the growing al-Qaida threat in Libya and the danger to Ambassador Chris Stevens and his staff. When Fox bothered to acknowledge the Times’ work, it has been only to accuse the paper of carrying water for the administration, and specifically, for Hillary Clinton.

Charles Krauthammer insisted the Times piece was all about protecting Clinton’s 2016 presidential chances. “The reason that Times invested all the effort and time in this and put it on the front page is precisely a way to protect the Democrats, to deflect the issue, to protect Hillary, who was exposed on this issue with almost no issue in her tenure in the administration,” he said Monday. “It is obviously a political move.”

To be fair, the Times story had critics beyond Fox: the Daily Beast’s Eli Lake continued to peddle the story that al-Qaida played a key role in the Benghazi bloodshed.

But Fox Business hit a new low Thursday, when Lou Dobbs hosted former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer to attack the Times’ work. Scheuer became famous critiquing the Bush administration’s war on terror in his book “Imperial Hubris,” which he first published anonymously. But he’s reached new depths attacking Obama.

full article:
http://www.salon.com/2014/01/03/gop%E2%80%99s_benghazi_insanity_reaches_new_depths/