The Real Benghazi Scandal

With Day 1 of the Benghazi hearings in the can, it's hard to know where to begin: altered talking points, murdered ambassadors, State Dept. review boards, YouTube videos, orders to "stand-down," etc. If there doesn't seem to be an immediate political pay-off it's because there's been so much information coming so quickly, it's hard to absorb. Still, I think there's one inescapable conclusion that  we can already draw, and it's the real Benghazi scandal:

We have a chickensh*t president and (had) a chickensh*t Secretary of State who, God help us, aspires to be president herself.

I say this with all due respect*, of course.

Obama and Hillary actively worked to depose Hosni Mubarak and Col. Qaddafi under the guise of an alleged democratic revolution sweeping the entire Middle East when in fact the "democrats" were just Islamists with Twitter accounts. The deposing of Qaddafi was supposed to be the exemplar of the sort of "lead from behind" way of war that would accomplish everything "dumb" George Bush tried to do in Iraq, but at the fraction of the cost in blood and treasure. Having overthrown the government and unleashed a typical jihadi maelstrom, Obama and Hillary deposited Amb. Stevens and three dozen diplomats and intelligence types into a hellhole and then left them for dead once the inevitable happened and the Muslims began seeking out Americans to kill.

Then they went out and blamed a video, supposedly made in America, for the violence. In other words, our American president tried to blame us and our First Amendment right to free expression for a coordinated attack by our deadliest enemies. He even went to the UN and said this. If there is another American president who would have even contemplated doing such a thing, let alone done it, I'd like to know his name.

Then, during the few precious minutes when Mitt Romney challenged Obama on his misfeasance and non-feasance, the president smugly demanded that we "look at the transcript," where you could indeed find a single generic sentence about "terror" from the one public statement he gave about Benghazi - and that settled that! As if the whole controversy was over a prepared statement in the Rose Garden and not the cold-blooded abandonment of our diplomats.

By any definition you choose, that is chickensh*t behavior.

It's probably true that there wasn't much you could do from DC to save the 4 men who died, but so what? They made no effort to save them, and actively stopped the efforts of the few people who tried to take the initiative and rescue the embattled mission. And, forget the 4 dead, what about the three dozen survivors, some of them grievously wounded, who were also abandoned to their fates by the progressive Jesus who went to sleep while his diplomats fought furiously for their lives? The Obama-ites left them to die. Say what you will about George Bush or Ronald Reagan, but they wouldn't have let this play out that way.

The million dollar question is whether this will discredit Obama and Hillary in the eyes of the public. Well, I don't know. The whole point of covering up Benghazi was to preserve the story line that al-Qaeda was dead and the Arab Spring was going great. The depressing lesson from the 2012 election is that there are tens of millions of Americans who are happy to look the other way so long as they keep getting their government money, whether for food stamps, "free" health care, condoms, abortions, Obama-phones, layabout jobs in the bureaucracy or whatever. Amb. Stevens may have died, but at least the Tsarnaev family still had their subsidized housing! (and there's a sort of grim irony in the younger Tsarnaev brother getting his US citizenship on the same day as the Benghazi attack, isn't there?)

This is the president we've got now. That's the real scandal.

*i.e. none