CSotD: Hello? Hello? Is this thing working?
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There are a few Benghazi cartoons making fun of the hyperinflation being brought to this non-event, but I think John Cole got it best.
I mean, are we really not supposed to be able to see past the scary mask? Maybe if it were bigger. Maybe if it even began to somewhat fit.
And yet there it is. Count Floyd, political analyst.
It's important that someone find out how many people are falling for this ridiculous smear effort, because I can no longer judge the gullibility of the American people.
Here's what I've figured out so far:
The anti-Clinton campaign funded by Richard Scaife was able to find some credible material by casting a wide net. The "Hilary murdered Vince Foster" nonsense fell flat, but Whitewater was a good piece of propaganda, since commercial real estate is a slippery beast to begin with.
Specifically, since a lot of people have purchased a house, they feel they understand how real estate works, but residential transactions are heavily loaded with consumer protections, since the law recognizes that one party is inexperienced and requires disclaimers and transparency.
Commercial real estate, by stark contrast, is a full-contact sport in which it is assumed that both parties know the rules, which is that there aren't a lot of rules. Nearly any commercial deal of any magnitude could result in investigations and convictions if you chose to parse every clause and every unspoken agreement. The Number One Rule of making a deal is that nobody talks about the deal.
So Whitewater got plenty of traction, not just from the rightwing but from mainstream media and a good segment of the general public, until they finally actually showed their hand.
At which point, business writers looked at the cards and said, "You've got nothing. All commercial development deals look like this."
The shrugs were not effective in turning public opinion, but the courts also saw that there was no there there and, while a couple of people got minor convictions for not crossing a T or dotting an i, Whitewater dwindled down to nothing.
And then they pulled out Monica Lewinsky and proved that — gasp! — a powerful man had enjoyed consensual sex with an adult woman not his wife. And they got him to fib about it and they managed to drag that somewhat standard denial into the Congress.
They got their impeachment but no conviction, but they had made the point that conservative, god-fearing America will not tolerate a politician who cheats on his wife and lies about his infidelity.
Unless, y'know, he runs for office, in which case a trip to Argentina becomes indistinguishable from a hike on the Appalachian Trail, as noted by Christopher Weyant in the New Yorker's daily cartoon yesterday.
Clinton or Sanford, the whole adultery thing is a matter of much hand-wringing and not much caring.
And today Bill Clinton is doing just fine, his wife is doing even better and the American Spectator has been out of business for a dozen years and Richard Scaife wasted his millions.
The only positive that emerged from all that for the conspirators was that, when Hilary Clinton said there was a vast right-wing conspiracy, everyone laughed, so that future right-wing conspiracies could continue to go forward without a lot of kneejerk opposition against which to prove themselves.
So what are the Koch Brothers and Murdoch and the rest of the Unholy Alliance getting for their money this time around?
The whole birther thing — like the Vince Foster murder case — kind of degenerated into obvious screwballism.
Obamacare, by contrast, has a certain Whitewater appeal in that healthcare funding is easily as impenetrably opaque as commercial real estate development, with the advantage that while, in order to be useful, Whitewater had to result in serious legal charges, there doesn't have to be any actual denouement with Obamacare: We can kick around competing financial models forever.
As has been noted many times, if you laid every economist in the country end to end, they wouldn't reach a conclusion, so this one can remain a partisan game in which everyone gets to believe whatever they want, including that it was a good thing when Romney proposed it, but a bad thing now that Obama has gotten it passed.
But, while bitching about Obamacare helps against Democrats in general, it's not very useful against Hilary, and so we're dragging out that stained blue dress and putting Benghazi under the microscope.
This graphic has been circulating on Facebook for a few days. I'm not sure of the numbers. I've seen different figures as well, but it's certainly, clearly true that the attack on the Benghazi consulate or CIA spook shack or whatever it was hardly stands out as unique over the past decade.
And I've always felt it was a little unfair to assume that Bush and Rice should have necessarily picked out the warnings about 9/11 from the stacks of CIA intelligence briefings that no doubt came before them, though the assassination of the head of the Northern Alliance two days earlier should probably have prompted some "where are we at with this?" curiosity.
It's equally unfair to assume that everything happening at every moment in Benghazi was being laid on the President's table. Either the man is both omniscient and omnipresent or he's not, and, if he is, then Bush was, too, and is responsible for everything that went wrong on his watch.
Benghazi is nothing.
1. It is not unique. Whatever the actual numbers prove to be, there have been many other attacks on American consulates with greater loss of life.
2. It sure seems like it was the aforementioned CIA spook shack. If so, that would explain some conflicting cover stories in the hours and days that followed. It would also suggest that the party that outed Valerie Plame for political advantage and that revealed classified information about Benghazi in a committee hearing should shut its pie hole.
3. As for "whistleblowers," the term does not simply mean people who are willing to bitch and moan about the boss. If that's what it means, then any business with more than 8 employees has at least three "whistleblowers" who could come forward and testify. You're thinking of "Monday morning quarterbacks."
So the question is not "What happened in Benghazi?"
The question is, for all the willingness of the GOP fringe, talk radio and rightwing cartoonists to flog this thing, is anyone actually buying it?
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