For months, Fox News has been promising to blow open the Benghazi cover-up that they’re sure is worse than Watergate, Iran-Contra and the Titanic, multiplied by the Hindenburg to the Teapot Dome Scandal power. And again and again, the same essential facts have emerged. As protests raged at U.S. embassies across the region, the U.S. military tried and failed to protect the diplomatic mission in Benghazi.
On Wednesday’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart explained how Republicans and Fox News are outraged at a supposed cover-up that they can’t prove or explain, and are equally outraged that no one else is outraged.
The right suggests the lack of outrage in Benghazi is part of the left’s continued control of the media. But the media loves a good scandal, and would jump right in if one existed.
The fact is, most Americans are skeptical of the GOP not because of media bias, but because we have a memory. We all know the the GOP has a tendency, as Hypervocal‘s Slade Sohmer points out, to “cry wolf.”
We remember the ridiculous impeachment of President Clinton. We remember the fixed intelligence that led to the Iraq War. We remember birtherism, Solyndra, Fast and Furious — all examples of the GOP trying to conjure scandals that in no way resonated with the American public.
And some of us even remember Mitt Romney politicizing the attacks in Libya within hours of the deaths of Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans, attacking embassy officials in a bizarre manner that continued his obsession of accusing President Obama of “apologizing for America.” Romney humiliated himself that night, and again in the second presidential debate when he accused the president of refusing to call the attacks “terror” when Obama had in fact used that exact word the day after the attack.
As our Joe Conason points out, President Obama has been trying to commit what the GOP considers the greatest high crime and misdemeanor: Being a Democratic president who finishes his second term. So you can’t expect them to ever give up on trying to turn Benghazi into Watergate, unless they find some bright, shiny new scandal that actually makes sense.
