As anyone who tries to remember
will remember, "Benghazi-gate" was a trumped up scandal designed to deny President Obama reelection. Obviously, it failed. The story was that the White House covered up certain facts that would hurt Obama on the campaign trail. So a narrative was cooked up to explain
why this was all a big scandal that the media should give wall-to-wall coverage.
The way the narrative was supposed to go was that the President saw electoral doom in a terrorist attack on a consulate in Benghazi. Why this was supposed to sink his chances isn't clear nor was it ever explained. It just would, OK?
So anyway, the White House colluded with the State Department to hide the terrorist attack and blame it on anti-American rioters -- as if there's any substantial difference here. The scandal's narrative arc had it that a terrorist attack would mean the president would have trouble being reelected, but a riot would mean he wouldn't. Why? Because stop asking so many sensible questions, that's why.
Of course, the president won reelection fairly easily and decisively,
despite the fact that this whole terrorist/riot thing was cleared up long before election day. Despite Republicans' best efforts to churn up a big, scary scandal, young "Benghazi-gate" had died. It now exists solely as a zombie. It has to. The problem with made up scandals is that they have to be played out to the bitter end, lest the scandal-mongers be exposed as con artists, charlatans, and liars. The problem with "Benghazi-gate" is that it's shambled along in undead pointlessness far beyond even that end stage -- which, for all practical purposes, it entered when Barack Obama was reelected back in November. It continues to lurch around only because the GOP refuses to bury it, as John McCain demonstrated so well this weekend.
Steve Benen has the skinny...[
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