Saw this tweet from The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza early this afternoon:
"OK, let's go all in on the IRS scandal." -- a lot of Republicans this afternoon.
— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) May 14, 2013
Lizza was presumably responding to Jake Tapper's publication of a White House e-mail that turns out to be much less inflammatory than the press told us it was last week when news of it was leaked.
But give up on Benghazi? Republicans? Really?
Um, no:
House Republican members are defying Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and five committee chairmen by endorsing a measure that would set up a special panel to investigate the deadly attacks in Benghazi, Libya.More:
A growing number of members on the committees with jurisdiction over the Benghazi matter -- Intelligence, Judiciary, Oversight and Government Reform, Armed Services and Foreign Affairs -- have signed onto Rep. Frank Wolf's (R-Va.) resolution.
Boehner and the chairmen of those committees do not support the legislation. Instead, they have worked together to investigate the Obama administration's handling of the Sept. 11, 2012 assault.
Despite that resistance, Wolf has garnered a sizable majority of the GOP Conference as co-sponsors since introducing the measure in January. It has 146 GOP co-sponsors, with more than 80 Republicans backing it over the last month....
Not one Democrat has co-sponsored the Wolf resolution....
Wolf ... wrote in a letter to Boehner Thursday that he remains convinced a special committee is "the only mechanism to ensure that the complete truth comes out."Republicans don't let issues go -- they damn sure don't let anything go at the first sign of a setback for their side. This is what Republicans do: they ratchet up whatever they're doing.
Wolf wrote that last week's hearing in the House Oversight Committee was a "positive step" but "also made clear that a thorough inquiry will require witnesses from across government - including the Defense Department, State Department, Intelligence Community, Justice Department and even the White House. Only a Select Committee would be able to bring the cross-jurisdictional expertise and subpoena authority to compel answers from these agencies."
As Republican red-meat issues go, Benghazi is prime rib. Republicans enjoy any opportunity to attack and harm a Democrat, but nothing is as delectable as an opportunity to accuse a Democrat of being weak and betraying those who wear the uniform in defense of America. This goes back to where everything goes back for the right: to the 1960s, when the archetypical evil lefty opposed the Vietnam War and was skeptical of "law and order."
Recall that, in Obama's first term, the scandal Republicans worked the hardest, with no success whatsoever, was Fast and Furious. In Republicans' eyes, that was a conscious effort to weaken border security and get immigration agents killed in order to spread gun control (which to Republicans, of course, weakens America further).
That was the domestic aspect of their lefty archetype -- contempt for law enforcement. Benghazi, in their eyes, fits the foreign policy aspect of the archetype. The fact that a rescue didn't happen was, to them, like Jane Fonda sitting on that cannon in North Vietnam. It was like putting flowers in gun barrels. It was hippies dancing in the mud at Woodstock.
They'll never let Benghazi go. Their view of it is practically in their DNA.
