The benghazi inquisition might be a bigger deal than a lot of non-Fox viewers think because it's starting to get buy-in from the so-called liberal media. Yes, non-Republican journalists still think there's no crime involved and therefore no cover-up that should be actionable ... but, really, the White House committed a political error, didn't he? So, really, he had it coming, right? Therefore, if the GOP is going to paralyze the country with a phony constitutional crisis for the rest of this year --or the next two and a half years, or onward into infinity if Hillary Clinton is elected president but Congress is still Republican-controlled -- then it's as much Obama's fault as the Republicans', isn't it? Wasn't Obama asking for it?
So I saw this on Twitter from a Miami Herald reporter, enthusiastically retweeted by National Journal's Alex Seitz-Wald:
If WH wasnt so spin & secrecy obsessed, it would've 1) been more accurate re TP 2) disclosed emails sooner 3) not be dealing w/Benghazi now
— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) May 6, 2014I responded to this by noting that Hillary Clinton's book tour is coming up, so the GOP would have found an excuse to do this no matter what. Seitz-Wald replied:
@nomoremister @MarcACaputo sure, but new info confirms R's suspicion that WH is holding back, and suggests WH knew Rhodes email was damaging
— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) May 6, 2014Yes, but this line of thought easily morphs into the sort of "just world" thinking that partly absolves Republicans of responsibility for the fraud they're committing. It's as if these reporters are watching a kid get bullied in the junior high cafeteria and telling themselves that, after all, he does all those weird things, so of course he gets picked on. They lose perspective on what should be the unacceptability of what's being done.
And when we turn to The Washington Post, there's Dana Milbank saying the same thing:
If Republicans succeed in turning the Benghazi "scandal" from a nothingburger into a Double Big Mac, the Obama White House can blame its own secrecy and obsessive control over information....A nasty cafeteria beatdown is now inevitable, and reporters and pundits are making themselves comfortable with the idea that it's going to happen, because acknowledging that sociopaths control half our government is too much to ask of them.
As I've argued before, Benghazi doesn't qualify as a scandal because the Republican allegations, even if true, don't amount to much....
But the White House unwittingly gave the matter new life by disobeying the first rule of crisis management: Get all information out there, quickly....
On top of that, the whole flap over Rice and the "talking points" was caused largely by the White House's attempt to control tightly the dissemination of information....
