"The Benghazi Story goes critical" reflects the original topic prior to it getting bumped. I had assumed smuggling arms to Syrian terrorists through Benghazi would cause a significant shift in both our media and our government.
The illegality of working to overthrow Assad and hand Syria over to the likes of ISIS should have stuck a chord with the American people. Apparently it did not. Either the public does not generally know we built Syrian terrorists, the same sort that are destroying Iraq, or the people approve of us creating the next Bin Laden.
If we don't want to create terrorists, then the arms smuggling really should have been a bigger deal, an impeachable offense. Problem is there are Republicans like McCain who loved the idea. So the story passes through the media with nary a peep. People aren't whipped into revolt against it and they soon fall back asleep. Ignorance is bliss.
You touched on one of the reasons - the recognition that the Republicans would have done much the same. We always try to shape events to our benefit, and it's often a dog's breakfast because often there is no good side and sometimes not even a less bad side. That said, should we really get all up in arms and throw out the bums in favor of the other bums? Seems to me that in a two-party system, the only reason to get really up in arms is when the party in power is doing something the party out of power would not do. If for instance we successfully removed Obama and Biden and crowned President Boehner, would we be sending a powerful message that such behavior is unacceptable, or just legitimizing it for Boehner? (I mean after he stopped crying, obviously. I doubt anyone could understand him the first couple of days.)
From what I understand is the Ambassador specifically wanted the Embassy there and specifically wanted mostly local security. I also believe there was a plan to secure this embassy more but congress denied the spending. I feel Hillary should have made more noise about the security budget.
Its a shame we live in such partisan times, I feel we are missing an opportunity to understand what went wrong. I also believe no single person is guilty, I believe its a process failure and multiple parties made small mistakes.
Too bad the special prosecutor was completely abused with Whitewater. Assuming it didn't become an investigation from Benghazi to did the President lie about having fruit loops for breakfast on a particular day.
Man, I hope you got paid for that post since you hit pretty much every Democrat taking point. Pelosi could not have done better.
1. Blame the dead guy.
2. Blame Republicans cutting funding. (Or not increasing funding as much as asked.)
3. Blame partisanship.
4. Assert that we'll never know what happened.
5. Blame Republicans again.
I think it's virtually a certainty that multiple people made mistakes. Very few spectacular failures occur from a single person's single mistake, and especially given the habitual secrecy and turf wars it's surprising that more such mistakes don't happen. Ideally the minimum acceptable for an ambassador would be a reinforced Marine squad with an available QRF and a reaction force, all with attached transportation, and a plan to reinforce with the QRF within an hour and the larger reaction force with twenty-four hours. This is simply sound military planning. But there are always other concerns and competing needs, and I suspect someone up the chain scrimped on security thinking that the CIA station nearby could and would provide a QRF. If memory serves, the CIA station until soon before the attack was larger; unfortunately State is not in the CIA's chain of command, so a reduction or relocation in CIA personnel does not necessarily show up on State's radar. I think it's also likely that there's an element of a calculated risk here as well. And possibly there are concerns they thought valid, such as gun running, that need to be kept secret. Whichever, I think it's likely that Benghazi is not a major scandal.
It's sad that a President lying for political benefit about the murder of a US Ambassador seems to me no more than a minor scandal, but that far predates Obama. Romney (who was my guy) was using the attack for political advantage as well, and I fully believe that President McCain would have also spun the most advantageous story he thought he could get away with.