Hands down the biggest news story of the 2013 holiday season was t
he New York Times opus on the 2012 Benghazi attack.
The Dec. 28 story debunked every single right-wing conspiracy peddled
by Fox News (and also promulgated briefly by CBS News’ “60 Minutes”):
the attack was, in fact, heavily motivated by an anti-Islam movie, as
the Obama administration claimed; its militia ringleaders were
independent of al-Qaida, and there was nothing the administration or
Hillary Clinton’s State Department could do to protect the four men who
died at the underdefended Benghazi compound.
Given the holiday,
you may have missed the story. The folks at Fox may as well have. They
continue to push their old lies: that the tragedy was the result of
Obama and Clinton ignoring the growing al-Qaida threat in Libya and the
danger to Ambassador Chris Stevens and his staff. When Fox bothered to
acknowledge the Times’ work, it has been only to accuse the paper of
carrying water for the administration, and specifically, for Hillary
Clinton.
Charles Krauthammer insisted the Times piece was all about protecting Clinton’s 2016 presidential chances. “The reason that
Times
invested all the effort and time in this and put it on the front page
is precisely a way to protect the Democrats, to deflect the issue, to
protect Hillary, who was exposed on this issue with almost no issue in
her tenure in the administration,” he said Monday. “It is obviously a
political move.”
To be fair, the Times story had critics beyond Fox:
the Daily Beast’s Eli Lake continued to peddle the story that al-Qaida played a key role in the Benghazi bloodshed.
But Fox Business hit a new low Thursday,
when Lou Dobbs hosted former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer to attack the
Times’ work. Scheuer became famous critiquing the Bush administration’s
war on terror in his book “Imperial Hubris,” which he first published
anonymously. But he’s reached new depths attacking Obama.
In
a Dec. 23 column on Obama’s tyranny, he effectively advocated the
president’s assassination, quoting Algernon Sidney on what should happen
to tyrants: “by an established law among the most virtuous nations,
every man might kill a tyrant, and no names are recorded in history with
more honor, than of those who did it.”
Scheuer also managed to
work in racism, sexism and xenophobia, insisting Obama and Attorney
General Eric Holder are protected because “the impeachment provisions of
the Constitution are a dead letter; that they apply only to individuals
named Nixon; or that they do not apply to black Americans supported by
such towering giants of fatuousness as Oprah, Chris Matthews, Fareed
Zakaria, Piers Morgan, and Hillary Clinton and her motley band of
Viragos.”
David Frum argued that “Scheuer’s meltdown” would once and for all discredit him
and keep him off the airwaves – Frum charges liberals with looking away
from Scheuer’s extremism and anti-Semitism back when he was a Bush
critic, and he has a point.
But Frum was wrong: Dobbs invited
Scheuer to weigh in on the Times’ Benghazi scoop, and he came through
for the Fox Business host, insisting Clinton “has blood on her arms up
to her elbows for not being willing to protect the people who are
representing us in Libya” and thus “killed those Americans and
[the Times editors] have to kill that story or it is going to become
mainstream for 2016.” (h/t Media Matters.)
Clearly the right’s
Benghazi fever will not be cured by facts. Obama and Clinton’s critics
are so adept at projection that they imagine the New York Times is
motivated by the same sort of political agenda that drives Fox’s news
coverage, only for the other team.
I enjoyed managing editor Jill Abramson dismissing Fox’s charges as “ridiculous,” without elaboration.
The
truth is, the Times piece was not without criticism of the
administration’s efforts in Benghazi. It found that the attack’s leaders
had benefited from American weaponry and support while fighting Moammar
Gadhafi, and suggests that while the strike on the compound “does not
appear to have been meticulously planned, neither was it spontaneous or
without warning signs.”
The Benghazi tragedy, David Kirkpatrick
wrote, “shows the risks of expecting American aid in a time of
desperation to buy durable loyalty, and the difficulty of discerning
friends from allies of convenience in a culture shaped by decades of
anti-Western sentiment.”
That raises thorny questions of national
security that demand serious bipartisan debate. But the usual suspects
on Fox and within the GOP leadership continue to believe they have a way
to disqualify Hillary Clinton from becoming president, and it will take
much more than facts to convince them otherwise.
Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large and the author of
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