Scapegoat for Benghazi?

Probably Hillary. [Link]

And let us establish once and for all what happened.  The screwup was in two parts.  The first was tactical: the administration made a judgement call on whether or not to (metaphorically) send in the Marines.  They decided not to.  People died.  Did that make it a bad call?  Maybe.  Maybe not. Sometimes the dice hate you.  Maybe if the Marines had been sent in the whole thing would have gone spectacularly pear-shaped and we’d have a hundred people dead, not four.  But then again, maybe nobody would have died at all.  Generally speaking, it’s a lot easier to justify We don’t throw lives away for no good reason than it is to justify We’d rather let four people die than risk a hundred.  Still, it’s a hard call to make when it’s you on the scene.

But the second part of the screwup is less forgivable.  The general rule here isCommand takes responsibility.  JFK survived the Bay of Pigs incident because he embraced that rule. Nixon didn’t survive Watergate because he didn’t.  If Obama had said Well, we thought that we had good security up at Benghazi, only we didn’t, so al-Qaeda caught us by surprise and killed our people and that was something that I have to take full responsibility for and I’m never going to let that happen again then… well, he might have lost the election, actually.  We didn’t realize at the time, but Obama’s 2012 re-election strategy had pretty much no margin for error.  So the administration picked a narrative (it was all due to a YouTube video!) that cynically traded on stereotypes about foreign Muslims and their collective level of impulse control*, and did nothing but push said narrative for as long as they could.  Which was, oddly enough,long enough for the election to be over.

And that was last year.  But this is this year, and there’s nobody – well, except for the usual 1% fringe lunatics – who seriously believes that the Benghazi attack was due to a YouTube video.  And now what’s coming out, and being put in the formal record, is that the executive branch of the government knew that their narrative about what happened in Benghazi was false when they pushed it out, and that we know that they knew this because the people who had survived the attacks told them what had actually happened. And it’s not just the testimony.  From National Journal:

Curiously, the Obama administration also won’t talk about the footage that they have from the compound – video that some people who have seen it argue could clear up questions about whether the incident was a premeditated terrorist attack or something less.

As the National Journal then notes, “They just really don’t want to talk about this.” Which is not entirely true; they’ll be happy enough to talk about it if they can pass responsibility off to somebody else… and, hey: here we come back to Hillary Clinton.  Who is, again, no Bill Clinton or George W Bush or even Barack Obama when it comes to navigating through controversial waters.