The Shameful Politicization of the Benghazi Consulate Attack

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

11 October 12

he Tea Party Congress, having, with Paul Ryan's leadership, deeply cut funds for embassy security, held a hearing on Wednesday on the circumstances of the attack on Sept. 11, 2012, on the US consulate in Benghazi, in which it tried to point fingers at the State Department and the Obama administration.

That's right, the Republicans cut funds for embassy security, and now are blaming the State Department for laxity.

One of the Republican talking points is criticism of Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice and other Obama administration officials for saying that the events on Sept. 11 began with a demonstration outside the consulate against the hate film "The Innocence of the Muslims."

But the fact is that the Libyan Arabic press initially reported that there was such a demonstration, and Libyan officials in Benghazi said so, as well, and I conveyed these assertions here.

The indications that this was a revenge attack for the killing of al-Qaeda number 3, Abu Yahya Libi, were a) that a rocket propelled grenade was deployed against the consulate, which goes rather beyond typical mob violence; and that b) the safe house to which dozens of consular personnel were moved by Libyan special forces itself came under mortar attack. This latter fact was reported later in the week by Libyan journalist Hadeel Al-Shalchi.

But it is natural that there should have been a fog of war around the attack. The one who would normally have been reporting back to the State Department about the details- Ambassador Chris Stevens- died from smoke inhalation.

I frankly can't understand what the Tea Baggers are driving at here. If their complaint is lack of consulate security, then they shouldn't have cut the money for it.

If their complaint is that early accounts of what happened were chaotic and ultimately inaccurate, what else would they expect? When would that have not been so in the aftermath of such a disaster? As I've pointed out before, lots of embassy attacks occurred under Bush, including one in Athens, and I doubt they GOP even held a hearing on most of them.

One subtext seems to be that Obama naively unleashed al-Qaeda in Libya by helping overthrow Qaddafi, and then was unprepared for its attacks. But July's parliamentary elections showed that radical Muslim movements are a tiny minority in Libya. The largest single party is nationalist, not Muslim fundamentalist. Libya has a problem with the militias that grew up during last year's revolution. But many of them, as with the Zintanis or the Berbers of Jabal Nafusa, are hardly pious fundamentalists. I was in Libya in May-June, and it simply isn't the violent basket case that Americans keep depicting it as.

I don't know if Americans are finding this politicization of the tragedy in Benghazi distasteful. They should be.

Romney on the campaign trail started telling the story of an ex-Navy Seal who died in the attack, who had been stationed in a facility a mile from the consulate, wand who ran toward the danger. Romney praised his courage and Americanness, attampting to appropriate some of it for himself.

But Romney never ran toward danger in his life. He dodged the draft for Vietnam by trying to convince French people not to drink coffee or wine.

The deceased SEAL's mother asked Romney to knock it off, saying that she doesn't trust the GOP standard bearer.

That's the same response Americans in general should have to the distasteful and cynical attempt on Capitol Hill to deploy Chris Stevens' killing for narrow political gain at the polls

Warren/Brown III: The Night of Nonsense Liberation

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

11 October 12

ednesday night was the third debate up here in Massachusetts between incumbent Senator Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren. They debated for an hour. They debated health-care policy. They debated taxes and spending and The Deficit. They debated issues important to women, including abortion and contraception and equal pay for equal work. They debated levels of military spending. They did not spend once blessed second talking about what may or may not have been on Elizabeth Warren's job applications 30 years ago, and they did not descend into an utter waste of time like they did here a week and a half ago sitting down across from David Gregory. Even Brown seemed to realize this debate was serious business, because he passed on his one and only opportunity to cook up the Native-American nothingburger once more. And for this serious business America has to thank a guy named Jim Madigan who works at WGBY-TV in Springfield, Massachusetts. Almost by himself, on Wednesday night, one man kept a race very important to the balance of power in this country from descending into nasty, racially-grating burlesque for the balance of this campaign. I don't think I'm overstating the case at all when I say that, based on their relative performances moderating debates up here, Jim Madigan should be replacing the Dancin' Master this Sunday on Meet The Press.

(Even with Madigan's work keeping things on an even keel, the crowd in Springfield was just rowdy enough to give the debate a little tang. Some crazed woman kept yelling, "NO!" at Warren while Brown got a resounding bazoo when he tried to claim credit for being "the deciding vote" in the committee that created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was Warren's creation from the jump.)

Perhaps because the proceedings were liberated from the nonsense, Warren by far had the best night on stage she has had throughout the entire campaign. She was sharp and relaxed and relentlessly on-point, making quite clear that, for all of his professed bipartisanship, Brown has been Republican enough to sign onto Grover Norquist's suicidal no-taxes-of-any-kind pledge, something Brown didn't have to do, and something for which he absolutely has no answer. When Senator McDreamy tried to wriggle away from it, promising out into the cheap seats that he wasn't going to "raise taxes on anyone here in Massachusetts," Warren riposted that, "I think I just heard Senator Brown say he'd signed a pledge to work for Grover Norquist but not for the people of Massachusetts." And, when the subject turned to women's issues, Warren had a moment that, I suspect, people around the Commonwealth (God save it!) are going to be seeing once or twice in television commercials:

"He had one chance to vote for equal pay for equal work, and he voted no," she said. "He had one chance to vote to mandate that health-insurance companies cover contraception, and he voted no. And he had one chance to vote to put a pro-choice woman on the Supreme Court, and he voted no."

She was even quick enough (finally) to turn Brown's endlessly cited statistics from the National Federation of Independent Businesses, Republican hack hatchery for decades, against him. When he again brought up the NFIB's estimate on how many jobs "her" economic plans would cost, she replied, "First of all, that report doesn't even mention my name. It doesn't even mention the president's name, and the NFIB is a group that's endorsed a lot of Republicans and that once referred to Ted Kennedy as 'Public Enemy No. 1.'" Very rarely do you hear the network of wingnut welfare called out so clearly. And the most remarkable moment came early on, when, in a discussion of the Affrodable Care Act, which Brown flatly says he'll vote to repeal, he trotted out the "$700 billion in Medicare cuts" lie, and Warren slapped it down much more effectively than the president did in Denver last week, and linked Brown to Willard Romney in the process.

(Brown was pretty obviously adrift on the entire subject of health care. He was proud of what he was able to help do in Massachusetts, and he insisted that the ACA would undo the Massachusetts plan, a contention that is flatly bizarre. At times, he seemed to be inching toward Romney's own incoherent position - that what works in Massachusetts would be tyranny in Tennessee, or something - before moving on again to the problems with having "Washington" butt into the health-care nirvana that we have wrought up here. It is one of the great ironies of the age that the Republicans cannot find a single, solid position to take on the success of health-care reform in Massachusetts.)

It would be wrong to read too much into Warren's strong showing. Brown did what he came to do, which is to promise not to raise any taxes anywhere on anyone, ever. This is, of course, insane public policy, and it makes him sound more like he's running for state senator again, but it sells very, very well, and if he can use it to deflect Warren's attempts to make national issues important to this race, it will have served its purpose. This will still be a two- or three-point race, either way. Recent polling has shown Warren's unfavorability rating inching northward - endless TV attack ads will do that - but it also has shown that people overwhelmingly blame Brown for the tone of the campaign so far, which undoubtedly had something to do with the fact that he declined to utilize his Injun-spottin' skills on Wednesday night. Maybe it takes a strong hand to turn a campaign back into something positive. Maybe, dammit, it takes a Jim Madigan.