Camille Paglia does not believe Benghazi is a phony scandal.
Salon has an interview with Paglia in which she offers some thoughts on Hillary Clinton as Democratic nominee for President and her role as Secretary of State during the Benghazi attack which killed our ambassador:
As a registered Democrat, I am praying for a credible presidential
candidate to emerge from the younger tier of politicians in their late
40s. A governor with executive experience would be ideal. It’s time to
put my baby-boom generation out to pasture! We’ve had our day and
managed to muck up a hell of a lot. It remains baffling how anyone would
think that Hillary Clinton (born the same year as me) is our party’s
best chance. She has more sooty baggage than a 90-car freight train. And
what exactly has she ever accomplished — beyond bullishly covering for
her philandering husband? She’s certainly busy, busy and ever on the
move — with the tunnel-vision workaholism of someone trying to blot out
uncomfortable private thoughts.I for one think it was a very big
deal that our ambassador was murdered in Benghazi. In saying “I take
responsibility” for it as secretary of state, Hillary should have
resigned immediately. The weak response by the Obama administration to
that tragedy has given a huge opening to Republicans in the next
presidential election. The impression has been amply given that Benghazi
was treated as a public relations matter to massage rather than as the
major and outrageous attack on the U.S. that it was.Throughout
history, ambassadors have always been symbolic incarnations of the
sovereignty of their nations and the dignity of their leaders. It’s even
a key motif in “King Lear.” As far as I’m concerned, Hillary
disqualified herself for the presidency in that fist-pounding moment at a
congressional hearing when she said, “What difference does it make what
we knew and when we knew it, Senator?” Democrats have got to shake off
the Clinton albatross and find new blood. The escalating instability not
just in Egypt but throughout the Mideast is very ominous. There is a
clash of cultures brewing in the world that may take a century or more
to resolve — and there is no guarantee that the secular West will win.
While she laments Republicans gaining advantage out of it, she nevertheless seems to agree that the handling of Benghazi both before and after the attack was a major failure. We learned this week that even the people initially held responsible have been reinstated (at slightly different jobs). As Paglia points out, if Hillary really believed the buck stopped with her, why didn’t she resign?