In response to One Year Later: Why We Were in Benghazi:
Great article, John. Over at my blog, I wrote:
Mickey Kaus had an interesting metaphor for explaining odd news coverage. He suggested that sometimes one can feel the presence of a “Dark Star,” visible only by the gravitational fields it exerts on visible matter. The star itself is dark and therefore invisible, but you can infer it exists by the strange and unexpected pathways other objects (stories) take when they come near the Dark Star.
I think this whole arms operation is the Benghazi Dark Star. I think it’s better to just have it out in the open, because, look, it already is out in the open. There is literally no one in the world who cares to know about this who doesn’t know about this.
The only people who are being kept in the dark are the American public. And I don’t even care if they remain in the dark about this.
But what I do care about is the media’s Phony Scandal You Guys treatment of the Administration’s — Obama’s, Clinton’s, and now Kerry’s — lapses and illegal cover-ups to protect a supposed Dark Star that everyone knows about.
Whatever the CIA was doing in Benghazi is simply not any kind of excuse for failing to take security threats seriously, or for failing to mount a rescue when men could still have been saved, or for perpetrating a ridiculous lie about a YouTube video on the public.
It’s my belief the Administration took a license to lie about the Benghazi annex’s mission — which itself was permissible — and then used that as a pretext for concocting a politically-useful lie about the Administration’s cock-ups and horrible decisions before, during, and after the attack. And that part is not permissible.
They could have protected the Bengazi annex’s secret mission by simply stating the truth — that this was a terrorist attack against American interests. Instead, they figured that as they were lying about some parts of Benghazi, what the hell, might as well lie about everything else, too.