In 2013, CBS News, once the home of giants in journalism like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Conkrite, was caught deliberately misinforming its viewers about a series stories in the news — the Benghazi attacks, the rollout of the Affordable Care Act and the NSA. For these other Fox News-worthy exercises in propagandizing for the right wing, Media Matters has named CBS News its 2013 Misinformer of the Year:
Lindsey Graham has a tea-bagger primary opponent in his campaign for reelection to the Senate from South Carolina next year, so he he is now threatening to shut down government appointments, including to top positions at the Federal Reserve and the Department of Homeland Security, because — Benghazi! He made the shutdown threat on Fox News last Sunday:
It hasn’t yet seeped into the political media’s central narrative about the Benghazi attacks yet — and if the past is a guide, it probably never will — but there has finally been a bona fide revelation of doctoring information about the attacks for political purposes, just as Republicans have claimed from the outset of the attack on September 11, 2012, in which Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others were killed at what is now being described as a CIA outpost.
The culprits who have been caught red-handed are not the administration officials Republicans have accused of spinning intel in order to make Pres. Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton look good, but rather the Republican accusers themselves.
Basically all you need to know about the Fox News-sponsored hearings on the Benghazi attacks scheduled for today is that two of the “whistleblowers” — Gregory N. Hicks, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya at the time of attacks, and Mark I. Thompson, a former Marine who is now the deputy coordinator for Operations in the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau — are being represented, reportedly pro bono, by Victoria Toensing and Joe DiGenova, a husband and wife team of lawyers who are longstanding political apparatchiks for the Republican Party.
The role played by Toensing and DiGenova in the hearings is damning evidence, if any were needed, that the “scandal” around the terror attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi last September is what it appears to be: a bogus political ploy fabricated by Fox News and its allies on the Hill intended to damage the Obama administration politically in the short term — perhaps opening the way to impeaching the president, as right-wing talk show host Mike Huckabee predicted it would yesterday — and, over the longer term, to weaken the prospective candidacy of Hillary Clinton should she decide to run in 2016.
The presence of Toensing and DiGenova is also likely a sign that all the high-powered nonpartisan attorneys in D.C. declined to take the case.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make? It our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, senator.”
On Wednesday at 11:30 a.m., Sen. John McCain of Arizona and his two top lieutenants in the Senate’s Obama Derangement Caucus, Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire (who has replaced Sen. Joe Lieberman, now retired, in the caucus) held a news conference in which they demanded the convening of a Watergate-style select committee to investigate the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi earlier this year in which the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three presumed CIA agents were killed.
According to the Associated Press, “The three Republican senators argued that numerous questions about the attack remain unanswered, among them what Obama’s national security team had told him about security in Libya, what steps were taken by Clinton and the roll [sic] of the U.S. military.”
But at the same time McCain was promoting Fox News-driven conspiracies about Benghazi to reporters in one part of the Capitol, he was supposed to be participating in a hearing on the attacks by the administration before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that was underway in another room in the building. McCain is a senior member of the committee.
The Fox News-generated hysteria among Republicans over the government’s handling of the Benghazi attacks relies heavily on the assumption that Fox viewers have incredibly short memories. Watching Fox present this issue, you might quickly assume that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya was unique — that nothing like it had ever happened before. You might also assume that, if there had been other similar attacks in the past, American patriots and their representatives in Washington would be entirely justified in politicizing the attacks and using the failures that led to them, whether real or imagined, for partisan gain.
In reality, of course, there have been many attacks on U.S. embassies and consulates — more than 40 in the past half century, according to The International News, a newspaper based in Pakistan.
The chart above from Mother Jones, for example, shows the frequency of attacks on U.S. diplomatic sites over the past 40 years. What Fox would like to erase from its viewers’ memories is that, as the chart shows, there were many attacks on U.S. missions overseas during the administration of the most recent Republican president, George W. Bush. It is crucial to Fox’s politicizing of Benghazi to make those attacks disappear down the memory hole, because there is an inconvenient fact associated with them: In the wake of the seven or more attacks on American overseas interests on Bush’s watch, Democrats did not politicize them the way Republicans are politicizing Benghazi today.
In particular, no Democrat ever suggested forming a Watergate-style select committee to investigate the attacks during the Bush era, like the one Republicans are demanding now.
There was one full-scale investigation — the one that looked into the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, which were the most egregious national security failure in U.S. history — but that investigation was outsourced to a bipartisan commission controlled by Republicans.
Speaking of 9/11, Republicans need to be reminded that after the attacks that September day, Democrats rallied around George W. Bush, a president they rightly viewed as an illegitimate Supreme Court appointee, because, in the wake of the attacks on their country, liberals reflexively saw themselves as Americans first and partisans last.
To hear Trump talk, he’s the only one
Who’s ever stood trial for crimes he’s done.
But instead of courtroom drama,
We get Trump in his pajamas,
That’s how he earned his new nickname: Don Snoreleone.
