Benghazi is back

Benghazi is the story with no end.

It’s back in the news, thanks to some emails uncovered by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group. The emails purport to buttress the idea that the Obama administration lied about what happened at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11, 2012.

They contend the administration engaged in a willful cover-up of the “truth,” whatever it is, about the violence that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/04/benghazi_white_house_emails_did_the_obama_administration_engage_in_a_cover.html

I’ve never believed in a cover-up. I do believe the administration made some big mistakes in trying to report what happened in that chaotic fire fight. They trotted out the U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, to say things about which she wasn’t briefed sufficiently. Rice had a set of talking points that turned out to be incomplete and wrong.

That constitutes a cover-up? Is it a deliberate deception?

No. It was a bungling attempt to get ahead of a still-developing story.

Still, the right-wing mainstream media has sought to keep this story alive and kicking — particularly if the then-secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, decides to run for president in 2016. It’s looking as though she’s going to run and that, all by itself, is reason enough — in the eyes of her critics — to keep hammering away at Benghazi.

Never mind that independent analyses have concluded there was no deliberate lying; they conclude that the U.S. embassy security network failed, but only because officials misjudged the intensity of the fight that was ensuing at the consulate; Clinton herself has taken responsibility for the failure to protect our personnel, but that’s not good enough to satisfy her critics on the far right.

The story will continue to boil and bubble. Were it not for Hillary Clinton’s still-budding presidential candidacy, it would have faded away long ago.