Benghazi and why it still matters

As I have talked about in another post, recently American troops in Niger were ambushed during the course of their mission in that country and four soldiers were killed.  The left has, of course, wasted no time in trying to use these men as political props just like they always do, most notably in the furor stirred up by partisan clown and utter embarrassment Congresswoman Frederica Wilson of Florida regarding the phone call to a soldier’s family.  The call was nothing but respectful but that doesn’t stop Li’l Miss Rodeo from conjuring up a scenario wherein the President of the United States had nothing better to do than call a grieving widow and insult her, nor does it stop millions of lockstep leftists from believing Wilson’s sick fairy tale.  But among the reprehensible comments being slung around about what is a tragic but not surprising aspect of military service is the statement by Ms. Wilson that the Niger ambush “is Trump’s Benghazi.”  Of course leftist idiots spent years following the Benghazi attack holding up other terrorist attacks that happened under Republican presidents as if they were making some kind of sensible comparison between the two.

They weren’t.  They still aren’t.  And here’s why.

What the left is desperate to conceal and minimize about Benghazi is not the fact that four Americans (three servicemen and one ambassador) were killed there.  As they often do, the left mixes a little bit of truth in with their much bigger lie to give it something solid to stand on, and that’s what they are doing when they compare Benghazi to, say, Beirut, or now when they try to compare Niger to Benghazi.  They do this in part because dead soldiers are a tragedy that resonates with normal American people, so the argument has legs.  In fairness that’s why we point to the four men who died at the compound in Benghazi as well and then go from there to the details.  But the scandal of Benghazi is not simply about American lives lost.  It’s about why they were lost and what the President did about it.

As is common knowledge at this point, on September 11, 2012, in the home stretch of the presidential race and on the eleventh anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, the American complex in Benghazi Libya came under attack by heavily-armed local extremists.  The siege of the compound lasted over eight hours during which time a handful of soldiers and security bravely held off the attackers and protected the ambassador while waiting for help that never came.  Rapid response units nearby were ready to roll out and come to the rescue but were told to stand down (and yes, the order was given).  Some of the men who perished did so when they were killed by mortar fire from emplacements that they were targeting with laser guidance systems in the vain hope that help was moments away.  After the battle was over, the consulate compound was left unsecured and wide-open for days.

While Americans were dying in Libya, looking to the skies for help that was not coming, Whatshisname was on his way to a campaign fundraiser in Las Vegas and Secretary of State Pantsuit was nowhere to be found.  Even after the debacle of the attack, they could have stopped the bleeding by acknowledging something remotely resembling the truth, admitting that they underestimated the attackers or thought the reinforcements would arrive too late or anything really, but what Whatshisname and Dr. Pantsuit did (and sent their drone Susan Rice to the Sunday morning shows to repeat over and over again) was claim that the attack happened…because of an internet video on YouTube.  They blamed a crappy movie that nobody watched for this “spontaneous” protest on the other side of the planet, and as the bodies of the soldiers who died came home Dr. Pantsuit sternly promised their families that they would “get the person who made that awful video.”

Now, this video thing is more important than it might sound.  I’ll remind you that at this point we were less than two months away from the Presidential election, and at this point Whatshisname had been running on the myth that he had killed Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda died with him, and that militant Islam was on the run in the Middle East all thanks to his “smart diplomacy.”  The reality of course was that Whatshisname gave up all the ground and progress won under George W. Bush and Dr. Pantsuit ignored the pleas and warnings from Moammar Qaddafi that if she took him out, the radicals would take his place.  But as she quite sickeningly laughed about later, “We came, we saw, he died.”  They had to deflect the cause of this attack onto something.  So rather than blame militant Islamists and accept responsibility for letting them get out of control, they tried (and they repeated this lie almost as much as “if you like your plan you can keep your plan”) to blame the attack on Islamophobia.  The maker of the video, who did have probation conditions that forbade him from using the internet for some reason, was arrested and imprisoned for violation of his probation, and Whatshisname’s administration brushed off their lapels and tried to call the matter settled.

But they weren’t fooling anyone who wasn’t willing to be fooled and they knew it.  Details came out about Benghazi and its aftermath that raised questions that remain unanswered to this day, about why the militants attacked there, about what was going on in that consulate, about why it took so long to secure the compound after the attack.  We may never know the answers because the press and the Democrat-controlled State Department covered everything up and lied about it all until people got bored.  As the fall campaigns came to a close, Mitt Romney delivered a knockout performance in the first presidential debate that had even Whatshisname’s devotees afraid that their idol was going down.  In the second debate, normally timid and reserved Romney hit Whatshisname with an unexpected haymaker about the Benghazi incident which by any rights should have had Whatshisname on the ropes, except that moderator Democratic tag-team partner Candy Crowley jumped in with incorrect information and set Romney back on his heels, allowing Whatshisname to recover.  Fraud was so blatantly rampant in that election that it’s questionable whether Crowley’s save made any difference but the narrative was boosted and the issue taken off the table.  Benghazi was downplayed as a witch hunt or an exaggeration or both until people got bored.

The scandal of Benghazi is not now nor has it ever been the deaths of the four men there.  Those deaths are tragic and those men are heroes, but to paraphrase President Trump, they knew what they signed up for.  What they did NOT sign up for was to be abandoned and sacrificed to prop up a political myth for the benefit of Whatshisname.  They did not volunteer to defend their country only to have their country make excuses for the animals who murdered them and go after an American citizen as a scapegoat.  They were ALLOWED to die in order to protect a secret we still haven’t uncovered.  For God’s sake, the survivors were put under strict gag orders and threatened into silence.  Yes, it’s possible that the ultimate explanation will be simple dereliction of duty, incompetence in the White House and State Department, and a desperate effort to keep a campaign catchphrase alive long enough to get over the finish line (with the help of a few hundred thousand fraudulent votes of course).  If that’s the case then the scandal is that the last administration got caught with its pants down and its foreign policy was shown to be a disaster, and they had no problem lying their backsides off to try to cover for their stupidity.  Nobody did that in Beirut, nobody’s doing that in Niger, despite what opportunists and jackasses like Frederica Wilson and John McCain are trying to claim.

I’m going to close out here with Bill Whittle’s video about Benghazi from 3 years ago.  I maintain that we will never know what was really going on there and much like Dr. Pantsuit’s email scandal, the real question is what were they trying to keep hidden, what is the real scandal that the scandalously incompetent response to the attack has so far successfully kept buried?  To put it as simply as I can, Benghazi is not about the loss of four men, but it is about the lies and the failures and God knows what else that the last administration was willing to leave those brave men to die over.  They laid down their lives for their country only to be sacrificed and abandoned for a political narrative.  That’s the core of the outrage over Benghazi.  That’s what makes it different.

As promised, Bill Whittle: