Hello? Hello? Is this thing working?

There are a few Benghazi cartoons making fun of the hyperinflation being brought to this non-event, but I think John Cole got it best. 

I mean, are we really not supposed to be able to see past the scary mask? Maybe if it were bigger. Maybe if it even began to somewhat fit.

And yet there it is. Count Floyd, political analyst. 

It's important that someone find out how many people are falling for this ridiculous smear effort, because I can no longer judge the gullibility of the American people.

Here's what I've figured out so far:

The anti-Clinton campaign funded by Richard Scaife was able to find some credible material by casting a wide net. The "Hilary murdered Vince Foster" nonsense fell flat, but Whitewater was a good piece of propaganda, since commercial real estate is a slippery beast to begin with.

Specifically, since a lot of people have purchased a house, they feel they understand how real estate works, but residential transactions are heavily loaded with consumer protections, since the law recognizes that one party is inexperienced and requires disclaimers and transparency.

Commercial real estate, by stark contrast, is a full-contact sport in which it is assumed that both parties know the rules, which is that there aren't a lot of rules. Nearly any commercial deal of any magnitude could result in investigations and convictions if you chose to parse every clause and every unspoken agreement. The Number One Rule of making a deal is that nobody talks about the deal.

So Whitewater got plenty of traction, not just from the rightwing but from mainstream media and a good segment of the general public, until they finally actually showed their hand. 

At which point, business writers looked at the cards and said, "You've got nothing. All commercial development deals look like this."

The shrugs were not effective in turning public opinion, but the courts also saw that there was no there there and, while a couple of people got minor convictions for not crossing a T or dotting an i, Whitewater dwindled down to nothing.

And then they pulled out Monica Lewinsky and proved that -- gasp! -- a powerful man had enjoyed consensual sex with an adult woman not his wife. And they got him to fib about it and they managed to drag that somewhat standard denial into the Congress.

They got their impeachment but no conviction, but they had made the point that conservative, god-fearing America will not tolerate a politician who cheats on his wife and lies about his infidelity.

Unless, y'know, he runs for office, in which case a trip to Argentina becomes indistinguishable from a hike on the Appalachian Trail, as noted by Christopher Weyant in the New Yorker's daily cartoon yesterday.

Clinton or Sanford, the whole adultery thing is a matter of much hand-wringing and not much caring.

And today Bill Clinton is doing just fine, his wife is doing even better and the American Spectator has been out of business for a dozen years and Richard Scaife wasted his millions.

The only positive that emerged from all that for the conspirators was that, when Hilary Clinton said there was a vast right-wing conspiracy, everyone laughed, so that future right-wing conspiracies could continue to go forward without a lot of kneejerk opposition against which to prove themselves.

So what are the Koch Brothers and Murdoch and the rest of the Unholy Alliance getting for their money this time around?

The whole birther thing -- like the Vince Foster murder case -- kind of degenerated into obvious screwballism.

Obamacare, by contrast, has a certain Whitewater appeal in that healthcare funding is easily as impenetrably opaque as commercial real estate development, with the advantage that while, in order to be useful, Whitewater had to result in serious legal charges, there doesn't have to be any actual denouement with Obamacare: We can kick around competing financial models forever.

As has been noted many times, if you laid every economist in the country end to end, they wouldn't reach a conclusion, so this one can remain a partisan game in which everyone gets to believe whatever they want, including that it was a good thing when Romney proposed it, but a bad thing now that Obama has gotten it passed.

But, while bitching about Obamacare helps against Democrats in general, it's not very useful against Hilary, and so we're dragging out that stained blue dress and putting Benghazi under the microscope.

This graphic has been circulating on Facebook for a few days. I'm not sure of the numbers. I've seen different figures as well, but it's certainly, clearly true that the attack on the Benghazi consulate or CIA spook shack or whatever it was hardly stands out as unique over the past decade.

And I've always felt it was a little unfair to assume that Bush and Rice should have necessarily picked out the warnings about 9/11 from the stacks of CIA intelligence briefings that no doubt came before them, though the assassination of the head of the Northern Alliance two days earlier should probably have prompted some "where are we at with this?" curiosity.

It's equally unfair to assume that everything happening at every moment in Benghazi was being laid on the President's table. Either the man is both omniscient and omnipresent or he's not, and, if he is, then Bush was, too, and is responsible for everything that went wrong on his watch.

Benghazi is nothing. 

1. It is not unique. Whatever the actual numbers prove to be, there have been many other attacks on American consulates with greater loss of life.

2. It sure seems like it was the aforementioned CIA spook shack. If so, that would explain some conflicting cover stories in the hours and days that followed. It would also suggest that the party that outed Valerie Plame for political advantage and that revealed classified information about Benghazi in a committee hearing should shut its pie hole.

3. As for "whistleblowers," the term does not simply mean people who are willing to bitch and moan about the boss. If that's what it means, then any business with more than 8 employees has at least three "whistleblowers" who could come forward and testify. You're thinking of "Monday morning quarterbacks."

So the question is not "What happened in Benghazi?"

The question is, for all the willingness of the GOP fringe, talk radio and rightwing cartoonists to flog this thing, is anyone actually buying it?

Comments

[Mark Jackson]

The faux Benghazi outrage seems to be less aimed at Obama than at Hillary's presumed 2016 candidacy.

And here's Dick Cheney on the subect:

'They should have been ready before anything ever happened,' Cheney told MailOnline exclusively during a party in Georgetown celebrating the launch of a new book by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld...'When we were there, on our watch, we were always ready on 9/11, on the anniversary,' he recalled.

"On the anniversary." Charlie Pierce calls this taking the Great Mulligan.

[Dann]

Mr. Clinton did not tell a fib.

He committed perjury. A felony that has cause many other people to wind up in federal prison.....even when the perjury was about consensual sex.

[Mark Jackson]

Dann, I'm certain you wouldn't write that without having at hand the names of some folks sent to federal prison for perjuring themselves *solely* about consensual sex. I'm curious as to who they were. Can you enlighten us?

[Mike Peterson]

Yes, I was going to ask to see the list of people who have served time in a federal prison solely for denying that they had engaged in consensual sex with an adult. And please put an asterisk next to any who were jailed despite having attempted to draw a distinction between actual full-on sexual intercourse and "fooling around" up to and including fellatio.

Inquiring minds want to know. Everyone else thinks it's pretty damn silly and a massive waste of taxpayer money.

[Sherwood Harrington]

Dann? Hello? Hello? Is this thing working?

[Dann]

You'll have to look back at 60 Minutes from that period of time. They profiled several individuals that were serving time for committing perjury.

It was one of those rare episodes that I watched.

Fortuitously, Google is not only your friend, but mine as well.

I think the following article from the NYTimes pretty well covers the questions that were asked. Including oral sex and other kinds of sex where the convicted perjurers attempted their own version of linguistic judo that sought to redefine the word "is".

http://partners.nytimes.com/library/politics/111798courts-perjury.html

The fact is that Mr. Clinton is an admitted perjurer. About consensual sex...as a material matter in a civil trial.

Regards,
Dann

[Mike Peterson]

I'll grant you the technical point -- people have served time for perjury alone.

But it's awfully argumentative. Clinton was testifying in a Ken Starr fishing expedition and his parsing of whether oral sex and intercourse are the same thing was only marginally "perjury," which that article kind of delves into at the end.

More to the point, the other examples are, to the extent that I'm gonna look into them, based on perjury in serious situations rather than trivial sideshows. That's not a political statement -- what I mean is that, for instance, Pam Parsons had launched a $75 million libel suit against Sports Illustrated, based on her contention that they lied, and her perjured testimony was on a point that would have disproved her own point and the basis of the lawsuit. She lost the lawsuit anyway, but served four months for the lie, which, again, was central and germane.

Battalino lied and subourned perjury in order to defend herself against a malpractice suit, based on her having had a relationship (not just isolated sex) with a patient. She did not go to jail, in fact, but served six months house detention, which I suppose means that whether or not she went to jail depends on what your definition of jail is.

I'll grant you, Clinton should have said, "Well, yeah, so what?" and I wish he had. But if trying to lawyer your way around the definition of "having sex" and not satisfying a judge amounts to "high crimes and misdemeanors," then we're all headed to the Big House.

And I say that as someone who remembers when "making love" to someone meant flirting. And intends to use Kenneth Starr's dictionary if I am asked how many women I have made love to -- just to protect myself legally.

[Dann]

First off...me too. I wish Mr. Clinton could have just told the truth in the first place. Even better would have been to acknowledge that he had solicited (unsuccessfully) sex from Ms. Jones instead of casting aspersions on her character. She would have become just another footnote in the over-active hormonal life of Bill Clinton.

But he didn't, and here we are.

Central to the point is the Mr. Clinton signed the federal law on sexual harassment that allowed prosecutors and plaintiff's attorneys to go on fishing expeditions. The law he signed established that it was permissible to seek evidence that created a behavioral pattern of harassment as justification for finding the defendant guilty (criminally or civilly) even if there was little (if any) evidence that the defendant had harassed a specific plaintiff. That law made the question germane/material to the case on which he was being questioned.

This wasn't Ken Starr's fishing expedition. It was Paula Jones'. And it was a fishing expedition that Mr. Clinton thought was appropriate for the rest of America to live with.

So why shouldn't he have to live with it as well?

I go back to Paula Jones; the women that never had sex with Bill Clinton but who's reputation was smeared because he was powerful and she was not. Every time I read an obfuscation of the historical record, I wonder why her right to a trial based on the facts is worth less that Presidential convenience. Were we talking about the president of General Motors (or Microsoft, or GE, or...) would we be as cavalier with the purported victim's rights or would be pound on the president for lying to save his skin?

Regards,
Dann

[Mike Peterson]

If you don't think there is a connection between Paula Jones's lawsuit and the Arkansas Project funded by Scaife, I'm not going to argue the point.

But, while her lawsuit was initially dismissed, Clinton interrupted the appeal with an out-of-court settlement and a check for $850,000. If you think that's not significant, please send me a check for that insignificant amount.

She had a right to a trial. She took the money. Nobody took away her right to a trial.

And this is totally off the point. Well-funded legal harassment of anybody, president of the country or president of the country club, is still underhanded and dishonest. And the pattern of fatcat harassment is undemocratic, shameful and unpatriotic.