It’s forgotten history at this point, but the stunningly over-hyped Hillary Clinton email server controversy that ultimately cost her the presidency grew out of a completely different Republican fishing expedition for evidence that, as secretary of state, she allowed (or masterminded or covered up—the theory of the case was somewhat unclear) the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in which Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed.

The Benghazi “scandal” and the ensuing investigations (all seven of them) were unspeakably ghoulish. From literally the moment Republicans realized Americans were under fire, they smelled a partisan attack (then–GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney made a political statement about it as the attacks were ongoing). When President Barack Obama won re-election anyhow, the political value of the Benghazi attacks migrated to Clinton, whom they rightly expected would be the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.

For four years, Republicans masked the naked political motivation for their Benghazi obsession with the blood of the dead. “Four Americans died” was a right-wing rallying cry until November 9.

A week after President Donald Trump took office, a U.S. Navy SEAL was killed in a botched raid of an Al Qaeda compound in Yemen, along with many civilians. It is perfectly reasonable to argue that Trump ought not be blamed for any particular aspect of the failure, apart from his decision to continue bad policy in Yemen. In dangerous parts of the world, people die. But by Republican standards, this should be a major, impeachment-worthy scandal. Unless there’s some arbitrary minimum number of U.S. casualties (greater than one but less than four) above which administrative heads should roll, there’s no standard by which Benghazi should have become the subject of a vast, conspiratorial inquest, but the botched raid in Yemen should not.

And yet, we are hearing no pieties about American lives from Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, no sense that the cause of the failure should be investigated, let alone that Trump’s role in it should be a major investigative focal point.