A blunder? Sure. Administration confusion? Absolutely. But a full-blown scandal? Hardly.

The day after the attacks, on September 12, Obama signaled that the YouTube video might have been important, rejecting "all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others." But the president added: "No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation." And in an interview on 60 Minutes the same day, Obama said: "my suspicion is, is that there are folks involved in this, who were looking to target Americans from the start."

The truth is that American diplomatic officials have long risked their lives for their country. In 2002, during the George W. Bush administration, a grenade attack on a church in Islamabad killed Barbara Green, an employee at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan. The same year, Laurence Foley, from the U.S. Agency for International Development, was gunned down in Amman, Jordan. In 2004, Edward Seitz, from the State Department's bureau of diplomatic security, was blown up in Baghdad. Two year later, in 2006, David Foy, a facilities maintenance officer at the U.S. embassy in Karachi, Pakistan, was murdered in a suicide attack. In 2008, American diplomat John Granville was shot in Khartoum, Sudan.

Clearly, security wasn't adequate in these cases either. But none of the deaths produced a political uproar. There was no Amman-gate, Islamabad-gate, Baghdad-gate, Karachi-gate, or Khartoum-gate to rival Benghazi-gate.

Why?

For one thing, there's a double standard, where Democrats are more vulnerable to being labeled weak on national security. The deeper reason is that Bush's foreign policy record was so flawed -- the Iraq War, the catastrophic invasion plan, the failure to find WMD -- that Democrats didn't have time to talk about these diplomatic deaths.

You want to know what a real scandal looks like? Ask Oliver North.

During the mid-1980s, North, who was then at the National Security Council, helped mastermind the Reagan administration's covert program of arms sales to Iran. The White House was drawn into a Faustian pact with an official state sponsor of terrorism, in which Washington traded over 2,000 missiles to Tehran in exchange for help in releasing American hostages in Lebanon.

The arms deal did free three hostages. But during the same period, three more Americans were taken prisoner in Lebanon -- creating an absurd revolving door of capture and release.

Secretary of State George Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger opposed selling arms to Iran, because it was of dubious legality, strengthened America's enemy, damaged America's reputation, weakened the policy of not bargaining with terrorists, and was domestically risky.

But Oliver North wasn't done yet. He put the "Contra" in "Iran-Contra" by illegally diverting the funds from the arms deal to help the right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua.