What Benghazi is all about.

What Benghazi is all about.

Every scandal the right manufactures has something simple at its core: a stained blue dress, a long-form birth certificate, a Budhist temple. What is with Benghazi? I haven’t figure it out yet.

The glib (and accurate) answer is " Hillary Clinton 2016 ". You don't have to be a rocket scientist (or super-genius Jason Richwine ) to crack that code. But even pretend scandals have some sort of narrative to tie them together. You know, the Clintons killed Vince Foster, Obama's birth certificate is forged, yadda yadda yadda.

But with this Benghazi thing ...

Best I can gather, it goes something like this: "Obama knew the attacks were carried out by terrorists even as he was saying they were a result of a YouTube anti-Islamic movie."

To that, the crazies respond with shit like this:



SUSAN RICE LIED HILLARY LIED OBAMA LIED AMERICANS DIED

There is, of course, hilarious irony to this, given that this is the same crowd that didn't give a fuck about Bush's genuine lies that got people genuinely killed. And lots of them. But even assuming their version of "reality" has any semblance of truth, it doesn't follow that any administration lies would've cost any lives. At worst, using their own facts, the administration misled the public for a week following the attacks. At worst. Only with wingnut logic does a post-event misstatement create a time vortex in which people lose their lives in the past.

But in reality, Obama called the attacks a terrorist attack the day after the attacks. Remember, it was this alternate wingnut version of reality that got Mitt Romney in trouble with the iconic "please proceed, governor" moment during the second presidential debate.

Yet the alternate wingnut reality persists. Maybe that's inevitable. After over four years of the most scandal-free administration since forever, conservatives have to hang on to some semblance of malfeasance to continue justifying their pathetic hysteria, and given the failure of their Fast and Furious hysteria, maybe this Benghazi thing can become the new scandal of the century. If they keep screaming about it enough, perhaps people will suddenly start believing in time vortexes as well.