No “news” network has been more committed to promoting rumors and conspiracy theories than Fox News. And the most persistent fake scandal in the Fox News Bucket-o-Bullcrap is the allegation that the Obama administration attempted some sort of cover up following the terror attack on the United States facility in Benghazi, Libya. Still, after more than a year of congressional hearings, and independent investigations by government agencies and the press, there has not been a shred of evidence linking the White House to anything improper.
However, that record of abject failure isn’t enough to dissuade Fox News from continuing its crusade against President Obama and his staff. The latest spark that is firing up Fox & Co. is an email that was released by the conservative activists at JudicialWatch. The email itself reveals nothing new. In fact, it reiterates information that has been publicly available for months and has been affirmed by the intelligence community. Nevertheless, Fox is unleashing a flood of phony stories that serve no purpose other than to distort the facts and enrage their pitifully ill-informed audience.
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What Fox News and other Obama antagonists regard as the smoking gun is a single sentence (out of 112 pages) that they falsely connect to events in Benghazi. In that sentence Deputy National Security Adviser David Rhodes writes that among the goals of UN Ambassador Susan Rice, as she prepared for a series of Sunday morning news interviews, were “To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video and not a broader failure of policy.”
However, what is left out by Fox, JudicialWatch, and virtually every right-wing pundit to comment on this, is that the email was not referring exclusively to events in Benghazi at all. It was a response to the much broader set of events in the Middle East including those in Libya, Egypt, Yemen, etc. This was expressed explicitly in another section of the documents that read “Clearly there are protests that are taking place in different countries around the world that are responding to the movie that was circulated on the Internet.”
It is unambiguously true that most of the unrest that was occurring contemporaneous to the attack in Benghazi was incited by the anti-Muslim video posted online by a raving American Islamaphobe preacher. No one, not even the deliberately deceitful folks at Fox News, dispute that.
So what we have now is Fox News pretending that the Rhodes email was related only to Benghazi when all the evidence shows that this is not the case. They have relaunched their 24/7 Grand Benghazi-thon wherein virtually their entire broadcast consists of nothing but Benghazi, and specifically their purposeful misrepresentation of this newly released email.
Over at their Fox Nation website they are suffering another seizure of Benghazi Tourettes. As of this writing there are nine separate articles posted on this one story. For reference, there are no stories posted about the GOP blocking the minimum wage bill, or the crisis in the Ukraine, or the devastating tornadoes in the Mid-West. On Fox Nation the only story of any significance is the trumped up Benghazi scandal. And the only thing that brings it back to prominence is an email whose contents Fox is lying about.
It’s what they do if the truth doesn’t serve their purpose, they create their own version of the truth. They keep repeating the same non-facts over and over and over again to their non-thinking audience because if you say it often enough and in a convincing enough tone of voice people will have to believe it’s true. Then their listeners will repeat it and repeat it until everyone they know believes it. They have to keep harping on this (which they didn’t do to George Bush & Dick Cheney when it came to creating a war where there didn’t have to be one) because they are living in GOP fear of Hillary becoming President.
Your points have been debunked 1,000 times over. Repeating the idiotic blather that Jay Carney was spewing won’t change that fact. ABC’s Jonathan Karl led the most recent charge, not Ed Henry. And onca again you are blaming this on that stupid video. That is a lie. You know it’s a lie. Channeling your inner Chris Matthews will not make this lie into a fact.
I wonder if you were so concerned when Bush-Cheney were lying us into a war; lying about funding Medicare Part D; lying about wiretapping Americans’ communications; lying about torture; lying about the deficit; lying about …
Oh, nevermind.
Dude!!!
Oh boy. So Scott agrees with Ollie North, who said last night that nobody in the Middle East saw the “Innocence of Muslims” video. Riiiight.
As everyone knows, that video went viral all over the world, particularly in the Middle East, where it sparked riots and over 50 deaths. Saying that it didn’t is to deny reality – in a similar way to how the right wing wanted to say that Mitt Romney was going to win the White House in a landslide. And it leads to the same result, doesn’t it?
Looking at this email, all we see is another reiteration of exactly what multiple inquiries into this situation have already revealed. Riots had broken out across the region, at which moment Fox News and right wing pundits chose to attack President Obama, hoping they could embarrass his campaign before the debates that looked to be Romney’s only chance to catch up. When the Benghazi attack happened, Fox News changed up their focus to assert that this was the only incident happening and that somehow the US military should have dropped everything else it was dealing with in the Middle East and rushed into Libya. Which indicates that the right wing may not know that much about how the military operates. They did task units to cover Libya, and those units arrived when they were able to do so. At no time has anyone shown any proof that military units were told to “stand down”. At no time has anyone shown proof that President Obama or Hillary Clinton deliberately left the Benghazi Consulate in a vulnerable position or that they ignored the situation as it developed.
The right wing nonsense about “where was President Obama” in the White House while the attack was happening is not only a strange question – it’s frankly offensive. Where were these guys when embassies were repeatedly attacked during George W. Bush’s presidency. Where were these guys when our Marines were attacked in Beirut while Ronald Reagan was president? The fact is that this has been a right wing meme, intended as some kind of a pre-writing of the right wing history of this presidency. It’s also clearly intended to somehow pre-empt the candidacy of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Good luck on both those notions.
The reality is that the right wing, for all of its bluster, has yet to show any criminality on the part of the Obama Administration. They’ve certainly tried, with Joe Sestak, Fast & Furious, Solyndra, Benghazi, the IRS, the NSA, you name it. It seems like every other week, the right wing thinks that it’s finally found some kind of “smoking gun” that spells doom for President Obama. And then the air comes out of the balloon again, doesn’t it? And these are the same pundits who obfuscated and lied to cover up the criminality of the George W. Bush Administration – the people who denied that there was anything improper in the activities of Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales and company, the people who shouted and screamed each time one of Bush’s cronies wound up indicted or forced to resign in disgrace, the people who repeatedly denied how unpopular W. Bush was, all the way up to the sad end of his presidency. It’s unfortunate that their only response has been to smear the next President at every possible opportunity. One would think that if they were truly patriotic, they would humbly apologize to the country and try to learn something from their mistakes.
Conservatives take no responsibility for GWB, so one has to wonder who those people are who (re)elected him even after his disastrous first term. Perhaps that explains the “voter fraud” they are always talking about.
Entitled conservatives treat the middle class as a maid whose job is to clean up their messes.