"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." ~ H.L. Mencken
Forget Benghazi and Focus on What Matters
"For weeks and months, the foreign policy debate in the United States has focused on the non-issue of whether the Obama administration played politics with the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Although the more important issue should be how to improve the security of diplomatic facilities in Libya, Republican and media focus has been on whether the administration played down the premeditated nature of the attack to look better during the election. In the worst case (and the evidence is mixed here)—that the administration engaged in such spin—so what? Is it any news that presidential candidates manipulate both perceptions and reality to get elected? Didn’t Mitt Romney change his positions on everything from abortion to health care in his unsuccessful candidacy for president? The worst case of pre-election shenanigans in foreign policy may have been perpetrated by Republican Richard Nixon, who, when running for president against Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968, asked the South Vietnamese government to block an incipient U.S. peace deal with North Vietnam, because he promised to give them a better deal after he won the election. A peace deal ending the Vietnam War would have been a big boost to Humphrey. After this near treasonous chicanery, it seems silly for Republicans to parse words with Democrats about whether the Obama administration should have called it a “terrorist attack” sooner instead of saying that extremists took advantage of a spontaneous protest. Again, who cares?"
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