CBS reporter Lara Logan fritters away her credibility by conducting a sloppy background check on a fraudulent eyewitness to the attack on our consulate in Libya, and suddenly liberals are salivating to talk about Benghazi.
Last fall, investigations by the U.S. State Department and five House committees concluded that the administration’s claim that the attack had been precipitated by an inflammatory YouTube video was false. Liberals yawned.
Anderson Cooper reported that murdered Ambassador Christopher Stevens’ diary documented his fears of being on an al-Qaeda hit list. Liberals sniped that CNN was invading his family’s privacy.
Multiple news sources produced evidence that al-Qaeda-linked groups were involved with the attacks. Liberals asked, ‘What difference does it make?‘
But now that a reporter has foolishly trusted a witness a year after the 2012 presidential election, when it can’t benefit Republicans, liberals have decided it’s time to jabber about Benghazi.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes opened his show Monday night with a segment on Dan Rather’s 2004 pre-election presentation of forged National Guard documents showing that President George W. Bush hadn’t fulfilled his military service. Hayes segued to Logan interviewing discredited eyewitness Dylan Davies. He gasped, “We all remember the last time 60 Minutes made a blunder this big … Given the obvious similarities with this Benghazi story, many were expecting a similar level of self-examination.”
Logan, you may recall, is the reporter who flounced around in Tahrir Square during Egypt’s “democratic” uprising interviewing supposedly moderate young male protestors, and subsequently found herself being assaulted by idealistic reformers. So Logan’s blind acceptance of a fraudulent witness’s testimony isn’t exactly evidence of a blinkered right-wing Benghazi conspiracy movement.
The difference between the Rather and Logan stories is that Rather trotted the former out weeks before a presidential election to impugn Bush’s character and sway the results. In the latter case, a center-left news outlet merely agreed to talk to a witness who had approached them a year after an election.
Showcasing the National Guard memos 50 days before the 2004 election was the equivalent of detonating a block of C4 in a powder keg. Interviewing nobody Dylan Davies a year after the 2012 election was the equivalent of tossing a wet cigarette butt in a flowerpot.
But give liberals credit for their impeccable timing — just when Americans are getting tired of talking about Benghazi, the left drags out the whole affair again as though the past 12 months of Republican evidentiary hearings had never happened.
Remember those old Olympics scandals when the U.S. would accuse some communist Eastern European country of cheating? The accused country would lob counter-accusations but still be found guilty — because everyone knows only guilty parties retaliate when their misdeeds have been exposed and they have nothing to lose.
Similarly, Democrats are fighting back on Benghazi only because they know they lost on this issue a long time ago and might as well lob grenades at Republicans in the hopes that some of them hit their targets.
