Seems to Me . . . Benghazi

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By Stan Welch

I had the opportunity Tuesday to speak with Senator Lindsey Graham while he was touring the Walgreen’s distribution center. The report of that visit and our conversation appears elsewhere in this issue. The Senator, as always, was gracious and pretty forthcoming.

One topic that we spoke about a great deal was the events that occurred at the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012. As you know, four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, were murdered during an attack on the consulate.

As infamous as that attack is in American history, its importance pales next to the events that followed. Overwhelming evidence, including the official report from the Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee, reveals that a false narrative was concocted in order to protect the president and his reelection chances in the 2012 election, which were just weeks away. False narrative is politispeak for @%#& lie.

That narrative blamed the attack on a video on YouTube; a video which reportedly inflamed the Muslim world. But subsequent information makes it clear that the Obama administration was informed almost immediately that the attack was conducted by an al-Qaida splinter group, and was deliberately slated to mark the anniversary of the September 11 attacks on America.

Senator Graham has made public promises that he will get to the bottom of the Benghazi situation; a promise that, if kept, could affect the 2016 presidential elections, and in my opinion, the future of this country for the foreseeable future. To me, as troubling as I find the lies that were told about Benghazi, I find the motivation for those lies even more disturbing.

I think this was done not just to protect Obama and his try for a second term; but to protect the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on whom the weight of the failure to protect the Ambassador falls just as squarely as it does Obama. Whether she can run successfully for president in 2016 while dragging four corpses around remains to be seen.

Frankly, after six years of lies and shell games and forgiven indiscretions by this administration, one more lie just didn’t have that much impact. It isn’t until I realized the depth of the cynicism behind that decision to fabricate a story that I understood just how contemptuous this administration is of the American people.

To lose an American ambassador in the line of duty is no small failure; and the consequences, especially just six or seven weeks before the election, threatened to be enormous. To lose one because military assistance was refused would have implications beyond measure on the political Richter scale. So the decision was made to lie to the American people so that Obama’s laughable claim that al-Qaida was decimated could continue to be made.

This decision essentially confirmed what many people feel about the Obama administration that nothing is more important to them than themselves. The effort to mislead the American people and the world in a matter of such importance is a special kind of perfidy that crosses the line between trying to spin a situation to one’s advantage, and a level of political cowardice that has no place in the Oval Office.

During my talk with Senator Graham I got a very real sense that his outrage is as great as mine; and that his determination to get to the bottom of the Benghazi matter is visceral, and not just politically convenient. He is in a position to achieve what he says he wants to achieve, although as he acknowledged, it will be a helluva fight.

I, for one, wish him complete success.