The GOP admits Benghazi!™ is all about Clinton

Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) on Monday joined the growing chorus of Republicans claiming that an in-depth New York Times report on Benghazi, Libya, was published to protect former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ahead of a possible presidential run.

...[A]t the expense of shocking you, dear reader, it all began with the New York Times--specifically with a series of much-praised articles by investigative reporter Jeff Gerth: groundbreaking, exhaustively researched, but not particularly fair or balanced stories that combine a prosecutorial bias and the art of tactical omission to insinuate all manner of sin and skulduggery. Accompanied by a series of indignant editorials, Gerth's work helped create a full-scale media clamor last December for a special prosecutor. 

Testimony in recent Senate hearings showed that the Resolution Trust Corporation's Whitewater investigation began in direct response to the Times coverage; the hearings themselves resulted in large part from the Clinton Administration's panicky reaction to reporters' queries about the RTC probe, Gerth's among them. Absent the near-talismanic role of the New York Times in American journalism, the whole complex of allegations and suspicions subsumed under the word "Whitewater" might never have made it to the front page, much less come to dominate the national political dialogue for months at a time. It is all the more disturbing, then, that most of the insinuations in Gerth's reporting are either highly implausible or demonstrably false.

Let us return briefly to those thrilling days of yesteryear--specifically the 1992 primary season. On March 8, 1992, Jeff Gerth's initial story about Whitewater appeared on the Times front page under the headline CLINTONS JOINED S.& L. OPERATOR IN AN OZARK REAL-ESTATE VENTURE