Memo from the Department of Duh
by digby
Surely this didn't just occur to them:
A House Republican-led investigation of the 2012 terrorist attack on an American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, will extend well into next year, and possibly beyond, raising concerns among Democrats that Republicans are trying to damage Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential prospects.
Some of us have known this for years. Literally:
...they didn't drag out Toensing and DeGenova by accident. And that's because this is only marginally about Obama's second term.
I've got one word that explains it: Hillary.
These people are Clinton character assassination specialists. And the right sees Benghazi as a Clinton scandal. Just watch Fox news for any half hour slot in a 24 hour period and it will come up. It's already become a punchline --- and a mantra.
Trumped up Clinton scandals are of a particular variety that are likely to make a comeback when Hillary Clinton runs again. I've written a lot about that too over the years. I call them "smell-test" scandals which are these long, drawn-out investigations in which details are dribbled out over time to give the impression of wrong-doing simply by the length and number of inquiries. When you add up the details they inevitably amount to nothing but that's not the point. The point is to create an atmosphere of scandal, a "feeling" that all this smoke must add up to something. (And there's always the hope that Monica Lewinsky -- or something like her -- will turn up to explode the whole thing into a real scandal.)
They've tried this with Obama and the IRS scandal and Solyndra and a few others and it doesn't seem to work with him. (They're settling now on the "tyrannical despot" approach.) But with the Clinton and her long history in politics, it's inevitable that they would dust off this scandal manual. It will be interesting to see if she handles it any differently than former president Clinton did. He fended them off one by one, but there was always a feeling that he was somehow energized by that challenge. I'm not sure that's true of Hillary.
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