All That Remains of Benghazi Scandal: "Benghazi!" at Frankly CuriousFrankly Curious

“Benghazi!”

I heard that Fox News had a big scoop: an interview with the five commandos who have come together to write the soon to be released, 13 Hours: A Firsthand Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi. You know how it is: when the right wing start talking about Benghazi, you have to find out what it is even though you know that for the umpteenth time it will be nothing.

So I went to Google News and entered the search term “Benghazi.” And what comes up is, of course, Fox News stories. Not just them, though; there are also articles in The Blaze and World Net Daily. What’s more, there are articles on liberal sites wondering just what the hell Fox is on about now. The best of this is Olivia Marshall’s article at Media Matters, Fox’s Newest Benghazi Conspiracy Immediately Debunked By Fox Guest.

Yesterday, supposed straight news guy Bret Baier announced that it was a “dramatic new turn in what the Obama administration and its allies would like to dismiss as an old story.” But as Marshall shows, this idea was dismissed by Charles Lane during that broadcast:

What we heard from your interview was they assumed he was waiting for more support from the local militia. Which, by the way, might not be a bad reason to wait. In other words, you want to go — you don’t want to rush in with just three guys into what was obviously a very, very dangerous situation. You’d want to wait to see if you could round up some more support. In other words, there’s a difference between “waiting” and “waiting for no good reason” and, even worse, “waiting because you were told ‘we don’t care what happens to the Ambassador.'”

What’s more, this is not news. We already knew this. The commandos are trying to make a bunch of money, which they can do both because Fox News and other conservative outlets have been pushing the supposed Benghazi scandal for the last two years, and because they are pushing it now. Normally, books promising to tell “what really happened” need to offer something more than publicly available information.

Igor Volsky at Think Progress wrote about what is really going on here, The Amazing Shrinking Benghazi Scandal. It really is quite amazing. It is as if after all the Watergate investigations, it had turned up the fact that the conspiracy stopped at G Gordon Liddy. Of course, in the case of Benghazi, it doesn’t seem as though they’ve even managed that. The whole conspiracy theory started with the likes of William Kristol writing, “It would have been a presidential decision.” And now it is, “The contractors say that the CIA station chief [acted] on his own authority and was not operating under orders from anyone in Washington DC.” So there is a difference of opinion about the response to the situation on the ground at the time. The worst you can say is that the station chief was wrong and even that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The right wing seems to have one thing and only one thing left in this scandal.

“Benghazi!”