I’m not sure why, but for some reason conservatives continue to be fascinated fixated on Benghazi. Conservatives have investigated. They have questioned. They have postulated. Yet, they found nothing. On Sunday, Vice President Dick Cheney was on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace. Now, I have no idea why Chris Wallace would waste his time talking with Dick Cheney. The former vice president really has no new insights. His point of view is clear. As a matter fact, you can put a cardboard cutout of Dick Cheney in a chair of any Sunday talk show and you know exactly what the former vice president will say. There are no circumstances in which he believes US military force is not the right option. He will always support an aggressive posture.
Oh, the lies. It would be different if Chris Wallace did not know the truth, but he does. Yet, he lets Cheney paint his own version of events in Benghazi. We know from testimony in front of the Senate that President Obama directed Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to “do everything we needed to do to try to protect lives.” Somehow, this little fact was never discussed on Fox News Sunday. Why not? Because their whole goal was to try to make the president look weak. A president who actually instructed to do everything needed isn’t weak.
Conservatives love painting liberals/Democrats as weak. They love saying that in a crisis liberals are unable to make a decision merely because they are liberals. Liberals spend so much time thinking about other people’s “feelings” that they can never make a decision. Yet, the truth is very different. After being directed by the president, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta ordered two Marine anti-terrorism teams from Spain to deploy to Libya. There was no dawdling. There was no whiny liberalism. There was action. Deploy. Yet, you’ll never hear this on Fox News. It isn’t that this information is hidden. This information is readily available. Just use the Google.
I should add that former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Republican, appointed by President Bush, thought the idea that the military could’ve responded in time to save lives was a “cartoonish impression of military capabilities.”
The truth is that we had a poorly defended Embassy that was in a country in which the government had just disintegrated. Ambassador Stevens did not stay in Tripoli, which was well defended. He decided to go where he was needed. That was Benghazi. We can continue to argue over what leeway the ambassador should have in dangerous countries. The bottom line – this was a tragedy. President Obama was not weak or indecisive. The president made a decision to quickly send available resources to Libya.
