COCKY REPUBLICANS, AND WHY THE PUBLIC HAS BEEN LESS CONCERNED ABOUT BENGHAZI THAN THE BELTWAY

How overconfident are the Republicans right now? So overconfident that they think they can win two presidential elections at once:

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is setting his sights on his biggest political target yet: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton....

While Issa has not directly criticized Clinton, one of his lieutenants -- Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) -- did on Tuesday, arguing the White House and Clinton had been more concerned with normalizing relations with Libya’s new government than with security.

"It seems to be a coordinated effort between the White House and the State Department, from Secretary Clinton to President Obama's White House," Chaffetz said on the Fox News Channel morning show....

Now, it should be noted that

Issa has not called on Clinton to testify at a hearing Wednesday morning meant to investigate security lapses at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Of course not -- Clinton has an approval rating in the mid-60s in the latest polls, while Congress has an approval rating roughly equivalent to Jerry Sandusky's. Nevertheless, the GOP is clearly dropping its phony we-love-the-Clintons act, which was always nothing more than a cudgel to beat Obama with, and is about to give us a four-year rerun of the 1990s, on the assumption that Hillary will run for president next time around. Then again, everything Republicans do is with an eye to winning elections, except when they're shoveling more money at fat cats, so maybe this is just another day at the office for the GOP.

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Now, I'm not saying there aren't issues here. It's clear that security could have been better in Benghazi (although irony dies a little every time Democrats are lectured on terrorism preparedness by the party that was in power when 9/11 happened).

But the public seems far less focused on Benghazi than the Beltway is -- and I mean the mainstream media as well as opportunistic Republicans.

I think that's for a simple reason. When Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed, that was the death of someone from the same stratum of society as Beltway insiders. Oh, sure -- UN and aid workers die all the time, but they're, y'know, Norwegian or whatever. Stevens was an American who might have gone to Georgetown cocktail parties.

But people from the same stratum of society as ordinary Americans have been dying the way Stevens died for more than a decade. To the Beltway, the death of Stevens was a shock. To the rest of America, it was more of the same. It was just like the miserable news from any other day since late 2001 -- news that usually people just like neighbors and relatives, if not neighbors and relatives themselves.

Maybe the GOP and the media will make America care about this incident. But to me it makes sense that Americans just heard the news with a shrug of resignation. They've heard it before.

(Via Memeorandum.)