At the Daily Beast, Ron Christie says Democrats are afraid of yet another Benghazi investigation because we fear it will reveal heretofore unplumbed depths of administration incompetence. Ed Kilgore laughs at the notion that Democrats are afraid:
When people in politics say stuff like this -- my opponents are making light of this issue because it secretly terrifies them -- I figure some serious self-deception is at hand. And that could be the case here. If Democrats are huddled quietly in the bars and opium dens where they conspire against America, confiding their fear of Benghazi! as the Rosetta Stone to all their nefarious schemes, I sure haven’t heard about it. Sometimes when people laugh at you it’s because they think you’re being funny.Personally, I think there's reason to fear -- but not because of administration guilt. If screwing up embassy security were an impeachable offense, Ronald Reagan should have been impeached repeatedly. It's a dangerous world out there, and neither party has a monopoly on security failings.
What there is to fear, though, is the ability of Republicans to generate the illusion of unspeakable evil out of next to nothing. Voter fraud. Death panels. The Ground Zero mosque. ACORN. Republicans can inflict political damage regardless of whether they're telling the truth. It's like a political version of swatting -- faking an incident that sends a SWAT team to the home of an enemy. It doesn't matter that that person isn't really guilty of what the swatter told the cops is happening at the house -- the target can still get seriously hurt.
That's what Republicans do to their enemies politically. That's what they're trying to do now.
