Anatomy of a scandal

All modern American presidents favored with second terms get scandals or pseudo-scandals.

Amid the political boredom implied by four more years of the same old same-old, something that has simmered inevitably gets stirred to a boil.

Benghazi is not yet, and may never become, worthy of this list: Richard Nixon breaking laws minor and major in Watergate; the Reagan administration’s selling arms to Iran to raise money for Nicaraguan contras; Bill Clinton’s morally reprehensible dalliance with an intern and his perjured testimony; and George W. Bush’s not being able to find a single weapon of mass destruction in Iraq after he pointlessly took America to war for a mission he declared accomplished that wasn’t.

The crime in Benghazi, we must not forget, was by the murderers.

It is not an impeachable offense against a political leader for murder to be committed on his or her watch. Otherwise we’d be changing mayors in Little Rock a couple of times a week.

The core of the Republican allegation in this “two-fer” scandal or pseudo-scandal-a “two-fer” in that it assails both the current president and the current president’s former secretary of state who is the pre-eminent Democratic candidate to succeed him-is that the White House and the State Department sliced and diced the truth about what happened.

It is surely political spin run recklessly amok to call an attack a spontaneously combusted demonstration against a bad movie if you know better-if you know the attack was terrorism.

But it surely seems to fall somewhere short of a crime or impeachable offense.

There’s the actual possibility that it was a mistaken assertion rather than a lie.

And, after all, President Barack Obama did, in fact, refer to terrorism in his own initial statement. And don’t forget that the facts came out in time.

Two leading journalists seem to have the matter pretty well analyzed.

First, columnist David Brooks said on Meet the Press on Sunday that the Obama White House never would face a scandal over money or sex.

But he said it might get in trouble for being overly political because it is very much a politically manipulative place.

So Obama was deep in a re-election campaign that he likely was to win, one fueled in part by his nailing Osama bin Laden and his assertion that al-Qaida was weakened.

Perhaps his people chose deliberately to suggest initially that the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi was something other than a terrorist attack.

That would be despicable. I dare not defend it.

But I’m not sure where the criminal code was violated.

Mike Huckabee overheated on his endangered radio show the other day to assert that Benghazi would prove bigger than Watergate because no one died in Watergate while four people died in Benghazi.

But the supposed scandal is in the administration’s overly spun reaction. The murders already had occurred.

No one seriously argues yet that there was any specific criminal negligence by an American official that permitted the murders.

There surely was a general failing of security, one that congressional critics would have to share.

Second, author David Maraniss, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Bill Clinton, said the other day that he finds this issue to present “the same old murky convergence of Clintonian defensiveness … and GOP overreaction.”

Hillary Clinton always has been beset by a bunker mentality. She showed it even in Arkansas.

She resisted the inevitable special prosecutor in Whitewater, making the matter worse.

She was right that there was a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against her husband, but not in her apparent point that her husband therefore ought to be excused for his own behavior.

After Benghazi, the first instinct of Clintonian defensiveness meshed perfectly with the first instinct of the Obama White House’s overt politicization. That is to say both were inclined to tell as little as possible.

They happened to be headed happily for the same bunker.

Clinton has another political failing that has become evident in this affair. It is that she sometimes lacks deftness in her pronouncements.

She delivered a nearly bravura performance in congressional testimony on Benghazi in January. But she eventually befouled that performance when she let U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson,Republican of Wisconsin, bait her.

He accused her of making a convenient excuse-that she didn’t want to interfere with other investigations-for not personally ascertaining the facts about what happened in Benghazi.

She snapped and uttered those fateful words: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

She went on to say essentially that the job at hand was to find out what happened because of course it made a difference.

But that exasperated cry-and that’s what it was, and it’s the kind of thing to which she can be prone-haunts her in 2013 and very well might haunt her still in 2016.

John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial, Pages 15 on 05/14/2013

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