Democrats and the mainstream media (to the extent they can be separated) were so eager to celebrate Hillary Clinton's performance before the Benghazi Select Committee that they failed to notice what it had revealed about the central question: Did she and other administration officials, including President Barack Obama, deliberately mislead the American people about what happened?
Hillary, in her own words, and in the emails from her private server that have been released, has now confirmed that they did. There is no other conclusion that can be reached, however much some might wish otherwise and so long as facts can't magically become something other than facts.
To begin with the facts that are undisputed--an attack upon our diplomatic compound in Benghazi on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 left four Americans dead, including ambassador Chris Stevens. For more than a week thereafter, Obama administration officials, including the president and Secretary of State Clinton, blamed the deaths on a spontaneous demonstration provoked by an obscure anti-Islamic video. UN ambassador Susan Rice went on five different news programs on the Sunday after the attacks to repeat that line.
As time passed, evidence suggested that what had happened in Benghazi wasn't a demonstration that got out of hand but instead a well-planned terrorist attack. Suspicions grew that the administration had known this from the start and concocted the "spontaneous demonstration/video" story for politically expedient reasons: seeking to fool the public in the midst of a difficult re-election campaign lest a key talking point come unraveled (that al-Qaida was defeated) and unwelcome questions be asked.
That's essentially where things stood, until Hillary's Benghazi Committee appearance; from which additional facts emerged that decisively confirmed those suspicions.
First, on the night of the attack, and just a few minutes after she had issued a State Department statement blaming it on a video-inflamed mob, she emailed daughter Chelsea to tell her that "two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an [al-Qaida] group."
Second, and shortly thereafter, she told the president of Libya that a gunbattle was going on that Ansar al-Sharia (an al-Qaida offshoot) was claiming responsibility for.
Third, and most damning, the next day, when the spontaneous demonstration/video story was beginning to be energetically disseminated publicly, she told the prime minister of Egypt that "We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack--not a protest."
So there we have it--when Hillary later promised family members of the victims before their caskets that the maker of the video would be brought to justice, she was perpetuating a story she knew was false.
The most interesting part, however, isn't that high officials sought to deceive for political reasons (imagine that!), but the perhaps even more duplicitous manner with which they sought to conceal their behavior.
The key step in that effort was to characterize any politically inconvenient questions as part of an effort to "politicize" a tragedy; a line which has now been smoothly transmuted into the claim that the Benghazi investigation should be ignored or even shut down because it's excessively partisan and therefore (in the words of a headline above a recent column in these pages) "purely political."
Such charges are, of course, irrelevant--Democratic partisanship influenced the congressional investigations into the Teapot Dome, Watergate, and Iran-Contra scandals, but that doesn't mean the investigations were unjustified or that there was nothing worthwhile to investigate. Because administrations accused of wrongdoing can't be trusted to investigate themselves it usually falls on the shoulders of the partisan opposition to do so (particularly when our media watchdogs are suspiciously uninterested).
But partisan motives have nothing to do with truth, or render the need to discover it any less urgent. However buffoonish many Republicans have acted, including members of the Benghazi Committee, one could take the GOP, Fox News, and Rush Limbaugh entirely out of the picture and the damning facts would still stand.
So we now know that the administration concocted a false narrative for highly partisan reasons in an attempt to deceive the public and then used charges of partisanship to delegitimize questions about it. The partisan end justified the means.
Of course, they wouldn't have tried something so staggeringly brazen unless they were fairly confident from the outset that an ideologically sympathetic media could be counted on to go along, which it then did, and is still doing, in impeccably obsequious lockstep fashion.
As Jonah Goldberg put it in a recent column, "If George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice had instantly blamed a terrorist attack on a video and then it was revealed they deliberately lied about it to win re-election, newsrooms across this country would be aflame in outrage. What is the response when the same fact pattern applies to ... Obama and Clinton? 'Meh.'"
A typically "Clintonian" bet was thus placed on media cravenness, and it's still being collected on.
We have, nonetheless, learned some important things from Benghazi, including the answer to the question that Anderson Cooper asked Hillary in the first Democratic debate--"Will you say anything to get elected?"
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 11/02/2015