Monday, May 13, 2013

The Soft Bigotry of Short Attention Spans

I realize conservatives have to strike while the iron is hot, but this is pure stupidity:

And they're off: With no defined field of candidates and the last election just six months in the rearview mirror, American Crossroads on Sunday aired the first attack ad of the 2016 presidential campaign, panning Hillary Clinton for her role in the "cover-up" of an attack last Sept. 11 on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

The 90-second paid spot - manufactured by the Karl Rove-founded "super PAC" - was posted Friday online and ran Sunday morning on CBS during a broadcast of "Face the Nation." Previewing the ongoing saga that's likely to haunt Clinton's White House ambitions for the next three years, the ad implicates the former secretary of state - Democrats' top-billed contender to succeed President Obama - in the wildly varying accounts of how administration officials reacted last fall in the wake of the strike.

"Was it because of a protest, or guys out for a walk who decided they'd kill some Americans - what difference, at this point, does it make?" Clinton is shown saying Jan. 23 before a Senate committee. A narrator counters: "The difference is a cover-up, and four American lives that deserve the truth."

To quote Gertrude Stein, “There is no there there.”

Here’s the thing: Benghazi was a tragedy for four Americans in Libya, of that there can be no doubt. And if the election was this year, I’d suggest that this tactic of trying to buffalo Hillary might work. The attention span of Americans is short enough that the noise from the empty can will be more than enough to suggest Hillary Clinton screwed up somehow.

But the election is still three years away, assuming that Mrs. Clinton even runs. That’s a long time. Let’s look at another failure of an administration to protect Americans, and see what we learned within three years.

On September 11, the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked, and roughly three thousand Americans were killed. Fighter jets were scrambled by 8:53, 20 minutes after the first plane hit the Trade Center, yet were unable to stop the rest of the attacks. Right away, a failure of the bureaucracy, but more, even had they been able to somehow catch up with events, they would have had to wait for the White House to approve firing upon a domestic civilian airline in American air space. It’s safe to say that when that order was given (at 10:20) the events had ended.

Where was Republican outrage then?

And yet, four years later, Americans re-elected the same incompetent boobs that screwed that mission up.

How they think that people are going to care in three years about four dead Americans if they didn’t care about three thousand ON AMERICAN SOIL is beyond me.