Redstate
Benghazi hearings in the Mirror Universe
By John Hayward
May 9th, 2013 

It’s amazing to watch the media bury yesterday’s explosive testimony on Benghazi.  Just imagine for a moment that today is the day after a veteran career diplomat – the top man on the ground in Libya after the murder of the ambassador – testified that a Republican administration told him not to cooperate with Democrat congressional investigators, shook him up with a menacing phone call from the top political “fixer” for a Secretary of State widely viewed as a leading 2016 presidential candidate, demoted him under cloudy circumstances so they could portray him as “disgruntled”… and then spent eight months loudly boasting of their enthusiastic, transparent cooperation with Congress.  Imagine the media coverage – from the glowing profile of Gregory Hicks as a new whistleblower demigod in the pantheon of good-government heroes, to the hows of outrage that noble truth-seeking Congressmen were thwarted by the machinations of a shadowy White House bent on preserving its electoral viability, no matter the cost to public transparency or national security. 

One thing you’d hear a lot more about today, in that Mirror Universe where the Benghazi scandal is hitting President John McCain early in his second term, is Hicks’ assertion that the phony “spontaneous video protest” cooked up by the Administration hampered the FBI investigation into the attacks, delaying access to the “crime scene” for weeks.  Remember how reporters were grazing through the rubble and finding important documents, such as Ambassador Christopher Stevens’ journal, while the FBI was still bottled up in Tripoli?  Remember how the Administration kept falsely claiming the “crime scene” was under control, even though it wasn’t?  You sure would remember that if Barack Obama was a Republican, because the media would be busy stitching together montages of all the false Administration claims and comparing them to Hicks’ testimony from yesterday. 

The media would also be returning to specific data about the Benghazi aftermath and the early days of the Administration cover-up, rather than relying on everyone’s vague memories of chaos, created in no small part by the media’s insistence on protecting Obama’s campaign narrative instead of questioning it.  In October 2012, the McClatchy News Service put together a timeline of the Administration’s shifting story on Benghazi, and noted that we didn’t really start hearing about the “video protest” fairy tale in a big way until three days after the attack.  Try to square that with Hicks’ testimony about the night of the attack, and the complete absence of evidence pointing to a spontaneous protest. 

It took Team Obama a couple of days to calculate the political ramifications of the attack, and realize that voters would ask all sorts of inconvenient questions about how that part of Libya degenerated into a terrorist hotbed despite Obama’s boasts of having beaten al-Qaeda into submission, or why our Ambassador was sent into such a dangerous area without protection or contingency plans.  It was deemed essential to portray the attack as a completely unpredictable event that no one could possibly have prepared for.  Hicks and his people in Libya hadn’t made such political calculations – that’s why they were “stunned” and felt their “jaws drop” when they watched U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice trot onto the Sunday shows to blather about a spontaneous protest that never happened. 

In the Mirror Universe where this is a Republican scandal, you can bet your bottom dollar that the media would never have stopped asking why Stevens was so poorly defended, and why there was no plan in place to mount an effective rescue operation.  Instead, they let Obama apologists get away with talking as if they knew exactly how long the attack would last – as if the terrorists had politely requested a permit for their assault from American authorities, specifying exactly when they would be packing up their precision mortars and heading home – so it was reasonable to tell our military forces to stand down.  Forget it, fellas, this thing’s gonna be wrapped up in a couple of hours.  Some of those mortars are rentals, and the al-Qaeda organizers don’t want to lose their deposit by returning them to Achmed’s Spontaneous Video Protest Supply House late... 

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