Richard Cohen: The GOP’s unhinged Benghazi fixation

New York Daily News ^ | 05/13/2014 | Richard Cohen

[presidio9]

Tuning the car radio some weeks back, I heard the President denounced as a moron. I was shocked. I had reached some right-wing talker and he was carrying on about something Barack Obama had recently said — that he worries more about a nuclear attack on New York than he does about Russia. The radio guy declared that the president had given terrorists an idea. He apparently forgot that the notion of attacking New York had already occurred to them.

-SNIP-

I feel about the GOP as I do about the religion of others: I don’t get it.

-SNIP-

No one can possibly think the Obama administration knew the attack was coming and let it happen.

-SNIP-

ETC.

[presidio9]

Under deep cover as a graduate student at perhaps the most liberal University in the United States, I have been away from FR for quite some time now. I've learned a lot about the way an intelligent and highly educated liberal east coast mind works. I believe that this article presents something of a teachable moment in that regard. I won’t speak to Mr. Cohen’s intelligence, but he would qualify, by most standards, as highly educated. I believe that he has a masters in journalism from the Pulitzer school at Columbia. He has also shown a willingness to cross the aisle on matters of foreign policy, particularly when the pertain to Israel. When he writes about terrorism, I read him, if only to hear what the other side is being told about an issue. –And that, in a nutshell, is the main issue for Conservatives when it comes to Benghazi. We are appalled at the death of four Americans, and the fact that the perpetrators are still at large. Given the duration of the attack, we wonder whether anything could have been done to save them. We recognize the White House’s response for what it was: A misuse of power in an attempt to sweep inconvenient facts under the rug so as not to allow them to influence an upcoming election. We are angered by the actions of sworn public servants to hinder subsequent investigations. But, most of all, we see this issue as a touchstone for something very wrong in today’s political marketplace: A complete breakdown in the media’s obligation to present all of the facts to their audience. In the last three years, for obvious reasons, I went to great efforts to avoid talking about politics. I was surrounded by affable, but true-believing, liberals. I was investing a lot of time and money into an advanced degree. I could not afford to waste it arguing. Nevertheless, I cannot tell you how many times I was surprised to learn that my highly intelligent and successful professional Ivy League classmates in their 30’s and 40’s had not heard names, places and terms that I supposed were common knowledge: “Single Payer System.” “Kermit Gosnell.” “Brian Terry.” The difference between a “machine gun” and a “semi-automatic weapon.” The fact that Mitt Romney had no intention of putting GM out of business and laying off all of its workers. Or that John McCain never said he wanted to go to war with Russia over the Ukraine. Or that Paul Ryan was trying to SAVE Social Security and Medicare. “Benghazi.” Not “didn’t care” –“never HEARD.” What became very clear to me during this time is the extent to which liberals and conservatives get their facts from very different sources. Personally, I have always disagreed with the Conservative canon on two or three important issues. Which ones they are is irrelevant. I make a point of never proselytizing here. The point, which most people here are very aware of, is the liberal tendency to form opinions without having all the facts. It seems that we have become so politically divided in this country that virtually everyone who cares about politics gets all of their information from entertainment news shows (like FOX and MSNBC) or simply entertainment (like Comedy Central and the major networks). We know that journalism appeals to a disproportionate share of young liberals. There is a liberal culture in media, and that probably will never change. We live in a center-right nation that gets its news from people that it disagrees with. That was the inspiration behind FOX, and the reason why it is the #1 rated cable news channel. Unfortunately, somewhere in the last decade, (I would say it was during the first Obama campaign), liberals on other networks began to assess their ratings correctly: They finally understood the reason behind the fact that 1/3 of the nation preferred to get their news from people they agreed with, and decided to write them off in favor of the other third. In doing this, they put themselves into competition with themselves for the liberal base. At that point, they decided to trust FOX, and only FOX, to present one side of the story. Liberals who watched the news used to hear views, news, and opinions about things that they didn’t care about because journalists took their jobs seriously. Now they get a steady stream of what they want to hear, and if they’re lucky, weak straw-man arguments like the ones presented in the last paragraph. Is it any wonder that they (Mr. Cohen included) have finally concluded that a political philosophy that includes geniuses like (you don’t have to agree with everything these people say, just recognize that they are among the smartest political philosophers alive today) Dr. Ben Carson, Charles Krauthammer, Paul Gigot, Thomas Sowell, George Will, Laura Ingraham, Daniel Henninger, Mark Steyn, etc., is nothing but a bunch of uneducated yokels? They are working off a different script. I suppose that I will need to turn these thoughts into a standalone vanity piece at some point when I have more time. For the moment, I will say that I have come to the conclusion that FOX is actually part of the problem. The solution is for more conservatives to get themselves hired at liberal news networks. The solution is not another network perceived as only conservative. That will only exacerbate the problem.

[miss marmelstein]

A graduate student who doesn’t know how to make paragraphs?

[Mycroft Holmes]

HTML eats excess white-space. If you type two or more spaces in a row between words HTML will reduce all of the spaces and tabs to a single space or tab. Carriage Returns (the Enter key) won't do you any good either. Without special care it is easy to end up with a wall of unreadable text. It's quite cruel. If you want white-space beyond a single space you need to insert it explicitly by typing <br> or <p> for a CRLF and a paragraph, respectively.

Break <br> works like you expect Enter (or Carriage Return) to work. It gets you a single LFCR (Line Feed Carriage Return, just like an ancient typewriter). Two styles of break are in use, the preferred version (used in HTML 5) is <br /> which contains its own closing tag. Paragraph <p> makes what follows into a paragraph set off by linefeeds. Neither <p> or <br> requires closing tag. The browser software will assume a paragraph is closed when it encounters the next <p>. Closing a paragraph actually makes good sense, closing a break seems like a waste of perfectly good characters.modulo the HTML gods referenced above.

Blockquotes are another useful trick. This entire paragraph has been enclosed in blockquotes. Anything you put between <blockquote> the example text <blockquote> gets indented and set off by linefeeds before and after. This example, rendered, will look like

the example text

the text above. Blockquotes can be nested (placed one inside another) and are a great way to distinguish the source of a quote from your own text.

Preformatted, or the <pre> tag provides a way to grab a bunch of text that is already formatted with tabs and spaces and not have HTML eat all that lovely white-space. As usual a closing tag is required with this </pre>. You can use this trick on a webpage but you need to realize that if the text you are copying wraps because it runs into the edge of the page and not because there is a CRLF present it will behave the same way in the preformatted chunk.

---

Horizontal Rule <hr> generates a horizontal line the width of the page. People often use this to separate their comments from those being commented upon. This also does not need a closing tag. A width can be set with this element, <hr width="150"> looks like:

---

Note that it is automagically centered. You can align="right" or "left" to position it more explicitly.

Fight the Free Sh☭t Nation

[trisham]

"The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision
of what is before them, glory and danger alike,
and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it."

~Thucydides

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[Dr. Thorne]

Obama is not a moron. A detestable, malicious scumbag homo he is.

[presidio9]

A graduate student, who cuts & pastes to save time. These are my sometimes hard-won observations. I’ve bitten my tongue so many times in the last two years that I’m lucky I can still eat a popsicle. I give you dispensation to insert the paragraphs wherever you want. The message is the same.

[miss marmelstein]

It’s unreadable, my friend. Absolutely unreadable.

[Ray76]

Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty had a fixation too, living. Guess they where unhinged too, huh?

[kingattax]

if obozo was a moron that would be a major improvement.

[SECURE AMERICA]

Tuning the car radio some weeks back, I heard the President denounced as a moron. I was shocked.

Why on God’s green earth would that shock anyone?
The President is a moron. A clever deceitful moron but a moron none the less.......
He also is a hateful, ignorant, mean spirited, America hating, far left “progressive”. Yes that is a derogatory term........

[mylife]

Bite me Dick, you were named appropriately.

The crux of the matter is that the same troops who made the initial stike on libya were 30 minutes away in Sigonella and champing on the bit to come to the rescue.

Why were they told to stand down?
What were we even doing in Libya?

Questions remain.

[kingattax]

maybe in its own way, it is a cry for help

[demshateGod]

Good post. You have a lot to say that I would be interested in hearing. I’m starting doctoral study next semester at a very liberal Midwestern university. I was just telling someone the other day that I believe the rise of conservative media has caused the untended consequence of pushing mainstream media all the way to the left. Before they reported bad things about their heroes, then made excuses. Now they don’t even report it. If Clinton was president now, only conservatives would know who Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky were.

[miss marmelstein]

I wanted to read his remarks. But I can’t with all those words packed closely together.

[tumblindice]

“Similarly, no one can still think the White House put the brakes on a rescue attempt by the U.S. military.”

We’re inundated with this bullshit 24/7.
Why would you bring it here?

[aquila48]

I guess Cohen and the Rats forgot about the following democrat fixations:

- Watergate
- Contra
- The Plame affair
- Abu Ghraib
- Bush lied
- Guantanamo
- Waterboarding

etc, etc.

[kingattax]

if you decide to dive in there, please take some survival gear with you.

[be-baw]

On my tiny cell phone screen, your sloppy post wasn’t worth the time to read. Wow you’re a busy grad student. Good for you. You ought to know by now that paragraphs are your friend.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

We went through the same crap trying to get Congress to do a real investigation of Ruby Ridge and Waco. It took years of abuse and threats suffered by patriots to make it happen. Like today members of both parties opposed.

Then it happened.. at least the real hearings did reveal some more information.

Oddly.. even though Rudy Ridge happened when George W. Bush was president Democrats still resisted -- who could forget Feinstein walking the Ruby Ridge sniper who shot Mrs. Weaver in the head through how he was actually aiming at something else and oooops . . . .

And who could forget House Speaker Democrat Tom Foley assuring the MSM that indeed the "October surprise" and G.W. Bush would be investigated by Congress even though there was no evidence of wrong doing. That was why there had to be a thorough investigation.