What Is It About Benghazi?

There are faint signs of cognition in Maureen Dowd’s latest column, which raises the remote possibility that the brain-dead left is not completely dead, but only mostly dead -- in terms of its ability to hold a critical thought about the disastrous Obama presidency for half a second or more. She wrote in Sunday’s New York Times: “The administration’s behavior before and during the attack on Benghazi, in which four Americans died, was unworthy of the greatest power on earth.” She used the word “unworthy.” That is muted criticism, and if the New York Times is willing to go that far in criticizing the Obama administration, that in itself is one kind of a story -- not man-bites-dog, but the faithful lapdog -- ever so slightly -- raising a lip at its master. Even this little performance won a few plaudits for Dowd and the New York Times. A reporter at Newsmax described the column as a “scathing” critique of the Obama administration. In fact, it was carefully protective of the president -- offering just enough criticism, mixed in with a lot of whitewash, to make his performance seem much less shameful than it actually was. There are three things that stand out about President Obama’s handling of Benghazi -- which I will quickly mention before taking a closer look at Dowd’s column. The first, of course, is that the president knew almost from the start that the consulate in Benghazi was under heavy attack and yet he and his administration did nada -- nothing -- to mount a rescue mission… or even to mobilize a show of force (scrambling fighter jets from Italy) that might have frightened off the attackers. The president did not call for a meeting in the Situation Room at the White House on the night of Sept. 11/12 to track what was going on Libya. It seems that he went to bed that night without even calling the Pentagon to check on the situation. Next, having decided the night before to do nothing to try to save the Americans trapped in the consulate and later at a nearby an...