“If they want to go after somebody, they should go after me.” —
President Barack Obama, November 14, 2012

Be careful what you wish for, pal. Don’t worry, we will.

Geez, I remember back in the good old days how if you had something bad happen in faraway places the reasons behind it would be pretty straight forward: I mean, at Pearl Harbor it was half deception, half lack of technology, half not taking the Japanese threat seriously enough. There was a lack of intelligence and a security breakdown when all those Marines were killed in Beirut back in the early 80s. The U.S.S. Cole and 9/11 were ultimately chalked up to a “wall” between our national security agencies and a disbelief that passenger planes could be turned into flying missiles. In all of this, people may have acted wrongly, but not (at least it appears) dishonorably.

This whole Benghazi thing both astounds me and troubles me. It astounds me because what at first seemed to be a question of who knew what and when – after all, none of the head honchos in the Obama administration – not the President, Vice-President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Attorney General, or CIA director have willingly gone on the record to say what they new about the events of this past September 11 that led to the deaths of our ambassador to Libya and three others. What we know is that requests for enhanced security beforehand went unheeded, that when the attack came requests for help went unheeded, that the President himself went to bed during the attack, wasn’t wakened, and then after some brief Rose Garden remarks that really said nothing, went off campaigning to Las Vegas. We know that the following Sunday, our ambassador to the UN Susan Rice went on all the Sunday talk shows saying the attack was in response to some anti-Muslim video no one had seen. This lie was further perpetrated in the coming days by both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton when the caskets of the four were greeted at Edwards Air Force Base and days later in a speech by the President to the United Nations.

It troubles me because here we are, two months after the Benghazi attack, and what do we have? An expanding circle of bizarre events involving one or more instances of marital infidelity, a botched FBI investigation where the agent became obsessed with one of the female particulars, hundreds (if not thousands) of bizarre e-mails, a child custody battle, rumors of secret prisons, misuse of classified documents, and the driver’s license of General Patreus’ mistress found in a notorious Washington, D.C. park. Something out of a reality show that would be pathetic if it wasn’t for the fact that nothing has really changed at the core of the story: our ambassador and three others are still dead, a media which I guarantee you would have had hundreds of reporters badgering every administration official they could find if this were a Republican president seemingly neither curious or willing to do their jobs, and senior administration officials resisting at every corner to testify before Congress.

It’s really pathetic and frightening when you come to think of it. I mean, scandals like this are the kind that bring down governments or, at the very least, very high people up the chain to lose their jobs. At the very least, I’m talking Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but she’s off in the Far East avoiding anyone and everyone.

I suppose I could say something smarmy like scandals such as this is what happens when guys and chicks get topgether, but it’s really a very serious thing that’s going on here, and no one outside of Fox News and a very few mainstream reporters seems to notice. Charles Krauthammer is right when he says there is something bigger going on here that only recently have the mainstream media seemed even somewhat curious about:

…how do you explain the testimony that Petraeus gave, when it contradicted the testimony that the CIA station chief in Libya had told them, when it contradicted what Panetta had briefed, and what everybody at the time was saying. Now, the Broadwell disclosure that we just saw is important not because people are now getting all upset about it, because it might have disclosed secret information, but because it might tell us what might have been a motive for the CIA to disguise, to lie about, or to cover up what was happening in Benghazi.

If they were holding prisoners, either the administration or the White House knew about it in contradiction of the executive order Obama had done when he came into office, or the CIA and the people in Libya were holding it from the administration, in which case it’s a breach of something and it could be serious. But it gives you one of the many motives why Petraeus’ testimony was so at odds at what everybody at the time was saying and knew. And the fact that Petraeus resigns with a week to go before he is supposed to testify, will not be there as many people on the Hill have already said, we have got to have him there, including Dianne Feinstein, I’m sure, being a Democrat and, therefore, being obviously nonpartisan about this they’re going to want to know where did this testimony come from.

That’s the link between the two scandals. And personally, I’m not interested in the private lives of high officials, but I am interested in what happened in Benghazi and why the story out of the CIA was so bizarre.

This is not just reality show stuff, this is something much bigger – perhaps the biggest scandal to enfold an administration in our history. After all, no one died in Nixon’s Watergate, Reagan’s Iran-Contra was policy run amok in the hands of zealots, Harding’s Teapot Dome was simply the lining of the pockets of connected bigwigs with dollar bills. In this instance real people are really dead, and the fact that you have an Obama administration unwilling to come clean and its cadre of all-protective media lapdogs all too willing (at least to this point) to give it a free ride is something that should scare the bejeezus out of everyone who cherishes transparency and accountability of its elected officials.

This is frightening stuff, folks – if this administration is allowed to get away with this kind of thing, what else will they be able to get away with? My guess is this is going to get much uglier in the near future as more details are unearthed. Just don’t expect “the most transparent administration in history” to be forthcoming about it one iota. They’ll have to be dragged kicking and screaming all the way to the gallows. It is disgraceful and shameful, though, in this day and age, and with the kind of people we’re talking about here (on both the political and media side) not entirely unexpected.