When you've lost Dowd, can you still win the war?
LBJ famously said that when he'd lost Cronkite after the Tet offensive, that he'd lost the war in Viet-Nam. By that token, there has been fewer Commentary writers who have been more loyal to the Progressive agenda than Maureen Dowd. We all cheered her writings when she took Bush to task, sometimes more than once a week. So imagine how disturbed I was to
read her article this Sunday.
In the midst of a re-election campaign, Obama aides wanted to promote the mythology that the president who killed Osama was vanquishing terror. So they deemed it problematic to mention any possible Qaeda involvement in the Benghazi attack.
Now, to be fair, Maureen spends the article highlighting the various charges and claims, and which ones seem to be true, and finishes by saying that the real failure seems to be our unwillingness to put forth the superhuman effort required to save four lives. But here is the thing. for months Maureen has been part of the chorus of folks here, chanting that it is nothing but a partisan witch hunt and we should ignore it. Now, it is going more mainstream all the time. Our answer here, and in the backrooms of the DNC is to keep ignoring it, and eventually it will go away. We had better figure out what we are going to do about it, because even if the Republicans don't impeach President Obama, this will set him up to finish out his second term as a lame duck.
The New Yorker Magazine also had a writeup, which means that soon, everyone of the media outlets will be covering the story, all as more of the IRS targeting the RW story is being released.
It’s a cliché, of course, but it really is true: in Washington, every scandal has a crime and a coverup. The ongoing debate about the attack on the United States facility in Benghazi where four Americans were killed, and the Obama Administration’s response to it, is no exception. For a long time, it seemed like the idea of a coverup was just a Republican obsession. But now there is something to it.
The story has grown legs. Every day, more of the news organizations are turning from tepid support of us, to outright opposition to us. Every day, President Obama and the Democrats are going to spend less time arguing for projects and legislation for the future of this nation, and more time answering insane charges from the world of insane conspiracy theories, because we gave them the opening to make it fairly reasonable to question our honesty.
Or we could keep on with what appears to be the current plan. Ignore it and hope it goes away while we focus on legislative objectives. Does anyone think that will be successful?
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ymmv