18 November 12
epublicans
are fond of comparing their scandal-mongering - like the current hype
over the terrorist assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya -
with genuine scandals, like Watergate, which sank Richard Nixon's second
term, and Iran-Contra, which marred Ronald Reagan's last two years in
office. The GOP's false equivalence represents both an effort to puff up
their latest accusations against Democrats and an attempt to minimize
the misconduct of those two Republican presidents. For instance, one
favorite GOP comment about Benghazi is: "No one died at Watergate. Four
brave Americans died in Benghazi."
This apples-and-oranges sophistry misses the point
that Watergate and Iran-Contra were complex conspiracies that required
intensive investigations to unravel their secrets (many of which remain
hidden or in dispute to this day) while the Benghazi affair boils down
to an easily resolved question as to why the U.S. intelligence community
withheld some of the details in the immediate aftermath of the attack
last Sept. 11.
The answers seem to be that the Benghazi consulate had evolved into a CIA base for secret operations
and that U.S. intelligence didn't want to tip off the attack's
perpetrators regarding how much the agency knew about their identities.
So, the word "extremists" replaced specific groups and the CIA
affiliation of two slain Americans was withheld.
By contrast, the history of Watergate is still substantially misunderstood even by supposed experts.
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