Tape Shows Benghazi 'Scandal' Kept Artificially Alive by Far Right Activists

About a week ago, President Obama mentioned "phony scandals" that were drawing attention and effort away from the real work Washington needs to do to rebuild the economy. "With an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals," he said in a speech on the economy at Knox College, "Washington has taken its eye off the ball. And I am here to say this needs to stop... Our focus must be on the basic economic issues that the matter most to you -- the people we represent."

Those remarks became a minor scandal in itself, the daily worst thing ever! we've all become so familiar with. The unceasingly outraged right were outraged at the outrageousness of this latest outrage. "It is dismissive. It is insulting. It is minimizing. It's not validating the concerns that people have," Rep. Michele Bachmann said, as if validating unfounded concerns was something anyone should be interested in doing.

A lot of critics ran to the Benghazi story -- although the president didn't mention it directly. People died, they said, did they make those deaths up?

Well, no. They didn't make up the deaths, just the controversy over them. New evidence shows a concentrated effort between GOP leadership and conservative activists to turn a foreign policy tragedy into a "scandal" that was supposed to rock the presidency.

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A Vanishing Opportunity to Turn the Tables on the GOP

Politico called last week a "political gift" for Republicans. The convergence of three controversies had a fading political party drooling. Of course, Benghazi was an entirely made up conspiracy theory, the IRS story may or may not be scandalous but doesn't involve the White House, and seizing phone records from the AP is the sort of thing Republicans can actually get behind in their never-ending War on Terror.

Still, the press went a little nuts with the stories on an otherwise slow news week and Republicans began to believe the hype. Wall-to-wall coverage of these three stories merged into one rat king of story and the nation was transfixed. Completely and utterly transfixed.

Or were we?

CNN: President Barack Obama comes out of what was arguably the worst week of his presidency with his approval rating holding steady, according to a new national poll.

But a CNN/ORC International survey released Sunday morning also indicates that congressional Republicans are not overplaying their hand when it comes to their reaction to the three controversies that have consumed the nation's capital over the past week and a half. And the poll finds that a majority of Americans take all three issues seriously.

According to the survey, which was conducted Friday and Saturday, 53% of Americans say they approve of the job the president is doing, with 45% saying they disapprove. The president's approval rating was at 51% in CNN's last poll, which was conducted in early April.

So Americans take these issues seriously, but not seriously enough to change their opinion of the president. "The CNN poll is in-line with Gallup, which also indicated a very slight rise in Obama's approval rating over the same time period," the report continues. "And Gallup's daily tracking poll also indicated a slight upward movement of Obama's approval rating over the past week. But as with the CNN poll, it was within that survey's sampling error."

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If It's Not Racism, Then It's Another Kind of Crazy

One of the great joys of the post-election political landscape is watching Republicans struggle with the BS with which they've hobbled themselves. Chief among these is the whole Benghazi affair. If you want a measure of how crazy the rightwing freakout over the attack on our consulate there actually is, just take it down and look at it for a bit. The whole argument behind the GOP "logic" works like this: knowing the attack was terrorism, President Obama sent out his minions to lie all about it. Why? Because if everyone knew it was a pre-planned terrorist attack and not a protest that got out of hand, Obama wouldn't be reelected. Not sure why we're supposed to believe that (and no one's actually explained it), but there you go. The important thing to remember is that it's all a big coverup.

Anyway, the coverup was uncovered-up before the election and Obama sailed to reelection anyway. At this point, the whole conspiracy theory is looking pretty sick. No one but Republicans cared about Benghazi much, so the whole "coverup" theory was done for from the gitgo. After all, why risk a scandal to avoid something that was clearly not scandalous -- or even politically hazardous? In the court of public opinion, Barack Obama was cleared -- resoundingly.

And it was a surprise to no one but the right. All during the campaign, Benghazi wasn't even a blip on the issues radar. Polling showed pretty much no one all that worked up over it. But the right was sure that everyone was going to lose it over Benghazi any minute now. If they just kept up the pressure, they could turn this into a major scandal -- despite the distinct absence of anything actually scandalous.

Now that the election is over and the public failed to freak out over the GOP's big package of nothing, they're kind of stuck with Benghazi. Maybe they think that to just drop it now that it's failed to serve its purpose would be to give away the game and admit the whole thing was BS all along. So this dead horse must be thoroughly beaten. If only there were some way out. A distraction, maybe. Some sort of victim card they could play or something.

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