It seems to me that part of the GOP’s game is:
[ol]
[li] Take an event which claimed four American lives.[/li][li] Ask Democrats nitpicky questions about the trivialities of some talking points.[/li][li] Get the respondents to dismiss the questions out of exasperation.[/li][li] Extract exasperated soundbites (“Dude, that was two years ago”, “What difference does it make?”).[/li][li] Couple that dismissiveness to the actual deaths as if they were the subject at hand. Instant outrage![/li][/ol]
In some ways, it’s a brilliant means of smear, and I’m surprised neither party had ever tried it before, since every event in history has some details one can nitpick. I can think of a couple reasons why.
One is that the part where you nitpick requires that your base actually care about the nitpicks to some extent, so only certain rare situations allow for the trick. You couldn’t *literally *ask Bill Clinton / Ronald Reagan questions about what tie he wore when the USS Cole / Beirut barracks were attacked. Even if from my perspective that’s what the GOP is doing with the current White House, it’s not that way from everyone’s perspective. Some people really do grant life-and-death importance to certain word choices. (I probably do it myself, for different areas of word choice.)
That leads to my other reason. I think something about 9/11 and other events helped make it more acceptable for politicians to politicize these crises, even in ways that go beyond “How can we prevent this?” and more into the optics area. In fact, it’s possible that as a nation we’ve become numb to the idea of preventing tragedies at all. And when you lose the hope of “never again” (even in the lens of “If only my side were in charge this wouldn’t have happened!”) all that’s left is caring about which signals your leaders emit, whether those are pro- or anti-gun, or involve the word “terrorist”, or touch on religion or taxation or whatever.
Possibly relating to that, one comment from a few days ago got my attention, and I don’t think anyone else responded on this particular point.
This line of thought, for me, is another frustrating/odd element of the brouhaha. Many conservatives seem to think that if a liberal says “Those Muslims killed those people out of anger at a video”, the implication from the liberal is there is no first-amendment right to make such videos. As opposed to the possibility which should so without saying, that the Muslims in question are obviously murderers without excuse. I guess that unlike a conservative, a liberal can’t think that any Muslim might be over-reacting, because they luvv them some Muslim terrorists, right? (See also “Where are all the moderate Muslims who condemn violence?”, a question which assumes quite a lot of bad faith, in both sense of “faith”.)
After 9/11, many people said “They hate our freedom”. Were they implying that freedom is a bad thing or an “excuse for murder”?
In the broader context, I can kind of understand the point being made here, because a lot of different people in government had indeed expressed issues with that particular video (which was a really awful piece of work) and with religious hatred in general. Such attempts to diffuse tensions make complete sense, especially when there are lots of people in the world who look at the US and its president in the worst possible light, and would jump all over any lack of condemning the hateful film as a tacit approval. (Of course, as their Benghazi actions show, Republicans wouldn’t know anything about thinking in such terms.)
But regardless, “Blaming the video for the attack means sympathizing with the attackers and hating free expression” is a weird argument to make because no one disagrees about the simple fact that people have, throughout history, committed violence in retaliation for free expression they disliked. If in fact the entire Benghazi incident had been 100% anti-film protest and 0% anything else, would the president be obligated to lie that the video had nothing to do with it? Or would it be okay to say they were killing over a video, but not to say anything negative about the video itself? (Even if directly asked their opinion.)
What if the president endorsed the video, saying “That’s right, screw you, Islam!”? Would that satisfy today’s GOP, or would it be too conciliatory to terrorists?
