If Barack Obama is reelected, will he face impeachment over Benghazi — a yet more unpleasant and far more wrenching result than to lose an election?
It could happen — and in my estimation should happen — the way revelations are playing out over the bloody terror attack that took four American lives and has led to weeks of prevarication and obfuscation.
The scandal thus far has at least tarnished and quite possibly implicated everyone from the CIA director, to the secretaries of State and Defense, to the UN ambassador and, of course, the president himself — with no end in sight, because Obama, normally loath to expose himself and even less so in an election season, refuses to answer questions on the subject.
It’s not the crime, but the cover-up, we learned in an earlier impeachment, only in this case the crime may be just as bad or worse.
A new impeachment will be all the more probable in the not unlikely scenario that Obama wins the electoral vote while Mitt Romney wins the popular vote, perhaps handily. The atmosphere in that instance will be more poisonous than it has been in years — and it’s poisonous enough already.
In fact, under this scenario — a Romney popular victory mitigating (no pun intended) an Obama Electoral College triumph – I think impeachment proceedings will almost certainly begin in the House. Moreover, the ramifications of such an impeachment would be greater than Watergate and Monicagate — relatively minor internal events in comparison, the former concerning the break-in of a political office during an election that was already won and the latter, well, adultery in the White House… or more precisely lying under oath about adultery in the White House.
Neither was about anything nearly as important as the seemingly negligent deaths of American personnel, the evolution (actually diminution) of American foreign policy and its possible implications thereof for the health, even the survival, of Western civilization and its values.
We live in a time when the hopelessly inept producer of an unwatchable film is asked to take the fall for an ongoing, indeed centuries old, ideological conflict pitting democracy against religious fascism, with our current administration promulgating the absurd self-aggrandizing delusion that the assassination of a leader of that fascism (bin Laden) and a few of his henchmen (al-Awlaki, etc.) would be an end to their cause. As if.
All those factors hover around Benghazigate like flies around a fetid lamb carcass in a Middle Eastern bazaar. They are fair game for the next Bob Woodward and we may have already found one in Jennifer Griffin of Fox News. She has done a yeoman job investigating the horrifying events on the ground in Libya the evening of September 11 with our noble warriors left to die by some or all of their superiors. But does she have it right or was she too misled?
More will undoubtedly come forth, unearthing the domestic chicanery involved. It’s the old story of what did he know and when did he know it.
A night of the long knives has already broken out with SecDef Panetta accusing critics of being “Monday-morning quarterbacks” while his Pentagon denies they had enough warning to save our people in Benghazi. Claims are being made that it was all the CIA’s fault, but their spokesperson, normally speaking under orders from director David Petraeus, stated: “No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate. ”
Well, maybe. Time will tell — or it won’t. Most recently we have learned that we may have had support gunships over Libya when the massacre was occurring, one — with a laser beam trained on the enemy — begging to provide support. As the poet would say — an unholy mess!
So who’s to blame in all this? Fingers will point in every direction, but as we all know the fish rots at the proverbial top or, more politely, the buck stops with the president. Obama admitted as much. Only he hasn’t taken the buck. Not even a penny. He hasn’t said a word, at least one that makes any sense. He’s trying desperately to fly through to November 6 on the wings of the mainstream media, aka the Cricket Club. But a few of those crickets, in and outside the MSM, are starting to chirp. Soon it may be a cacophony.
Still does this all rise to the “high crimes and misdemeanors,” that term of legal art that constitutes the hurdle for impeachment? If this were a Republican administration, we all know the answers to that.
But I say, if this doesn’t, what does?
Or look at it this way — which is the worse, lying to cover up a party office break-in, lying under oath about extra-marital sex with an intern, or lying to the American public about a terror attack that resulted in the deaths of four of our worthiest citizens while covering up the continued power and presence of al-Qaeda and its allies throughout the Islamic world and maybe beyond?
You be the judge. I think Benghazi is worse. A lot worse. But if you want to avoid an impeachment (not to mention the ascendance of the cognitively disadvantaged Joe Biden to the presidency) and all that entails for our country when we have so many problems to resolve, there is a simple solution — vote Romney on November 6.
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