MSNBC host Chris Matthews closed out his October 19 Hardball program with the strange assertion that President George W. Bush is both ultimately responsible for allowing the 9/11 attacks to happen AND the murder of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya eleven years later under the Obama/Clinton State Department.
Matthews insisted that Republicans seeking to lay blame for the deaths of U.S. State Department personnel on that fateful night really have Bush to blame for setting in motion events in the Middle East which inevitably, apparently led to Libya.
Never mind, of course, that it was President Obama, with the full-fledged support of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who provided U.S. military air cover for Libyan rebels deposing Moammar Qadhafi from power and leaving the dangerous power vacuum which created the hostile, deadly climate in Benghazi in which Amb. Chris Stevens, et al perished.
Matthews's assertion capped off an evening in which Matthews exulted that Donald Trump had said "the emperor has no clothes" by challenging Jeb Bush's boast that his older brother kept Americans safe from terrorism during his administration.
"Katy, I am not a big fan of Donald Trump on many occasions, on many fronts," Matthews told NBC correspondent Katy Tur during the broadcast. "He awakened us all to the fact that Jeb said something that just isn't true. His brother did not keep us safe."
Matthews should be careful. After all by his logic, popular Democratic Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton did not keep Americans safe because of Pearl Harbor in the case of the former and in the case of the latter a few different terrorist incidents: Oklahoma City bombing (April 19, 1995), Khobar Towers (June 25, 1996), embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania (August 7, 1998), and lastly, the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen on weeks prior to the presidential election (Oct. 12, 2000).
What's more, of course, the current Democratic frontrunner's husband, former President Bill Clinton, himself admitted that he had opportunity to take a stab at killing bin Laden prior to 9/11, but passed on the chance.
Here's Matthews's closing Let Me Finish commentary in its entirety (emphases mine):
MSNBC
Hardball
Oct. 19, 2015CHRIS MATTHEWS: Let me finish tonight with the wondrous fact that Donald Trump was the one to say the emperor has no clothes. Ever since September 11, 2001, the Democrats have joined the Republicans in agreeing that the country would be better off if we didn't become divided in blame over who allowed this country's worst attack on the continental United States.
What upset this arrangement was Jeb Bush's statement, deniable on its face, that his brother George quote "kept us safe." Well, actually, he didn't. He did a good job of rallying the country after we were hit, a quick job of tracking down the killers to Afghanistan. From there it all came apart with his war of choice against Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with what happened here in 2001.
In any case, what brings this matter back is the atrocious way in which the Republican Party is trying to blame Hillary Clinton for the deaths of four Americans serving in Libya in 2012. Three years later, they continue to hunt her, hunt her down you can say, on the groundless argument that someone must be to blame. Well, you follow that argument and the trail of 9/11, and you end up with George W. Bush.
As Harry Truman once said of the American presidency, the buck stops here. And that's Hardball for now. Thanks for being with us.
