A great many conservatives (e.g., the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes) don’t believe last Friday’s House Intelligence Committee report was the last word on the Benghazi attack, but some lefty bloggers certainly do.
Charles Pierce of Esquire borrowed liberally from Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch to express his relief that “the largely mythical beast known as Benghazi” was now “an ex-scandal,” and that the four Americans killed “finally can rest in peace”:
The largely mythical beast known as Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI! is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late scandal, It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If they hadn't nailed it to our eyeballs, it'd be pushing up the daisies. Its metabolic processes have ceased. It's off the twig. It's kicked the bucket, rung down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibule.
A few things should happen now, though I do not believe all of them will. Congressman Mike Rogers is departing the Congress for a new career as a radio talk-show host. His first shift on-air should be, ah, interesting. Sharyl Atkisson's newly minted career as a martyred truth-teller should experience something of a downturn although, rising to her defense, the burble caucus has retrenched on Fast And Furious,which is an even deader parrot. The Sunday Showz [sic] should apologize to America for wasting time on this thing. And, please god, Chris Stevens and the other people who died at the consulate finally can rest in peace. And to that, all say amen.
The Washington Monthly’s Martin Longman asserted that the media, having devoted so many hours and so much space to Benghazi-related “bullshit,” now “ought to spend the next three-plus years publishing articles and airing pieces on the extent to which this was all a cynical and spiteful lie from the beginning” (bolding added):
Who [should] take on the laborious task of countering the six trillion hours of media coverage that aired on the “Benghazi Scandal” with an equal and countervailing amount of coverage on the now established fact that it was ALL bullshit from the start?...
…Any media outlet that lent credence to this “debate” ought to spend the next three-plus years publishing articles and airing pieces on the extent to which this was all a cynical and spiteful lie from the beginning. They should keep doing these pieces no matter how much it outrages and annoys their audiences. They should do it long after it has any potential to edify the public…
Every day should be Susan Rice Vindication Day. We should wake every morning to mockery of Darrell Issa and go to sleep each night to ridicule of Mitt Romney. This should go on until all decent people have long ago given up and stopped begging for it to stop…
…[G]iven how seriously these charges were taken and the sheer volume of credulous coverage that was dedicated to them, the public will not internalize the actual truth unless and until they are subjected to a similarly ridiculous and seemingly superfluous amount of corrected media coverage and attention.
Finally, Kevin Drum of Mother Jones opined that “there is no scandal, and there never was,” and suggested that Republicans ginned it up for political gain:
A Republican-led committee finally admitted that every single Benghazi conspiracy theory was false. There are ways that the response to the attacks could have been improved, but that's it. Nobody at the White House interfered. Nobody lied. Nobody prevented the truth from being told.
It was all just manufactured outrage from the beginning. But now the air is gone. There is no scandal, and there never was.
