Benghazi and Capitalism

Benghazi. Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi... It's the manufactroversy that just won't die, owing to a professional partisan noise machine and the relative paucity of scandalous behavior by the Obama administration. At least that the GOP can get a good head of outrage over.

Benghazi looks safe to them. Nice and economics free, letting them just trot out the same old neocon chest-thumping, repeating the fantasy that Republicans are the warfighting party and Dems are a punch of granola munching hippies. But if they keep pushing into this story, they're gonna unearth some ugly facts that directly contradict their pro-business dogma...

Let's go over the basics of US Embassy security. First  of all, the Marines are there to protect the embassy grounds only. If you're a State Department employee and you're not on the grounds when things kick off, then you're shit out of luck. Security for personnel is contracted out to indigenous police forces, which works quite well in a place like Germany but is just asking for trouble in free fire zones like Libya. So if you're lucky, security in these places is handled by mercs - "contractors" to use the PC term - from places like Blackwater, or Xe, or Rainbows or whatever they're calling themselves these days to sound less evil.

The reason for doing this... is no reason at all. It relates back to a long standing tradition in Western Civilization of not manhandling the diplomats. A tradition that didn't exist in Iran in 1979, which probably should have tipped people off that things needed to change.

So rather than just leaving the poor State functionaries to fend for themselves, we hired a bunch of free enterprise child rapists to keep them safe. This situation would worry more thoughtful pols but since those don't exist in America, we've got congressional Republicans clamoring for an investigation that will either expose how the CIA handles its operations or will show that outsourced security is no substitute for the big guns of Big Government.

A quick aside - of course the CIA was running operations out of the US Embassy in Benghazi. It was a frickin' war zone and the CIA always runs its ops out of embassies because even HUMINT is outsourced to moles and mercs these days. And then we wonder why no one saw this attack coming...

Knowing all this, you should be wondering right about now if the GOP don't care to put egg on the face of their favorite economic talking points or if they're just really stupid. Which just shows you haven't been paying attention because last year's shutdown pretty clearly demonstrated it's both. They're more than happy to keep this not-scandal rolling in the hopes of picking up a few more seats in November and they're dumb enough to think that'll actually happen, if they just keep repeating this unfunny meme.