Rightwing bloggers are all twitchy about Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony on the Hill today. The trouble is, there’s no real there there. That some early details were reported incorrectly by the Obama administration, in a fast-moving story, has been blown up into a massive conspiracy theory.
Clinton finally got testy with one moron Republican questioner who kept trying to score political points on this flimsy basis.
“With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make? It our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, senator. Now, honestly, I will do my best to answer your questions about this. The fact is that people were trying, in real time, to get to the best information.”
The right, to no-one’s surprise, is honing in only only one sentence in all that.
They have a new “you didn’t build that,” a new “spread the wealth around,” and they’re going to wring everything they can out of it.
…Now, sometimes these things never attain any more than shibboleth status — they’re secret codewords right-wingers use whenever they talk about a particular Antichrist of theirs. This will definitely attain that status — years from now, when Hillary publishes her memoirs or announces a run for president, folks on winger message boards will write “What difference does it make?” and not even bother to put the phrase in context, because all the like-minded readers will just know.
But sometimes these things do more damage. Sometimes they really do color how a story is covered outside the right-wing bubble. Will that happen this time? Will the wingers be able to turn this decontextualized soundbite into a deceptive sign of Secretary Clinton’s indifference?
They’re certainly going to try as hard as they can to tar Clinton with an out of context phrase.
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