May 10, 2014

Hell may have just frozen over, because David Brooks actually said something I agree with. He actually admitted out loud that the fake Benghazi outrage we're seeing from Republicans is nothing more than a way to score cheap political points.

From this Friday's PBS Newshour:

HARI SREENIVASAN: So, this week, in Congress, it seems that the Republicans are pivoting back to the B-word, Benghazi. It seems that they’re actually not talking about the Affordable Care Act nearly as much. We were talking about we will probably the eighth inquiry in this.

Is there merit to this and will it galvanize the base?

DAVID BROOKS: There’s some merit to it.

The administration did spin. And they’re not the first administration to spin, but on occasion they have had their foreign policy been overly influenced by messaging priorities. They’re not the first administration to do that, but they’re sometimes guilty. David Ignatius wrote a very good column that subject this week.

Is it the subject the Republicans should be emphasizing? Well, of foreign policy subjects, I think it probably would rank 47th. There are just much bigger subjects. Why are they doing it? I have a theory.

It is the voters don’t want to be interventionists abroad. The Republican natural tack is to attack the Democrats for not being strong and interventionist enough. Benghazi allows them to attack the Democrats for being either incompetent or weak, without the Republicans themselves having to commit to anything interventionist abroad. And so it’s a cheap way to score points without actually being for a foreign policy.

Thanks Captain Obvious. Brooks has done more than his fair share of calling President Obama "weak" himself and has a bad case of selective amnesia when it comes to all of the really horrid foreign policy decisions he's been supporting for years on end now, but even he was forced to admit that this game is absolutely nothing but pure politics for the GOP.

We'll see how long it takes him to back peddle if the right goes after him for this.

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