From the House Intelligence Committee, what a paradoxical bundle of cynicism: yet another tranche of refreshing albeit superfluous honesty revealed in the disingenuous shadows of a Friday night trash dump. Two years of the loudest of hyperpartisan scandalmongering--Benghazi, Benghazi, yes they'd expose the truth about Benghazi, surely the greatest betrayal of America since Arnold--only to scurry off in a whimper.
Well, it's mostly out the door. Rep. Trey Gowdy's select committee will use the Intelligence Committee's findings "to determine," says a spokesman, "the full facts of what happened in Benghazi ... and contribute toward our final, definitive accounting of the attack." Gowdy's will be the eighth definitive accounting--all seven predecessors found what the six preceding the House Intel Committee found: nothing. No CIA or U.S. military impropriety, no intelligence failure, no nefarious "stand down" order, no evidence of secret arms transfers, and, above all, no wickedness by Obama administration officials.
And you know what I found this morning? Not a single story about the Intel Committee's findings on Drudge. Not a fucking word.
Glancing at Web aggregators, with the exception of HotAir.com (which launches a weak semantic assault on the non-differentiation between an intelligence "failure" and an intelligence "wrong call"), there are also no reactive stories from Fox News, National Review Online, Weekly Standard, Power Line, The Blaze, Breitbart, Michelle Malkin, the Daily Caller, Red State or Right Wing News.
As always, it's less the partisan crime than the spineless cover-up and subterranean silence that truly insult, and show great contempt for the body politic. Few who understand politics ever particularly begrudged the GOP its manic obsession with Benghazi. It riled the base, provided a platform from which to attack the likely Democratic nominee in 2016, raised oodles of cash for the party and its affiliated henchmen--all rather standard-issue political gamesmanship. But now the jig is up, laid bare, incontrovertibly dead. Rather than contemptuous silence, at least a Perryesque "Oops" would be nice. But of course it won't come, for there is no honor on the right.