Just as was done with the Iraq war, the absence of incriminating evidence regarding either Benghazi or her emails is being spun as “we know Clinton broke the law, and the difficulty of proving it just shows how fiendishly secretive and clever she is.”
As previously described here, but for three little words Hillary Clinton would now be in the final year of her second term as President, Senator Barack Obama would be the front-runner for his party’s nomination to succeed her, and Vice-President Joe Biden would still be equivocating on whether to throw his hat in the ring.
Clinton’s initial White House bid was done in by her failure to expose and reject what I call the Rumsfeld fallacy: To justify going to war in Iraq, Rumsfeld spun “the absence of evidence [of WMD] is not evidence of absence” into “the absence of evidence is proof of their existence.”
The Rumsfeld fallacy again haunts Clinton’s candidacy. In fact, it’s the very core of the GOP’s war on Hillary herself.
And just as with the run-up to the war in Iraq, the continued absence of evidence allows the GOP to keep their slanderous narrative alive in perpetuity.
If only her handlers could coach her along these lines:
- “When I became Secretary of State, I’d known for 15 years that there’s no such thing as secure email. In the early 1990’s when email was becoming widely available, all my tech-savvy friends told me, ‘Don’t EVER put anything in an email you don’t want to see on the front page of The New York Times — once you hit Send, you relinquish all control over what happens to anything you’ve written.’ I didn’t forget that while I was First Lady, a private citizen, or Senator. And I especially didn’t forget it when I became Secretary of State.”
- “Regardless of how insecure you think my personal email server was, there’s been no evidence at all that the State Department’s email system was any more secure. Not a week goes by that we don’t hear about government and private corporations’ servers being hacked. Congressman, how do you know your own server hasn’t been hacked and you just don’t know about it yet? The truth is, you don’t.”
- “You know you’re not going to find a smoking gun because there isn’t one. I know you don’t want honest answers, and you’re not going to give honest answers to the American people because then you’d have to stop these ridiculous sideshows.”
- “When is this committee going to declare, ‘We looked everywhere and we didn’t find anything, so we can only conclude there’s nothing to be found?’ That’s never going to happen, is it?”
Here’s what neither side in this unholy inquisition can come right out and say:
Suppose the ambassador and his team had all survived and recovered from the attack. Here’s how he would have been interviewed:
“Libya was in a state of total anarchy. Benghazi, the second largest city, was a vipers’ nest of militias, terrorists, spies, and double agents. And you decided the anniversary of 9/11 would be a good time to go there with a security force that would fit in an SUV, with a seat or two left over. What were you thinking?“
If the Republicans say this, it exculpates Clinton and the Obama administration, so that would be game-over for them.
If Clinton and the Democrats even hint at it, they know they’ll be eviscerated for “blaming the victim” and “slandering the memory of a fallen colleague.”
And if the media say this, they’ll be caught in the crossfire from both sides.
But someone has to say it: the ambassador himself made a fatal and tragic mistake. (This is not a case of hindsight being 20/20.)
If there’s been a cover-up of anything, it’s to the credit and honor of Clinton and the administration that this was what they covered up.
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