A long editorial by the Washington Post editorial board blasts “Republicans and conservative media” for “a focus on phony issues,” for being “obsessed with what they regard as the Obama administration’s scandalous coverup of the nature of the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi….”
I wonder if the editorial board had the Post’s own Bob Woodward in mind. “If you read through all these emails,” the eminent Watergate chronicler said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe a few days ago,
you see that everyone in the government is saying, “Oh, let’s not tell the public that terrorists were involved, people connected to al Qaeda. Let’s not tell the public that there were warnings.”
And I have to go back 40 years to Watergate when Nixon put out his edited transcripts to the conversations, and he personally went through them and said, “Oh, let’s not tell this, let’s not show this.” I would not dismiss Benghazi. It’s a very serious issue.”
And on Meet The Press this morning:
You look at the whole Benghazi thing. You look at those talking points and the initial draft by the CIA very explicitly said we know that activists who have ties to Al-Qaeda were involved in the attack. Then you see what comes out a couple of days later and there is no reference to this. This is a business where you have to tell the truth and that did not happen here.
Or perhaps the Post’s editorial board was thinking of the Post’s own associate editor and foreign affairs columnist, David Ignatius, who wrote in his column today that after all the omissions and changes demanded by the State Dept. and the White House to the CIA’s original draft of the now infamous talking points that “the original product is so shredded and pre-chewed that it has lost most of its meaning,” enough so that then CIA director David Petraeus concluded (“growled,” according to Ignatius) that “Frankly. I’d just as soon not use this.” The result, he wrote, is that “what started as six information-rich bullet points and whittles them down to an information-thin three points.”
Who knew the Post had so many “Republicans and conservative media” mavens in such influential positions.
