I’d like everybody to pay close attention to this Tweet:
.@mittromney more interested in bogus #Benghazi theory than battling auto bankruptcy. #battleship #p2
— Ed Markey (@MarkeyMemo) October 23, 2012
It’s from back in October of 2012, when – as Legal Insurrection very helpfully notes – Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts (D) (now running against Gabriel Gomez in a special election for MA-SEN) was doing his level best to convince the world that there was absolutely no reason at all to believe that the attack in Benghazi that murdered four Americans (including our Ambassador) was due to a preplanned terrorist attack – and that any suggestion that the White House was covering things up was some sort of bizarre theory promulgated by conservatives. That’s October of 2012. Now let’s go to May of 2013:
(CBS News) “Everybody in the mission” in Benghazi, Libya, thought the attack on a U.S. consulate there last Sept. 11 was an act of terror “from the get-go,” according to excerpts of an interview investigators conducted with the No. 2 official in Libya at the time, obtained by CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”
“I think everybody in the mission thought it was a terrorist attack from the beginning,” Greg Hicks, a 22-year foreign service diplomat who was the highest-ranking U.S. official in Libya after the strike, told investigators under authority of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Hicks, the former U.S. Embassy Tripoli deputy chief of mission, was not in Benghazi at the time of the attack, which killed Chris Stevens – then the U.S. ambassador to Libya – and three other Americans.
CBS goes on to also helpfully note that this testimony will more or less flatly contradict the White House narrative that Ed Markey so hotly defended, and that Mitt Romney presciently sneered at. The simple truth of the matter is this: the administration made the call to obfuscate what happened at Benghazi because admitting at the time that it was a terrorist attack might have cost them the election. This is a thing that has happened. Now they’re paying the price for that, but they don’t want to, only I don’t give a… darn… about that and neither should you.
Now this the brutal part. Republican Senate candidate Gabriel Gomez is likely too much the gentleman to make this point, but I’m happy to: Ed Markey got Benghazi wrong. Badly. At best he’s a pathetic dupe for what was one of the clumsiest narratives in recent American political history; at worse, he was a willing collaborator in pushing that narrative. Ed Markey wants to be a Senator for a state that has recently suffered an unquestioned, unambiguous, and deeply troubling terrorist attack; it is not unreasonable to assume that Massachusetts’ federal Senate and House delegations will be involved in crafting America’s eventual response. Who do you think would do a better job of representing Massachusetts’ victims, in this case? The guy who Islamist terrorists tried to kill*, or the guy that finds it politically inconvenient to simply accept that Islamist terrorists want to kill Americans?
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*Added with malice aforethought. There are elements of the antiwar Left who absolutely hate it when it’s pointed out that there are people out there who want all of us dead, and that those people make absolutely no distinction between me, Gabriel Gomez, Ed Markey, or a random member of the antiwar Left. They’d be happy to get one of us, and would get happier and happier as the body count goes up. There are no rear areas and safe places in this war.