More or less typifying the flesh-eating cynicism that has spread through today’s Republican Party like an unchecked contagion, Mitt Romney hustled to a microphone and cameras after the reports of an attack on the American consulate in Benghazi like a salesman with a parcel of fresh leads on potential buyers for lousy Boca Raton real estate to a telephone, and proceeded, confused about his basic facts and wrong, to allege President Obama guilty of scandalous malfeasance.
Keeping a stiff upper lip against his overwhelming grief, or perhaps girding to prevent a grin from breaking out across his face betraying his excitement, Romney accused the president of, “sympathizing with those who waged the attacks,” followed shortly thereafter by Republican Party chairman, the not-so-fresh prince Reince Priebus tweeting, “Obama sympathizes with attackers in Egypt. Sad and pathetic.”
These immediate responses from these two bargain basement knock-offs of actual human beings tell you all you need to know about Republican priorities in the aftermath, and those priorities could not have been further from attacks on American consulates, or the deaths of Americans abroad, or from diplomatic security concerns, but were in fact from the very beginning conspicuously an opportunity to assail the president they have loathed with mind-altering malignance.
This spectacle surely was the most callous use of dead American bodies since soldiers’ corpses were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, this one evoking a similar air of ghastly celebration by Republicans. The rapidity of Republicans’ nonsensical, utterly frivolous calls for impeachment was only further evidence of the demented meretriciousness of their sordid enterprise from the very start.
The project by Republicans for years to manufacture a scandal to somehow balance the parade of Republican scandals from Watergate to Iran-Contra has been a busy one, futilely attempting to conjure crimes to somehow balance things out or to even the score. The number of times Republicans have alleged a new Democratic scandal “worse than Watergate” have piled up to such a level an accurate computation would require a mainframe. To understate it by who knows how much, Benghazi is just another example.
The record will show that unlike the 13 foreign attacks similar to Benghazi which occurred under the reign of George W. Bush unremarked by these very same Republicans much in the same way rising deficits and national debt went unremarked by Republicans while Republicans were piling them up, with expenditures and tax cuts during the same era, Republicans were afire with calls for investigations and document dumps and accountability this time. If only they could have remained so unbothered this go around, our morally malfunctioning colossuses of transparently sleazy hypocrisy unable to conquer their genetic predisposition once again.
These would be the same hypocritical humbugs who, lathered up in radical anti-government rectitude earlier voted emphatically against funding for diplomatic security abroad. Unsurprising behavior by those who spend three quarters of their time spouting disdain for their own American government, always in full dudgeon against every expenditure unrelated to corporate subsidies or tax advantages for the rich.
Indeed Republican members of congress are fully correct, that the time has in fact come to seriously consider impeachment. Impeach this malodorous coagulation of buffoons before their bad faith, cynicism, radicalism and nihilism damage the nation beyond repair.
