"Perhaps Kevin McCarthy is clumsy enough to be a Speaker Democrats can really get behind.

After McCarthy's candid admission that the House Benghazi committee only exists to beat up Hillary Clinton, House Oversight Committee chair Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) is rebuking McCarthy for saying something so totally outrageous as what everybody knows to be obviously true. But let's go a little further in stating the painfully obvious. The "Benghazi" story, issue, whatever you want to call it, has always been about and solely about exploiting the death of four Americans for partisan political gain.

Always.

From day one.

Full stop.

The only difference or evolution is that the stories have changed and so have the specific targets - first Obama and later Hillary. Remember, back on that dark night in 2012, Mitt Romney rocketed out of the gate trying to wrench the event into a replay of the Iranian hostage crisis to save his faltering campaign. Mitt's own effort to gain from the deaths was short-circuited because he jumped out with a press release - itself containing a demonstrable falsehood - before it was clear that a US Ambassador had died, a fact that led to widespread criticism of his reckless effort to exploit the tragedy. Indeed, he first jump out before it was clear the real story was in Benghazi rather than Cairo. The Romney camp actually authorized a top campaign foreign policy advisor to give an interview attacking the President for the Benghazi attacks while the attacks were still underway.

The simple truth was that first Romney and then other Republicans not only didn't wait for the attack to end to start looking for ways to exploit the events and eventually the deaths for political purposes with various conspiracy theories. They started trying to politicize it and generate conspiracy theories before it was even clear, in the most basic and immediate sense, what had happened.

The exploitation and conspiracy derp predated having any idea what happened because that was what it was about: working a political angle. What actually happened, good or bad, was a secondary detail - facts of whatever sort which could be used or arranged in such a way to advance the core goal: exploiting the deaths for political gain.

We know this. Thanks you, Kevin McCarthy for stating the obvious.

McCarthy for Speaker."

Josh Marshall

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"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill