The GOP’s Benghazi Weak Sauce

 
By Michael Tomasky

After all that buildup, was that really the best the Republicans could do? Seriously?

I watched several minutes of Fox during the breaks in the Clinton Benghazi testimony, just to see how they were going to spin things, and all day it seemed matters weren’t proceeding all that swimmingly from the Fox perspective. But the capper came at 4 p.m., when Shep Smith said that his big gripe of the day was that he and his staff had ordered wings at 3 p.m. and they were supposed to be there at 3:20 and hadn’t arrived yet. Smith is known for his occasional departures from orthodoxy over the years, but I somehow doubt that if some of Hillary Clinton’s blood had been in the water at four o’clock, he’d have been joking about lunch.

It says all that needs to be said that Fox, alone among the cable nets, pulled the plug on its live coverage in the 5 p.m. hour. But this is not to say that Clinton scorched the committee. I actually thought that in his morning questioning, Kansas Republican Mike Pompeo was reasonably effective. He established what you might call an interrogatory narrative: His questions led somewhere, had a point to them. He showed that Clinton and others at the State Department didn’t respond to requests from Chris Stevens for more security, and this was the only moment when I thought, ah, there’s something the Republicans can maybe take away from this—this line of questioning can produce an attack ad down the road that will question her competence and ask voters if this is really the person they want to put in the Oval Office.

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Source: The Daily Beast