Back in the day—July 10, 2014, to be precise—I whaled on Bloomberg’s Eli Lake for pulling together a lot of ass-covering/blame-shifting “if only the president had listened to me” quotes from former members of the Obama Administration to explain why the government of former Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki failed to prevent the rise of ISIS. But after all the ass-covering and blame-shifting, Eli also quoted a “senior U.S. official who works closely on Iraq policy,” who had this to say about government failures in Iraq: “Maliki’s strength and staying power was more a function of the realities of Iraq than policies in Washington.” Which made me give Eli a rating of 20% thumbs up.
Well, today I’m reversing the percentages, more in the interest of symmetry than accuracy, I confess, for Eli’s latest, “Even Trump’s Enablers Are Thinking of Voting for Clinton” has more than its share of whoppers, but Eli does throw some pretty hard punches, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.
Eli’s springboard is a column by Richard J. Cross III, a “long-time Republican operative,” saying that Donald Trump is so obnoxious that Cross may be forced to vote for Hillary Clinton, even though Cross wrote the speech delivered at the Republican Convention by “Benghazi mom” Patricia Smith, who told the crowd “I personally blame Hillary Clinton for the death of my son.” Responding to the speech rather than the column, Eli writes as follows:
“With all respect for Smith’s pain and grief, this is bananas. Clinton made many errors with regard to Benghazi. …
…
“But Clinton didn’t kill Sean Smith. Ansar al-Shariah and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb did. …
“One might think that given Cross’s newfound revulsion toward Trump, he would be contrite about his role in this spectacle. But Cross is proud of his work. ‘As a political speechwriter, that was something of a home run moment for me,’ he wrote. ‘The New Yorker called the speech ‘the weaponization of grief.’’
“It was more though than just grief’s weaponization. It was also a kind of sabotage. Republicans in the last eight years, time and again, have sacrificed a good case against Obama for sensational nonsense. …
“But Benghazi was not a chapter in a John Grisham novel where a sinister president deliberately let his ambassador die. Smith’s speech at the Republican convention was not the first time the GOP went down this kind of rabbit hole. It has been happening since 2008. The voices of sensational nonsense have grown louder and louder. From the whispers about Obama’s citizenship to the party’s nominee telling a frenzied crowd the president founded the Islamic State. The Republican Party is going crazy. Now one of the enablers of this insanity is thinking of jumping ship, long after the damage has been wrought.”
As you can tell, I’ve aerated/skeletonized Eli’s argument, taking out the things I don’t agree with to highlight those that I do, because I think Eli is right—the Republican Party has gone crazy. But now I’d like to backtrack a little to point out the areas where I think Eli got it wrong.
I’ll start by noting that Eli includes the obligatory “Democrats are just as bad” riff—“It [blaming Clinton for Sean Smith’s death] is to do to Clinton what progressive activists did to George W. Bush in the 2000s. They paraded Cindy Sheehan, mother of the late Casey Sheehan, who blamed Bush for the death of her son while he was fighting in Iraq.”
Sorry, Eli. There is, first of all, a bit of a difference between “progressive activists” holding anti-war rallies1 and a national party’s presidential nominating convention. Secondly, while Sheehan argued that the war in Iraq was unnecessary and unjustified, deceitfully promulgated by President Bush and his administration for hidden political purposes, and that he was thus responsible for the death, not only of her son, but for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis alike, she did not accuse him of calculated murder in the manner of a president in a John Grisham novel.
Hillary Clinton did make many errors regarding Benghazi, but her huge error was pushing for the invasion of Libya itself, which has simply proved to be Iraq on a budget. Naturally, Eli accuses her of everything but this. He wishes (in hindsight, of course) that we had gone in big in Libya, so that the U.S. would have three multi-trillion-dollar disasters in the Muslim world, instead of just two.
Eli also skates over the real reason Benghazi was attacked. It wasn’t really a consulate; it was a CIA operation. Why the Obama Administration thought it was a good idea to 1) overthrow the Libyan government and 2) bring in the CIA, easily the most despised institution in the Muslim world, is a question Eli Lake does not want to ask. Nor does he want to hear it answered.
Lastly, Eli’s a bit off on his chronology. Republican hysteria started in 1992, not 2008. Republicans have never gotten over the shock of the shellacking they took in that election when their beloved “lock” on the presidency proved to be a rope of sand. Newt Gingrich formulated the new line of attack: the Democratic Party didn’t have bad ideas; the Democratic Party had bad people. It was then that the voices of sensational nonsense were first raised, and Eli and his neocon friends were among those shouting the loudest, until Donald Trump arrived to show them what a real demagogue sounded like.
The attacks made on Bill Clinton were just as vicious, and just as absurd, as those made on Barack Obama, and they were made during an historical period as stress-free as any in memory. They were made because the Republican Party simply has run out of ideas. Back in the first days of the Clinton Administration, Bill Kristol made a name for himself as a Republican “thinker” by arguing that Clinton’s health care proposals should be opposed, not on policy grounds but political ones. The question is not, is it good for the country, but, is it good for the party? Not as bloody as a Grisham novel, perhaps, but just as shallow.
UPDATE: Eli Lake, from 80/20 to 0/1000
Daniel Larison, more au courant than myself, catches Eli in the act of being a total asshole, “explaining” Why Obama Let Iran’s Green Revolution Fail. As Dan politely points out, everything Eli says is total bullshit. Actually, Dan is too polite, saying that Eli and the rest of the neocons “misunderstand” Iran’s “Green” movement. They don’t misunderstand it, Dan. They lie their asses off about it, as a way to denounce Obama for not solving all their problems for them with the wave of his magic wand. As for you, Eli, I’m not praising you again for at least ten years.
- And Cindy Sheehan was not “paraded around”. She was an anti-war activist who spoke at anti-war rallies. ↩︎
