BULLROAR OVER BENGHAZI: Still going!

SATURDAY, MAY 18, 2013

And looking ahead to next week: Below, we’ll offer three major takeaways from this past week of bullroar concerning Benghazi.

At the risk of repetition, our first takeaway will be this:

Your press corps simply cannt reed reel gudd: Eight days ago, ABC News released twelve versions of the now-famous “talking points” concerning Benghazi. To read that report, just click here.

Among the discoveries: In its first proposed version of this white paper, the CIA had included this paragraph: “Initial press reporting linked the attack to Ansar al-Sharia. The group has since released a statement that its leadership did not order the attacks, but it did not deny that some of its members were involved.”

In fact, Ansar al-Sharia had made a formal statement saying that none of its members were involved in the attack. We have no idea if that claim was accurate.

Much more obviously, “initial press reporting” simply isn’t a valid source for something this important. That said, this blindingly obvious fact hasn’t been obvious to the press corps over the past eight days.

Among the screeching hyenas at Fox, the scrubbing of that reference to Ansar al-Sharia has been treated like one of the cornerstones of the alleged White House/State Department “cover-up.” As we've seen this screeching continue, we’ve seen no journalist note an obvious fact—it would have been completely crazy to leave that passage in!

You can’t make such an important claim based on something you read in newspapers. Crazily, the mainstream press has completely failed to note this.

We’ve told you this for a very long time—your major journalists don’t know how to read. The lunacy of that attribution leaps out from that first CIA proposal. But no one in the press corps saw it, even though this lunacy undermines one of the major complaints against Susan Rice and the administration.

In the most major ways, your “press corps” simply can’t function. This brings us to our second takeaway:

Jonathan Karl made a howling error in that key ABC report: When Jonathan Karl released The Twelve Versions, he made some howling errors concerning a couple of e-mails.

In all honesty, these errors weren’t hugely important. Reaction to The Twelve Versions would have been the same if Karl hadn’t made these errors.

But Karl did make gigantic errors—and when his errors came to light, his response was stunningly evasive. We haven’t discussed this topic yet. We will next week.

The big TV stars of the liberal press corps have egregiously failed you: As Susan Rice was thrown down the stairs last fall, the mainstream press corps egregiously failed to challenge the claims being made against her.

That said, so did the big TV stars of the emerging liberal world! Sadly, their egregious failures to cope continued this past week.

Yesterday, we noted the way Chris Hayes bought the Benghazi con last fall. Everybody makes mistakes at some point—but in that case, Brother Hayes got massively conned.

That said, the whole range of stars on MSNBC ran and hid from this gong-show scandal all through the fall of last year. To the extent that they tried to address the “scandal” last week, they once again massively failed.

On Monday, we will start with Rachel Maddow’s attempts to discuss what Karl did while trying to avoid naming his name. On balance, Maddow doesn’t have the juice. In our view, she has demonstrated this problem again in the past two nights.

When you tune to MSNBC, you may think you see an array of bright young liberal stars who are there to defend your interests and your positions. Why, one is even a professor! They constantly say that they’re nerds!

We will suggest that you look again. That channel has egregiously failed in the nine months since Rice’s crucifixion began. First, they all ran off and hid in the woods, refusing to speak on Rice’s behalf. When they finally tried to respond, they showed the world that they didn’t know how.

That channel continued to fail you this week. On balance, do these heavily-marketed liberal children actually have the juice?

Coming Monday: Maddow smacks [name withheld]