Last week, during a second day of tough questioning in the White House briefing room, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, doubled down on the preposterous lie that the Susan Rice talking points memo was not about Benghazi, and he accused Fox News of spreading conspiracy theories.
It looked to me like a signal from the embattled White House to the progressive troops to employ a new narrative ridiculing the story.
Since then, two former Obama administration officials, Tommy Vietor and David Plouffe, have appeared on Fox News and ABC News to downplay the Benghazi e-mails. Vieter famously laughed off the importance of the emails (dude!), and Plouffe said that a “very loud, delusional majority” was driving Republican politics. “There’s no conspiracy, here,” he declared on ABC’s “This Week”, on Sunday.
On Fox and Friends, Monday, former CBS investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson explained that White House flacks were engaged in a “well-orchestrated strategy to controversialize” the recent coverage of the Benghazi scandal.
The key words they use, such as ‘conspiracy’ and ‘delusional,’ are in my opinion clearly designed to try to controversialize a story — a legitimate news story and a legitimate area of journalistic inquiry.”
“I see that as a well-orchestrated strategy,” she added, “to controversialize a story they really don’t want to hear about.”
This is a strategy they’ve had a degree of success with over the years. Even conservatives shy away from stories about Obama’s inconsistent birth narrative, yet the president recently mocked Fox News for supposedly being obsessed with it. (They never have been.)
The idea is to make a topic toxic through ridicule.
On Twitter, you see various Dems running with the Regime’s new “Benghazi is a joke” narrative.
Duane Lester of the Missouri Torch caught A Missouri Democrat using Benghazi as a punchline.
Thinking of saying “Benghazi” while debating tomorrow on the House floor. Just to see what happens. #moleg
— Rep. Stacey Newman (@staceynewman) May 7, 2014
Her “joke” was retweeted by a columnist from the Kansas City Star (aka “The Red Star” here in Missouri)
@staceynewman Do it!! I’ve got your back!! #Roomie4Life
— Tishaura O. Jones (@tishaura) May 7, 2014
Here’s how the Executive Director for the AFSCME in Columbia Mo, defended the tweets:
@reneehulshof We disagree on what the subject of the joke was. You say it’s about American deaths, I say it’s about conspiracy theorists.
— Jeff Mazur (@jmaz) May 7, 2014
@reneehulshof to use it now is simply to mock the people intoning “BENGHAZI”, not the events themselves.
— Jeff Mazur (@jmaz) May 7, 2014
@reneehulshof The people who’ve tried ad nauseam to use it as a cudgel against Obama and Clinton are responsible for making a mockery of it.
— Jeff Mazur (@jmaz) May 7, 2014
@reneehulshof She’s not the one who has turned “BENGHAZI” into a joke.
— Jeff Mazur (@jmaz) May 7, 2014
While serious journalists like Attkisson, Jake Tapper, and Jonathan Karl are insulted by the Obama administration’s increasingly desperate attempts to spin Benghazi, the true believers in the trenches are still loyally towing the party line, perhaps not realizing that by attaching themselves to a sinking ship, their own credibility is going down, too.
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