There were a slew of (mostly) older white men on Sunday morning television talking about Benghazi, Susan Rice, David Petraeus and all other things associated with the attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi on September 11 — attacks which led to the deaths of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans.
But New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman summed up what seemed to be the consensus of Washington D.C. convention wisdom when he said, "Libya is not a scandal. It's a tragedy."
Of course, not everybody agrees with that summation, most prominently South Carolina Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham. Along with his close friend John McCain, the pair have been the loudest critics on Capitol Hill blasting the Obama administration for the way they initially described what happened in Benghazi, and in the immediate aftermath.
Graham went on a tear on NBC's Meet The Press on Sunday, saying that the White House deliberately withheld the fact that it was a terrorist attack in Libya because it would damage the image that they had helped eliminate Al Qaeda.
"Well, I think one of the reasons that Susan Rice told the stories that she did is, if the truth came out a few weeks before the election that our consulate in Benghazi, Libya had been overrun by an Al-Qaeda-sponsored or affiliated militia, that destroys the narrative that we've been hearing for months that Al Qaeda has been dismantled, bin Laden's dead. We're safer."
This article appears in Nov 15-21, 2012.