Playing Politics

With the recent votes in Congress to have a special committee for Benghazi and the IRS scandal and to ask the Department of Justice to appoint a special prosecutor in the Lois Lerner IRS scandal, the gnashing of teeth, rending of garments and screams of anguish are being heard coming from Democrats throughout the land.  How dare they, the Democrats proclaim, politicize the Benghazi attacks and thereby gain advantage for the upcoming mid-term elections.  Drowning out the Democrats umbrage is the sound of hypocrisy hovering over all of this.

To an extent, I have no doubt that Republicans in particular and conservatives in general are anxious to make hay over the next six months.  By no means are conservatives of any stripe pure and chaste when it comes to playing politics.

At the same time, there are legitimate questions that remain unanswered.  For Benghazi, questions of ultimate authority and judgment exist, and with the IRS mess, in addition to the same questions existing, so too are there questions that may give rise to criminal charges.  With four Americans killed in Benghazi and our one of our most basic freedoms threatened in the IRS scandal, serious issues need to be resolved.  Not incidentally, politics is involved.  There is no way for politics not to be involved.

What's interesting about this is that Democrats are descrying the Republicans' moves as being political.  They may or may not be entirely political, but for a party who covered up the real reason behind the attack on our consulate in Benghazi to win an election and used the IRS to target groups that were opposed politically to the administration to complain about issues being used politically is laughable and hypocritical.  It's akin to a child hitting his sibling behind his parents' back, get retribution from the sibling he hit and then complain about being hit by the sibling whom he attacked first.

But this is part and parcel of the Left's mantra;  Do as we say, not as we do.  Heaven forfend that an opponent use a strategy that was successful against the party that used the strategy first.  That would violate the Left's mantra.

It's important that the Republicans don't overplay their hand on this.  Benghazi is important not so much to figure out what happened in Benghazi -- since everyone pretty much agrees on those facts -- as to find out what happened stateside during that fateful night.  As with Watergate, which also involved dirty tricks to win an election, we need to know who knew what and when they knew it...and what was ordered by whom when.  Democrats, especially Cankles herself, are wrong about whether it matters:  Judgment, integrity and honesty are involved here, just as they were in the Watergate scandal.  This goes to the very heart of whether these people are fit to lead.  That they oppose these measures so strongly indicates to me that they have something to hide and know how harmful revelation of the facts will harm them.

Four Americans died needlessly in Benghazi.  Four American families are grieving without being given any concrete answers.  Americans were violated by their government for expressing their political views.  These are not things that should happen in this country.

Unless we get answers on both issues -- and a few more -- this country's slide to mediocrity will only accelerate.

(c) 2014 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles