I listen to Fox News on my Sirius XM radio while driving to and fro from Winfield. I consider it something of an intelligence-gathering mission from the fact-based world, the one where we seek out the truth and take steps to understand it. I also seek to understand the roughly half of my country that aligns itself behind the thin theories that ring there.
So I know the special place that the Benghazi attacks have for the people at Fox News. For them, Benghazi is everything. It is the alpha and the omega of the Obama administration. It is the most popular player in their Fantasy Impeachment league, the one that exists in their stunted minds.
So I was stunned and surprised to see so much ink, and what appears to be such an enormous amount of reporting time, that went into the NYT reporting on A Deadly Mix in Benghazi. It is some of the most thorough, detailed, cited, minute-by-minute tick-tocks I’ve ever read in those pages. It’s unimpeachable, so to speak.
And no one in NYT-Land cares at all about this story. It is not in the top 20 viewed on emailed stories on the site. Nobody cared out there.
It’s a top story on Fox News, though. Because if this story is right, half of their news is wrong. Half of their editorial policy is wrong. So they spend a lot of words doing shoddy followup (unidentified witnesses, compound sentences with indeterminate noun clauses, etc.)
The cool thing is that nothing in the Fox report contradicts the reporting of the NYT whatsoever. They say it was a coordinated attack, and so does the NYT (their timeline starts with photographic surveillance hours before the disturbance). They say “The bosses on the ground were pointing, commanding and coordinating”, and so does the NYT.
Whenever they disagree on a point (like whether the main suspect was affiliated with Al Qaeda), the NYT has dozens of documented interviews with the suspect and people who have known him since he was a child. People who have lived with him in prison. And Fox has an unidentified source saying “…There is literal evidence in many forms and shapes, directly linking him.”
Literal evidence!
I feel the momentum of America. It’s evident everywhere. In gay rights legislation, in Boehner when asks about who’s kidding who, even in the acquiescence to a Pope who demands we love one another. Everyone.
Evidence everywhere.