Klein: GOP Tail-Chasing on Benghazi

Joe Klein on GOP efforts to gin the Benghazi investigation up into a big, nasty scandal on Time's Swampland blog.

The Republicans, apparently with nothing better to do, are still chasing their tails over the tragic events in Benghazi on September 11. Actually, no. That’s not true. They’re chasing their tails over what happened after the tragic events of September 11. They’re mostly concerned that the Obama Administration tried to cover up the fact that this was a terrorist attack by a local militia (translation: local street gang) which aspired toward bad-butt Al Qaeda status. This is a pretty hard sell since, the day after the attack, the President called it an “act of terror.”

But rather than address the substance of those problems–problems that Democrats don’t seem very interested in solving–they obsess on the stupid: fixing on more-or-less budget debates, federal dictatorship fantasies and meaningless political ploys like Benghazi. I suspect they won’t be a viable political party until they begin to focus on substance rather than emptiness.