The Smithian

…And there is certainly no evidence of the…most outlandish conspiracy theory about Benghazi: that the Administration left Americans to die because they were worried that responding to the incident with the force needed to beat back the assault would undermine President Obama’s counterterrorism record. Instead, what is in those e-mails documents the ways in which things in Washington are affected not by the big names—Obama, Clinton, Petraeus—but by the people who work for them, and the manner in which those staffers jostle with each other to protect their turf and their bosses. There is also a reminder that this “Administration” thing we think of as a single, unified entity is in fact a collection of people competing with each other.

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…is a political show trial designed to vilify Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. What we don’t need is a crass partisan effort to influence the 2016 presidential campaign. Unlike the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal, there are no questions of illegal acts, no secret funds, no shredding of documents and no efforts to directly circumvent a law passed by Congress. People may forget that 14  administration officials were indicted and 11 convicted as a result of the arms-for-hostages scandal. Instead, what we have [re the Benghazi tragedy] after eight months of investigation, 11 congressional hearings before five committees, 20 staff briefings and 25,000 pages of documents is exactly what we started with: a tragic situation with lessons to be learned, but not a grand conspiracy.

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…The fact that Barack Obama failed to win legislation to place further curbs on the purchase of guns—even after the horror of Newtown, Connecticut—has made people who ought to know better decide that he’s not an “arm-twister.” Ever since Obama took office, others have been certain about how he should handle the job and that he wasn’t doing it right. Yet if the health care law is allowed to work, despite continuing Republican efforts to try to make sure that it doesn’t, and if we take into account some other victories—the Lilly Ledbetter Act, the stimulus that was as large as the political market would bear, the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, the largest since the New Deal if Congress will let it be implemented—his presidency could go down as a time of historic achievement. Nevertheless, when an insufficient number of senators was available to kill a hypothetical filibuster of the gun bill—a watered-down measure to expand background checks for gun sales (while opening gaping loopholes)—suddenly the word went out that the president is hopeless as an arm-twister; the assumption of course was that being a good arm-twister was critical for a successful presidency. Wait a minute.

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