The Benghazi “scandal” — a word that already minimizes the significance of what happened there — is “falling apart,” we are told, by everyone from Talking Points Memo to Mother Jones to the Washington Post. The scandal is disappearing, they say, in the wake of admittedly troubling reports that Republican sources in Congress oversold tendentious paraphrases of administration e-mails as verbatim quotes, coloring with editorial prejudice the account of how the administration crafted its Benghazi talking points.
If it’s true, as it appears to be, that congressional sources were feeding reporters prejudiced and inaccurate quotes about the talking-points process, that’s bad. But it doesn’t change anything we learned about Benghazi before the e-mails were even a story, and it shouldn’t discourage Congress from pursuing this investigation to its conclusion.
Because the news about the paraphrased quotes is “the latest on the scandal,” and because we are cognitively disposed to give greater weight to more recent information, it might feel like the whole affair has been doctored, and that’s certainly the narrative that the port side of the media is pushing. But when you throw out the less accurate picture of the talking-points process suggested by the dubious paraphrases and objectively read everything else we know about the attacks and their aftermath, is there really no scandal there? Hardly.
Read more: nationalreview.com
