Neither of these two opposing groups really gives a damn about the country, and if they do, it’s because they have somehow convinced themselves the policy they will benefit from will benefit the entire commonwealth, and their opponents’ won’t.

Over half the people in the country have trusted Obama to be the one who decides, and have not only trusted his judgement on what to do, but his ability to make it happen. So be it.

Democracy is a crazy, unstable system, and there are no guarantees it will work. It destroyed Athens during the Pelepponesian Wars, and they were eventually defeated by brutal fascist thug state. But no body remembers Sparta as anything more than a bunch of bullies. Athens was the jewel in the crown of our civilization.

Democracy is the best we have, and I trust it. I think I could do a better job if I was dictator, but I suspect no one else would trust me with the task. I can’t really fault them for that.

So democracy, tempered by the flywheel of a constitution, is our only feasible alternative. Any other system is only a surrender of our lives to the will of a minority. The details of exactly how we organize and administer our democracy really don’t matter, its the general idea that works.

Democracy is a delphic system, i.e., in the absence of any “scientific” laws of government, we have no choice but to rely on the majority will of the people; we are counting on a statistical mechanics, not a Newtonian Physics, model of political space.

I trust Obama, he may not be the best possible man for the job, but he’s the best of the two that ran. And the more I see of his opponents, the more I’m convinced I’m right.

Amid confusing and contradictory reports from the ground, President Obama waited too long to utter the magic incantation, “Terrorism, terrorists, terror!” that would have … well, it would have done something, but it turns out that he did say “terror,” so never mind that. But that’s not the real scandal! The real scandal is that Susan Rice went on television soon after and amid all kinds of “based on the best information we have”s and “we’ll have to see”s, said one thing that turned out not to be the case: that after the protests in Cairo, there was some kind of copycat protest in Benghazi, which was then “hijacked” by extremist elements using heavy weapons to stage an attack.

A sane person might say, OK, she was obviously given some incorrect information at that time, but it’s not a particularly meaningful deception. As people have been pointing out for weeks now, it’s not as though not using the word “terror” or saying there was a protest before the attack gave the White House some enormous political advantage. If you’re going to have a cover-up, there has to be something you’re covering up.

But now, some Republicans, particularly John McCain and Lindsay Graham, are essentially saying that this horrifying cover-up was quite possibly the greatest crime in the history of the United States government, and if we’re going to get to the bottom of it nothing short of a select committee—a “Watergate-style committee,” as it is being referred to by reporters—will do. Who knows what it might uncover? Were there CIA whistleblowers whose bodies are now lying at the bottom of the Potomac? Was David Petraeus being blackmailed? Are William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright involved? Did Susan Rice fly to Tripoli, have a steamy liaison with a clone of Ayman al-Zawahiri created in a secret underground laboratory, then go to Benghazi where she personally killed Ambassador Chris Stevens with a hat pin? We won’t know unless we spin this out into a multi-week story!

So what’s going on here? I can sum it up in two words: scandal envy. Republicans are indescribably frustrated by the fact that Barack Obama, whom they regard as both illegitimate and corrupt, went through an entire term without a major scandal. They tried with “Fast and Furious,” but that turned out to be small potatoes. They tried with Solyndra, but that didn’t produce the criminality they hoped for either. Obama even managed to dole out three-quarters of a trillion dollars in stimulus money without any graft or double-dealing to be found. Nixon had Watergate, Reagan had Iran-Contra, Clinton had Lewinsky, and Barack Obama has gotten off scott-free. This is making them absolutely livid, and they’re going to keep trying to gin up a scandal, even if there’s no there there. Benghazi may not be an actual scandal, but it’s all they have handy.

Even if the Administration guessed wrong (and I don’t think they did) whether it was film or Fedalleen, what difference does it make? They had to wait for the administrative process to work its way through. They had nothing to gain by lying, before, during or after the event. And of course, Rice had nothing to do with anything. She’s UN, not State or Intelligence or Defense.At the most, there was a screw up in communications, which is par for the course during this kind of action. Read the lead-up to Pearl Harbor. Read the German High Command’s inability to figure out what was really happening on D-Day. You have hundreds of inconsistent and contradictory reports coming in from scores of sources into dozens of listening posts and agencies, all bubbling up through the bureaucracy for evaluation and coordination, each waiting for confirmation, because most initial reports are incomplete or dead wrong. And the whole time you have the security classification system, which determines who can and can’t see this or that message and cable.

This was an incident evolving in real time. Look at events that dragged on for months, and still got FUBAB. Remember WMDs? Yellowcake? Aluminum Tubes? Recordings of eavesdropped Iraqi messages at the General Assembly?

The Monday morning quarterbacks will eventually locate someone who didn’t relay a message, or a delay in transmitting a signal, or a bureaucrat who was out playing golf or flying the redeye home, or someone who went home early and missed the call, or a situation that was not anticipated in the Standing Order Book. Someone may even get dinged for screwing up or failing to follow procedure. But there is no conspiracy here. There is no crime. At most, there might be some incompetence, but it will be minor and on the part of some minor link in the chain.

Nothing will come of this, it is a Republican smokescreen designed to hurt the President before the election, which THEY screwed up and couldn’t put together in a convincing fashion in time for the polling. Now they’re trying to give themselves a little post election (and pre-financial cliff) leverage. You’ll see. Nothing will come from the hearings–if they are fair and public. Nothing, because there’s nothing there. But the conspiracy will linger on Fox…forever. It will be JFK and Dallas all over again.

Remember “Fast and Furious”? Nothing happened. Holder is still there. It turned out to be a Bush Administration program anyway.
Holder is black. Rice is black, Obama’s black. Maybe its just a coincidence. Maybe not. Or maybe Petraeus just couldn’t be reached at his office…