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GOP View On Benghazi ‘Cartoonish’ Says Former Bush Defense Secretary

Gates, a Republican who was appointed by then-President George W. Bush in 2006 and agreed to stay through more than two years of President Obama's first term, repeatedly declined to criticize the policymakers who devised a response to the September 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, including the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.

"Frankly, had I been in the job at the time, I think my decisions would have been just as theirs were," said Gates. "We don't have a ready force standing by in the Middle East, and so getting somebody there in a timely way would have been very difficult, if not impossible." he explained.

Suggestions that we could have flown a fighter jet over the attackers to "scare them with the noise or something," Gates said, ignored the "number of surface to air missiles that have disappeared from [former Libyan leader] Qaddafi's arsenals."

"I would not have approved sending an aircraft, a single aircraft, over Benghazi under those circumstances," he said. "It's sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces. The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm's way, and there just wasn't time to do that." http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3460_162-57584087/gates-some-benghazi-crit
ics-have-cartoonish-view-of-military-capability/]
Conservative Republican New York Times Columnist David Brooks:

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...my reading of the evidence is that a very terrible event happened at a CIA, basically a CIA facility, they went into intense blame shifting mode, trying to shift responsibility onto the State Department, onto anywhere else, and the State Department pushed back. They said no, it is not our fault. It’s you facility. And so they push back and they say why we are suddenly releasing information that we haven’t been releasing so far. So the CIA was super aggressive, there was some pushback, out of that bureaucratic struggle all the talking points were reduced to mush and then politics was inserted into it. http://egbertowillies.com/2013/05/12/conservative-republican-david-bro
oks-correct-take-on-benghazi-on-meet-the-press-video/]
Good to hear some intelligent voices on the right, but they're whistling in the dark, unfortunately:

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Once again, Republicans have raced off in their own direction, leaving the rest of us wondering what all the fuss is about.

The Benghazi boondoggle has wider implications. The eternal rule of politics is that elections are won and lost in the center ground. It is in the middle that the undecided and uncommitted are to be found. Those who only think about politics every four years are open to persuasion in a way devoted partisans are not. So why, when week after week it has failed to gain traction with Benghazi, is the GOP still cracking the whip at this long-dead nag?

Benghazi is not the only subject that excites the GOP but leaves voters cold. A party set on achieving government looks at what is concerning moderates and formulates policies to meet their needs. Exit polls show 56 percent of “moderates” voted for Obama, which ensured his reelection. This does not mean the GOP must kowtow to focus groups and pollsters, but it does mean being open enough to hear what voters are saying, not putting on headphones and ploughing on regardless with pet obsessions. http://blogs.reuters.com/nicholas-wapshott/2013/05/10/benghazi-and-the
-republican-abandonment-of-the-center/

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Now if I were the Rabid Liberal our righties think, I'd be enjoying the heck out of their further efforts at self-destruction. But I maintain once more, I want a VIABLE two-party system, and this obsession of theirs just puts them further outside the mainstream and makes them an even less viable political party.