“Why didn’t we bomb the shit out of them?” a man asked me. “Why aren’t we bombing the shit out of ‘em? Give me a B-52 and I’ll go over there right now.” It was a chilly night in Texas, but his mind was more than 6,000 miles away, in Libya. He and I and some 30,000 other people had come to AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas—home of the Dallas Cowboys—for the outsized world premiere of 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. The 2012 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi means many things to many people. It is, at its most basic level, an actual human tragedy, one of an uncountable number this country has been party to in the last fifteen years. Lives were lost, and they might have been saved, and it’s hard to say why, or what good it did. It is also a meme, a punchline, and a political cudgel…. Benghazi is less shorthand for a historical episode than a concept, an abstract descriptor of a feeling shared by an uncountable number of people in this country that the nation’s leaders are traitors, by way of incompetence or malice or both.
To anyone who claims that Michael Bay’s just released movie about Benghazi isn’t political, I’d ask one question: How else might you explain 30,000 people showing up to a screening at AT&T Stadium in Dallas, in the heart of arguably the deepest red state in the country? If it’s not political, then why go to such lengths? Why not screen it in a movie theater in New York or Los Angeles? For anyone to claim that 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi isn’t political is as fundamentally dishonest as it is disingenuous.
Once upon a time, the father of the late Ambassador Chris Stevens pleaded and implored that the death of his son not be politicized. Alas, it was never to be; Conservatives would NEVER pass up an opportunity to potentially embarrass The Black Guy in the White House © or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Multiple Congressional inquiries and millions of tax dollars later, nothing has been found that could be used to hold either the President or Sec. Clinton culpable for the deaths of four Americans at our consulate in Benghazi. Republicans who’ve been honest- like Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-IL)- have, albeit usually unwittingly- acknowledged the purpose of the multiple Benghazi hearings and investigations is simple: they’re intended to damage Sec. Clinton’s credibility and electability. If they also embarrass The Black Guy in the White House ©, so much the better.
Despite Mr. Stevens’ plaintive wishes, Republicans are heavily invested using Benghazi as a partisan political tool, and the release of 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi plays directly into that strategy. It’s sad, pathetic, wasteful, and more than a little pointless, but there you have it- Republican self-interest and partisan machinations at their finest worst. Why would a proud Conservative consent to a reasoned, rational discussion when they can stoke the considerable American capacity for outrage and frontier justice?
BENGHAZI!!!!
Tuesday’s carnival laid bare the strange and changing nature of the Benghazi obsession—the odd way it veers from sincere and mournful to maudlin and kitschy, the way it’s been instrumentalized. It was, in some sense, intended to be a memorial. People filtered into the stadium under giant waving flags on the stadium’s external jumbotrons…. Things took a turn for the worse. Chris Cornell of Soundgarden rose to sing a song. Things again took a turn for the worse: He sang another. This one, he said, was “inspired by the people who fell and who stood their ground” in Benghazi. As Cornell sung his Benghazi song, footage from the movie played—jets, wrecked military equipment, handsome men in a foreign land. A Benghazi music video…. [T]he slain ambassador, Chris Stevens, is given pretty short shrift. He comes to Benghazi with a pretty face and high ideals—a “true believer.” He gives the annex a corny pep talk about bringing Democratic values to Libya, while a warrior nods off in the background. He’s a victim and we mourn his passing, sure, but he just doesn’t get it. As proof of his vanity, his consular residence contains a framed picture of himself being interviewed on TV. We see it shortly before he is killed.
The partisan Sturm und Drang surrounding Benghazi has never been about the death of Ambassador Stevens, nor is it about the other three Americans (whom no one seems to care enough about to acknowledge, much less discuss) who perished. Stevens is merely a prop in a passion play whose sole purpose is advancing Conservatives interests while destroying Sec. Clinton’s political future.
That neither the movie nor the fury surrounding Benghazi is about those who were killed is sad and pathetic enough. That most of the same people now expressing considerable righteous outrage about how Sec. Clinton “failed” to adequately protect those killed is distressingly dishonest. Conservatives completely ignore the reality that they were the ones who slashed the budget for security at the consulate. Beyond that, how is it that so many are so thoroughly apoplectic about four dead Americans in Benghazi, yet astonishingly silent about American dead and wounded in Iraq after an illegal and immoral war purchased with lies, deception, and propaganda?
Oh, right; I forgot…the President during the Iraq War was a Republican, and the President and Secretary of State in office at the time of the Benghazi debacle are Demcorats. Not that there’s a double standard or anything…right??
Bay insists—and much of the coverage about the movie accepts—that 13 Hours, which follows a group of military contractors during the attack, is “non-political.” That’s true inasmuch as the movie does not mention Hillary Clinton’s name. In every other way, of course, the claim is horseshit —and not even in the sense that all movies, let alone war movies, are political. As it shows in theaters over the coming months, it will make an indelible mark on the presidential race, and conservatives know it. Donald Trump is renting out a movie theater in Iowa to show it. Last night, when it came time for Ted Cruz deliver his closing statement in the Republican debate, the first words out of his mouth were “Thirteen Hours.”
The Sturm und Drang involving all things Benghazi has nothing to do with what actually happened on that terrible day. It has nothing to do with the four Americans who lost their lives. It has EVERYTHING to do with stoking hatred, prejudice and fear in the easily manipulable, like the 30,000 who eagerly got off on the patriotic porn surrounding the screening of the movie. Ambassador Stevens and the other three Americans killed are at this point merely pawns used by Conservatives to advance their narrative and sow hatred, fear, and divisiveness. It also has nothing to do with fostering a reasoned, rational discussion of what happened in Benghazi…because Conservative demagogues like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz (and they’re hardly alone) know their campaigns would quickly be rendered moribund with rage, prejudice, and cheap, hollow patriotism.
2 1/2 times as many people died from #FlintWaterCrisis as #Benghazi #ArrestGovSnyder #tcot #UniteBlue pic.twitter.com/N3YAUgyKDM
— The Vicious Babushka (@viciousbabushka) January 21, 2016
From a business standpoint, I can understand why 13 Hours was released now. Timing is everything in the movie business, and the studio will undoubtedly make boatloads of money by striking while the iron is hot in the midst of a Presidential campaign. My real quibble with Bay is his claim that 13 Hours isn’t political. He’s surely intelligent enough to recognize the political maelstrom created by his movie, and it’s release was absolutely timed to capitalize on that. Bay’s claim that 13 Hours isn’t political is pure, unadulterated horseshit.
And so we have yet another contribution to the coarsening of our political discourse and the generalized dumbing down of America. Instead of a reasoned, rational, dispassionate discussion of the FACTS, we get yet more fuel for the screaming ninnies who demand justice for those killed in Benghazi even as they ignore the war crimes that brought us the war in Iraq.
That selective outrage makes me embarrassed to be an American.
