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" Welcome back to our weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue, which, as you know, is what Beethoven would have come up with had he composed the Gastoral. We begin this week&amp;#039;s tour of the Great Vapid Plains with a survey of the silliest coverage of the ongoing Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI! mummery, which dominated the weekend&amp;#039;s proceedings, and which shows every sign of being a continuing summer miniseries starring Darrell Issa as the Concerned Suburban Dad and Jim Inhofe as the wacky neighbor who dresses up like a fencepost for church on Sunday. Pride of place here goes to the Dancin&amp;#039; Master, who labored long and hard to produce a really terrible historical parallel. GREGORY: You know, Katty Kay, a historical precedent I think is interesting, and I have been looking at it this week and that&amp;#039;s the Beirut bombing of 1983 when our servicemen were killed respectively on a landing strip there, a deadly video. There were recriminations politically, the president taking responsibility. I was looking at the time. Sam Gibbons of Florida saying I&amp;#039;ve only got three words, Lebanon, Reagan&amp;#039;s, Vietnam. Senator Fritz Hollings saying that, the deployment of American troops in this type of situation borders on the criminal. All they are doing is sitting there, hunkered down at the end of a runway, waiting to be killed and on and on he goes. A tragedy that became a political issue here in Benghazi, it somehow becomes a scandal. What is the difference between tragedy and actual scandal? Even divorcing this from its immediate historical context \u2014 which, we must remind the younger folks, included the administration&amp;#039;s eventually shipping arms to Iran, which helped sponsor the bombing in question \u2014 the comparison doesn&amp;#039;t make sense. There was a foreign policy debacle. Americans died. Ronald Reagan mumbled some words and then appointed a fact-finding commission, the recommendations of which were adopted without much argument. (The members of the State Department&amp;#039;s Accountability Review Board in this case should be so lucky; Issa now wants to depose them.) Then, not long afterwards, Reagan invaded Grenada and everybody forgot about Beirut. Some rough talk from Sam Gibbons and Fritz Hollings doesn&amp;#039;t measure up to what looks to be a summer&amp;#039;s worth of hearings and televised grandstanding. Over on The Clinton Guy Who Was Shocked By Blowjobs, the ever-reclusive John McCain was pried out of his desert lair and encouraged to suggest that what this situation really needs is, well, him. And there are so many questions that are unanswered... We need a select committee. I think this is a serious issue. I will even give the president the benefit of the doubt on some of these things. We need a select committee. And, I&amp;#039;m sure, if you ply him with soft words and soothing music, the senator could be encouraged to serve on said special committee, which would make it a very special committee indeed. Meanwhile, former Grand Armee embed Bob Schieffer invited struggling rookie senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire into the studio, probably to rescue her from the hordes of bereaved parents who have harshed the senator&amp;#039;s mellow pretty badly since she took a dive on the gun-control compromise. Ayotte, who&amp;#039;s been playing the role of Hilary Swank in The Next Karate Kid to that pair of genius sensei, McCain and Lindsey Graham, also was quite upset that someone might use The Sunday Showz to hurl bullshit into the public mind. Yes, I believe that the real question is were they manipulated in terms of, in the middle of an election to not tell, really the full story, give the picture to the American people, and I think that&amp;#039;s a serious question.  Here is where we stop, as always, and ask the eternal question \u2014 did these people really think Willard Romney could win? The American People weighed in on this rather decisively. Is the question whether or not the decision they made would have been different had they known that there was a raging pissing match between State and CIA that resulted in editing \u2014 12 TIMES! \u2014 of some TV talking points? Because, if that&amp;#039;s the question, I&amp;#039;m fairly sure I know the answer. Call on me! Call on me! Oh, but they have their teeth in this one. That&amp;#039;s for sure. The way you know this is that Schieffer brought out the CBS house conspiracy maven, Sharyl (Fast And Furious, Vaccines Cause Autism, Watch The Skies!) Atkisson to talk about her latest suspicions. Well, I am still learning new things, including this past week we learned some new things about the way General Petraeus felt as head of the CIA when those talking points went through those huge revisions. We saw emails that seemed to express deep disappointment on his part if not aggravation that so much material had been taken out. I wonder if he has more to say if someone were able to get him to talk. I also wonder if a pattern is emerging now that we&amp;#039;ve seen all mention of terrorism, Islamic extremist, al Qaeda, al\u2014 I&amp;#039;m sorry \u2014 al Sharia, removed from the talking points. Additionally, there was no convening of the counterterrorism security group by the White House that night, which is described to me as required by presidential directive . Is there a pattern of someone wanting to avoid the terrorism narrative in exchange for, basically, the YouTube spontaneous demonstration narrative? Maybe we should waterboard Petraeus? Maybe we should tie him to a chair and have Darrell Issa talk to him for an hour. Is there a pattern of...someone? HUGE revisions! The truth is...out there. Of course, the other proposed solutions aren&amp;#039;t much better. David Brooks went on with the Dancin&amp;#039; Master and seemed to be trying to get poor David Gergen, the Minnie Minoso of political advisers, another job in another White House. So what the president needs I think is a group of people put out there who are the clearly above politics, who are senior older people; show that a significant part of this administration and the core of this administration is not hyper-political and that has been a problem for the administration I think since the get-go.  If only this administration, from the get-go, hadn&amp;#039;t been so &amp;quot;hyper-political&amp;quot; as to alienate those reasonable Republicans, who just want a share in the governance of the country. If only it had &amp;quot;reached across the aisle,&amp;quot; as it were, maybe had a beer with Darrell Issa, who likely would have tennis-shoe&amp;#039;d the check. It&amp;#039;s gonna be a very looonnnnnnggg summer. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a18462/gobshites-weigh-in-on-benghazi-hearings-051313/>