The best indicator that the wingnuts are pulling out all the stops on Benghazi is that the corporate-funded glibertarians are getting into the act. Matt Welch:
Yesterday’s dramatic congressional testimony about the deadly Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on U.S. interests in Benghazi, Libya convincingly corroborated what was widely reported within days of the attack: that senior American officials on the ground knew immediately, despite the Obama administration’s storyline to the contrary, that the assault did not arise out of a “spontaneous” demonstration outside the U.S. Consulate in protest of an obscure YouTube trailer of a homemade anti-Islam movie called Innocence of Muslims.
Falsely assessing partial blame for the violence on a piece of artistic expression inflicted damage not just on the California resident who made it—Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is currently serving out a one-year sentence for parole violations committed in the process of producing Innocence—but also on the entire American culture of free speech. In the days and weeks after the attacks, academics and foreign policy thinkers fell over themselves dreaming up new ways to either disproportionately punish Nakoula or scale back the very notion of constitutionally protected expression.
If you want to talk artistic expression, the first sentence of that second paragraph is like a statue sculpted completely out of bullshit. Welch makes it sound like Nakoula’s noble struggle to make the film forced him to violate the clear terms of the parole, which forbade using the Internet and using aliases, and hints that Nakoula is some kind of strugging artist instead of a man convicted of cooking meth and committing bank fraud. Doug Mataconis has a good run-down of the other wingnuts who are getting in on this party, but suffice it to say that the American culture of free speech will survive.
(Thanks to reader J for sending this in.)