BENGHAZI!!1!11!!!: A slight return

Rather impressive, the sheer amount of bullshit that Fox manages to pack into Sunday afternoon's top story. Needless to say, it had professional help:

Ric Grenell, the Trump administration's special presidential envoy for special missions, slammed Obama and Biden-era diplomat Susan Rice for the Democratic Party's years of foreign policies that he said landed the U.S. in two different wars under the Biden administration alone.  

"Your guy couldn’t even talk to Putin. For 3.5 years! Your policies helped usher in a war in Ukraine, Gaza…and Rwanda if you remember," Grenell posted to X on Saturday afternoon.

Fox is putting words into his mouth just a tad bit there, though you'll recognize the party line, even if he stops short of accusing Ukraine of invading Russia. But he's just getting started:

"And then you lied about Libya - it wasn’t caused by a video," he continued, referring to claims in 2012 that an anti-Islam video led to the Benghazi terror attack on U.S. government facilities in the Libyan city. "You made that up…. Donald Trump handed you peace in the Middle East and Europe - you handed us two wars. We see you," he added. 

Grenell was responding to a post from Susan Rice, who served as an Obama administration national security advisor and U.N. ambassador, that claimed conservatives "are up to the same old tired crap" following President Donald Trump's tense meeting with Ukraine President Volodomyr* Zelenskyy on Friday.

Zelenskyy's point on Friday -- at least, the one that seemed to spark young JD Vance's tantrum -- was that what Trump handed over only looked like "peace" if you ignored repeated cease-fire violations ("people have been dying on the contact line"), a failure to exchange prisoners as agreed, and so on. (And let's not get started on "peace in the Middle East.") But Grenell's getting back to a favorite old point in the catalog of right-wing resentment: the Benghazi consulate attack of 2012 and the idea that the craven Democrats -- Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rice and more or less everyone else -- invented the pretext of Muslim rage at a YouTube video to cover up their folly in not averting a terrorist attack.

Bit of a problem here, though: Fox News did as much as anyone to spread the supposed lie. Here's the top story from the morning after the attack (Sept. 12):

As early as the previous evening, Fox had gotten "anti-Islam video" into the No. 2 headline on the page. And you have to admit, the Orientalist vibe -- the irrational East driven to a murderous rage by an obscure social media video -- is the sort of batting-practice fastball that any Fox writer would swing at. Yet Fox has never been able to get the data to line up in its favor. Eighteen months later, after a FOIA barrage from Judicial Watch, Fox was able to find that some White House officials had briefed Rice on Sept. 14 for the upcoming Sunday talk shows, but that's about as smoky as the smoking gun ever got -- and well after Fox started spreading the gospel. Not that anything today is going to stop the Benghazi fable one it's rolling:

The Federalist's Mollie Hemingway had posted to X speculating that Rice and other Democrats may have "personally" advised Zelenskyy on acting "hostile and to try to goad Trump into blowing up" during the meeting, sparking Rice to weigh in.

"You clowns are up to the same old tired crap," Rice posted to X. "When your guy screws up and royally embarrasses himself and the U.S., you try to change the subject and lie about a favorite target to distract and deflect. For the record, I have never met Zelenskyy and never spoken to him. Ever. Or advised him or anybody around him. It’s a shame that you contend that it is in the U.S. national interest to sell out Ukraine and suck up to Putin."

Hemingway shot back, "Thank you for your response. Where would we place this denial, compared to your oft-repeated lie that the Benghazi debacle was due to a YouTube video, and your lie that you ‘knew nothing’ about the unmasking of Trump officials before being forced to admit you did it widely?"

As I've written before (sorry to harp on that, but I have students now who were in kindergarten when this happened), calling the consulate attack a fake scandal isn't the same as calling it a fake disaster. But the persistence of this right-wing bedtime story into the second Trump administration is a reminder of the close links between the Trump cult and its media support system -- even the parts that forget their own role.

* Ahem