You know what republicans screamed after they failed to adequately fund embassy security and an Al Qaeda affiliate killed four people in Libya?
BENGHAZI! BENGHAZI!
BENGHAZI! BENGHAZI!
Trump screamed “Benghazi" at every single campaign event. The only word he said more times was “emails". The GOP repeated it over and over at rallies, campaign events, and on social media. They dragged one of the victims' mother in front of an endless parade of cameras and featured her at their convention.
You may be the most politically disengaged person in America—but you’ve heard of Benghazi.
Americans were killed. Hillary Clinton.
That is what my child's school-age friends knew about Benghazi when I asked them. They didn't know it was a city in Libya. They didn’t know it was the terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia. They weren’t clear on what was attacked exactly. Nope. They just knew it had something to do with Americans being killed and Hillary.
The conservative rag National Review first used the term “Benghazi" in an article entitled “Battle of Benghazi". Fox News and other media outlets repeated that phrase like a rallying cry with the sole purpose of tying it around the neck of the presidential candidate they didn’t like. When it didn’t work on Obama, they simply moved to Hillary.
Never mind that it was the GOP who voted to cut embassy security. Never mind the litany of bullet points of facts that liberals like to retort. The GOP understands simple—that’s the core of their base, after all. There’s Benghazi—and all you need to know is death and somehow it was Hillary’s fault.
So I ask you, have you heard of Yakla?
Right now, we have a man-child in office who actually was reckless with American service members’ lives and responsible for a SEAL’s death. Trump was obviously being pushed to do a big raid to help his sagging poll numbers. Obama's raid to get OBL was so successful that not even the GOP could attack him for it. (They just tried to say later it didn’t matter.)
So Trump was told of a raid that Obama had passed on. Our new president discussed doing this during dinner with his two moronic, inexperienced advisors: Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner.
US military officials said that Trump approved his first covert counterterrorism operation without sufficient intelligence, with no ground support or with completely inadequate backup preparations.
The raid occurred after 5pm, which was too late for Trump. He refused to go to the Situation Room. Maybe he wanted to watch Finding Nemo so he could follow the sequel he’d watch a few days later. Who knows.
What I do know is that it was a massacre. I use the term "massacre" because the entire village was practically wiped out.
The name of the village in the Yemen raid is was Yakla.
The facts of the deadly botched Yakla raid entailed the following:
- 57 people, including nine children under the age of 13 were killed and five were wounded
- Death of Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer William Owens
- Destruction of a $70 million Osprey aircraft
- Failure to capture the Al Qaeda leader, which was the mission of the raid
Spicer had the unmitigated gall to call this mission a “successful operation by all standards". So successful that the White House has completely shut up about it. Soon afterwards, Trump made that white nationalist idiot Steve Bannon a permanent member of the National Security Council while ousting intelligence and military experts. WTF?
You know who else is silent about it? The same GOP reps in the House and Senate that had countless hearings on Benghazi and gave faux tears and empty platitudes about the lives lost. They swore to get to the bottom of Benghazi, and when there wasn’t anything there they still screamed about it.
The botched Yakla raid had death for no purpose whatsoever except as a potential boast to presidential ego. The big difference is that liberals decided to let President LittleHands off the hook.
If a Democrat authorized something like this with such shoddy prep, refused to be in the Situation Room, and announced to everyone that he or she was going to watch a cartoon afterwards—I don’t think we’d hear the end of it.
As Democrats, we don’t have to engage in phony, sanctimonious platitudes about the value of American life or engage in the wild-eyed conspiracy theories that the knuckledraggers of the GOP did for the Benghazi tragedy.
But dammit, we could AT LEAST bother to bring it up. Here we are less than one month later and already, it’s pretty-much forgotten.
You had better believe if this was under Hillary, “Yakla" would be in our lexicon as much as "Benghazi". But then again, if this were Hillary, this disaster wouldn’t have happened.