By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, January 08, 2016
For partisan Democrats, when the word “Benghazi” comes
up, the sophisticated thing to do is roll your eyes. If the name Charles Woods
comes up, the normal thing to do is say, “Who?”
So let’s talk about Cindy Sheehan for a moment instead.
Remember her?
For a while, she was the Joan of Arc of the anti-war
Left. The mother of a U.S. Army specialist killed in Iraq, Sheehan held a vigil
outside President George W. Bush’s ranch, demanding to meet with him so she
could denounce the war to his face.
The mainstream media swooned.
Sheehan’s “moral authority,” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd genuflected, was “absolute.”
NBC reporter Carl Quintanilla interviewed historians he
agreed with, and then reported: “Sheehan, say some historians, may be evolving
as an icon in the war’s turning point. . . . For three weeks, she’s dominated
headlines, mobilized protesters, [and made] it safe, her supporters say, to
voice doubts about the war, just as Walter Cronkite did on the evening news in
1968.”
Then–NBC News anchor Brian Williams introduced a profile
of Sheehan by saying, “As the 1960s protest song said, ‘There’s something
happening here.’”
Sheehan’s use-by date was January 20, 2009, President
Obama’s inauguration day. She was — and is — a vocal critic of Obama, too. But
there was no room in the script for that. When she was a thorn in Bush’s side,
she was just a normal American mom speaking truth to power. When she started
criticizing Obama, the same media dismissed her as a crackpot.
This isn’t particularly unusual in American politics.
Activists often pretend to be “normal” people plucked out of obscurity by
events. And sometimes, normal people plucked out of obscurity by events become
activists as a result.
But how the press treats, say, Joe the Plumber or Sandra
Fluke or Valerie Plame often seems to hinge on their political utility, or lack
thereof.
Which brings us back to Charles Woods.
Woods is the father of Tyrone Woods, one of the heroes
killed in the Benghazi attack.
I have never found Benghazi to be as mysterious as some
people think. It was a terror attack on 9/11. The White House was caught off
guard amidst a hotly contested presidential campaign. During that campaign,
Obama had made his “success” in decimating al-Qaeda one of his key talking
points.
As with pretty much every other terror attack before and
after, the Obama administration’s first response was to downplay the terrorism
issue.
And, as with pretty much every other terror attack before
and after, the Obama administration worked diligently to change the subject to
something more politically convenient. We are currently debating Obama’s
gun-control agenda, for instance, rather than a wave of Islamic State and
Islamic State–inspired attacks, because this White House would rather have that
debate than discuss Obama’s claim that ISIS is “contained.”
So, in the wake of the Benghazi attack, the president —
whose oath of office requires him to defend the Constitution — focused the
national discussion on the dangers of free expression. The White House insisted
the attack was a response to a YouTube video mocking Islam that had been posted
more than two months earlier. Obama even stressed the point in a major address
to the United Nations. Cooperative journalists and intellectuals took to the
airwaves and op-ed pages fretting over the limits to the First Amendment.
Hillary Clinton, whose own voracious hunger for the
presidency was at stake as well, fueled the conversation. She vowed to bring
the filmmaker to justice (which, as Reason
magazine’s Matt Welch notes, is not a secretary of state’s job). And that’s
what she told Charles Woods at a memorial service for his dead son.
Woods, a retired lawyer and administrative judge, wrote
in his journal at the time: “I gave Hillary a hug and shook her hand. And she
said we are going to have the film maker arrested who was responsible for the
death of my son.”
In two interviews — one with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos
and another with Daily Sun columnist
Tom McLaughlin — Clinton has said Woods (and Patricia Smith, the mother of Sean
Smith, also killed in the Benghazi attack) is lying.
Woods has gotten some attention, mostly from Fox News and
talk radio. More recently, the Washington
Post’s Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler, took up the issue and essentially
washed his hands of the whole affair, saying he couldn’t determine who was
telling the truth.
Woods’s moral authority isn’t absolute, because no one’s
is. But it soars above the moral authority of so many journalists who dismiss
him.
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