Eeyore is alive and well and working for the Republican Party.
You remember Eeyore, the perpetually gloomy donkey from the Winnie the Pooh stories. Nothing was ever good news for him, from finding his lost tail (“Most likely lose it again anyway”) to someone wishing him good morning (“If it is a good morning, which I doubt.”)
You remember Eeyore, the perpetually gloomy donkey from the Winnie the Pooh stories. Nothing was ever good news for him, from finding his lost tail (“Most likely lose it again anyway”) to someone wishing him good morning (“If it is a good morning, which I doubt.”)
I’m convinced Eeyore is running the right-wing press operation. As blogger Steve Benen pointed out last week, nothing makes these people happy — “An American POW goes free? Complain that he didn’t deserve it. Unemployment rate drops? Complain that the White House has orchestrated a conspiracy to manipulate data. A strike takes out Osama bin Laden? Complain that Bush and Cheney aren’t getting enough credit.”
The latest dark clouds effused by the right-wing gloom machine came in response to the capture of Ahmed Abu Khattala, the accused ringleader of the attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Now, you’d think that catching a murderous terrorist who orchestrated an attack on our people would be something everyone would cheer about. You’d think even the Republicans would be happy, since their current PR strategy has consisted of, to paraphrase Uncle Joe Biden, “a noun, a verb, and Benghazi.”
You’d think that, that is, if you weren’t familiar with the Eeyore Republicans. They’ve really outdone themselves with their creativity in finding something to kvetch about.
One of the most common gripes was that it took too long. After all, some said, Khattala had been giving televised interviews from cafes in Libya, so why wasn’t he caught then?
Some people apparently believe that a special forces operation is as simple as seeing someone on screen, immediately identifying the locale, putting together a team on the fly, entering a turbulent and chaotic country, and bagging the quarry within the 60-minute time frame of an episode of “24.” I may not be a military expert, but unlike some people, I do know that life is not like TV.
Some claimed that the capture was orchestrated to coincide with Hillary Clinton’s book tour. No, really — they’ve actually said this.
“In the midst of Mrs. Clinton’s failed book tour and failed book roll-out,” Rush Limbaugh sarcastically observed, “all of a sudden we capture the militia leader who led the attack. It’s a beautiful thing.”
Fox News host “Kennedy” claimed that she thought “this is convenient for [Clinton ] to shift the talking points from some of the things that she’s been discussing.”
Thankfully, not everyone on Fox was so cynical as to suggest that this was all about Clinton’s book tour. No, to them, Obama put American troops in harm’s way to promote Clinton’s interview on Fox.
“The timing on this stinks,” right-wing radio host Larry O’Connor told the network.
For the very first time, he claimed, Clinton was going to get some tough questions about Benghazi, and the triumph of Khattalla’s capture would distract from those. In other words, we captured the ringleader of the attacks on Benghazi to distract attention from questions about Benghazi.
Meanwhile, other right-wingers were taking up the old familiar cry that sure, we have a terrorist in custody, but big whoop. The real question is, are we being brutal enough to him?
New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte bitterly complained that the administration was “rushing to read [Khattala] his Miranda rights and telling him he has the right to remain silent,” even though regular criminal procedure hasn’t stood in the way of convicting and imprisoning dozens of other terrorist suspects.
John McCain (who was a POW) continued to wage his bitter war of words with none other than John McCain, griping that Khatalla should have been imprisoned in the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay — a facility whose closure he’d called for in 2008.
But, hey, who cares about consistency? Or for that matter, sanity? If there’s one thing the last few years have proven, it’s that accusations of inconsistency or pure silliness have stopped meaning anything to these people. They just don’t care about those things, because the only thing that matters to the right wing is their hate.
They hate President Obama, for a variety of reasons: racism for some, tribalism for others, partisanship gone mad, whatever. Ergo, anything Obama does is wrong, anything that goes wrong anywhere in the world is entirely his fault, and there is no plot too outlandish to be beneath the man who is, in their minds, both a fiendishly cunning supervillain and too dumb to speak without a teleprompter.
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