CPAC Features Right-Wing Effort To Push Benghazi Narratives Into Media

The right-wing obsession with Benghazi took center stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) as two prominent speakers, John Bolton and Sen. Mitch McConnell, focused on the attacks in an attempt to drive more media coverage of their manufactured scandal. 

The first day of the American Conservative Union's annual convention featured speeches from prominent conservatives. Within two hours of CPAC's opening remarks, two of those speakers used their time to invoke the September 11, 2011 attacks on a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, promising to continue using the tragedy as a political attack. Former U.N. ambassador and Fox News contributor John Bolton called Benghazi the “paradigm of the Obama doctrine failure,” even saying, “Under Barack Obama, you can murder his personal representative and get away scott-free.”

He then turned his remarks into an attack on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, pledging to tell Clinton, “We know what difference it makes, even if you don't.” Earlier, McConnell attacked media coverage of the Benghazi tragedy, suggesting that the media were “trying to fix Benghazi for Hillary [Clinton]” by not repeating right-wing myths.

Benghazi's prominent placement at CPAC is hardly surprising, considering the effort on the part of the right-wing media to maintain focus on their distorted version of the tragedy to attack President Obama and Clinton.