What is the number?

[Angrboda]

A more fitting comparison is between the investigation into Benghazi and that into the events of January 6. A recent opinion article explored that.

The differing responses to the two tragedies show the rank hypocrisy in the Republican Party and the sickness that has taken hold of it.

Lawmakers launched eight congressional investigations of Benghazi over four years, culminating in a two-year, $7 million select-committee extravaganza led by Gowdy (R-S.C.), now out of Congress. Theirs was an unrelenting (and unsuccessful) campaign to prove a preconceived premise that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had arranged for the U.S. military to “stand down” instead of coming to the aid of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and the other three victims.

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They never showed that Clinton had anything to do with a military response, that there was a “stand down” order, that the military could have done anything in time to stop the tragic outcome or that politics influenced the Obama administration’s actions.

By contrast, we know beyond all doubt that Trump on Jan. 6 refused to stop his own supporters’ bloody rampage — one he incited. Yet GOP lawmakers, after reacting in initial horror to Trump’s actions, now defend them absolutely and punish heretical Republicans who refuse to join the whitewash.

The hypocrisy doesn’t end there. The No. 1 conclusion of Gowdy’s Benghazi report: “The First Victim of War is Truth.” Investigators were outraged the Obama administration initially said the Benghazi attack began as a protest, which turned out to be false. “The truth is always important. It is especially so during times when we as a nation must face a crisis — and mourn one — together and to learn from it,” Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Mike Pompeo (Kan.), later Trump’s secretary of state, wrote in an addendum. “Instead of sharing that truth, the administration concealed it. And in doing so it misled the American people for political gain.”

(Washington Post)