re: #59 wrenchwench

So Shirley Sherrod was right after all.

So Van Jones was right after all.

So Eric Holder was right after all.

So Valerie Jarrett was right after all.

So Barack Obama was right after all.

How many verses does this song have?

What’s weird is that it was obvious at the time they were right. That video prompted spontaneous and often violent protests in something like 50 cities throughout Africa, Europe, the Middle East and South East Asia. At least 19 people died in Pakistan alone due to rioting in response to The Innocents of Muslims video.

It was patently obvious at the time that the video had caused furor throughout the Islamic world. The widespread right wing pretense that the Benghazi attack, which happened at the exact same time, could not also have been in response to that video is a testament to deliberate, ideologically based ignorance on an absolutely massive scale.

Which is also weird, because it’s entirely consistent with the conservative American islamophobic outlook to readily blame muslims for overreacting to perceived slights against their religion and Muhammed in particular. Normally conservative Republicans would be more than happy to say Muslims by and large are thin skinned and prone to take any insult as an excuse to riot or engage in violent jihad. They’d even be correct to a point, this problem (I think it’s a problem) does exist within the larger Islamic world, American style freedom of speech and expression is neither upheld as a principle of democracy nor is it tolerated. It’s not that people in those countries don’t understand it, it’s that by and large they just aren’t really down with it, at all.

But the conservative Republicans here decided to be in denial of all that obviousness because A.) it was at least in part what the Obama administration had said was the cause of the event (even though he’d labeled it terrorism,) and B.) that story was basically at odds with attacking the Obama administration for something it should have seen coming. Since the video’s release, from an American resident no less, was an unforeseeable act blaming Obama for not predicting it wasn’t plausible, so they reinvented the entire attack so that the video could not possible have been a proximate factor. In this new view the Benghazi attack was something that Obama caused through his intrinsic weakness and perception of the region through rose colored glasses, completely divorced from the video that sparked it.