10-26-2012, 06:44 PM
Yet the handling of these attacks by Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush never became the kind of partisan fodder that the loss of four American lives at Benghazi has become, pushed by the Romney/Ryan ticket and unprecedented critical coverage, both of which are politicizing every nuance of the Obama administration’s response.
In contrast with Mitt Romney’s relentless Libya critique, Clinton in 1992, Clinton opponent Bob Dole in 1996, Bush II and Newt Gingrich in 1998, Bush II again in 2000 and Bush II opponent John Kerry in 2004 did not exploit these incidents, while Walter Mondale’s attempt to do so in 1984 got little media support. As forcefully as Romney is attempting to depict the attack as a consequence of Obama’s perceived Middle East “weakness,” over 90 percent of the 538 Americans who died in these seven earlier incidents did so while a Republican was in the White House, and Obama’s tally of four fatalities in overseas incidents is the lowest death toll of any modern American president. Nonetheless, Romney’s drumbeat about the Libya attack, focused on the timetable of administration disclosures about the nature of the assault, has had a greater impact on this presidential campaign than the abject bungling of far more catastrophic events that preceded it.
http://www.thenation.com/article/170742/...azi-attack#