If your political opponents based an electoral campaign on a certain slogan and bombed, how much sense does it make to base your electoral campaign on the exact same slogan?
The moment when Kerry’s presidential campaign became all about the “Bush lied” slogan, I knew the campaign was hopelessly lost. And I was right. The absolute majority of voters does not care about lies enough to reject a candidate on this basis. People over the age of six are not all that traumatized by lying. This might be a sad reality but it’s reality.
So can anybody tell me why the Republicans are framing their 2016 presidential campaign in terms of “She lied about Benghazi“?
We all know that Americans don’t care about foreign affairs. Yes, it’s sad, horrible, I’m as appalled as you are. But the fact remains: they don’t think other countries really exist and don’t care two straws what happens in all those places with weird names. How many people do you know who can find Benghazi on a map or even know in which direction to look? Go ask the guy at the gas station or the woman at the convenience store and observe the reaction. My students couldn’t even name the countries the US borders. Neither could my friend’s students at an East Coast college.
Besides, there has been a domestic act of terror since Benghazi. People have short attention spans. You can’t expect them to remember the terror act that happened before the most recent terror act. Especially when the most recent one took place in a city with a clear and comforting name of Boston.
Anybody who believes that a lie about anything, let alone Benghazi, will make any impression on anybody during this election cycle is out of touch with reality.
And the entire country just died of boredom. Rand Paul would attract more attention if he just kept yakking about fetuses.


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