Caution, this entire post is full of liberal projection, but the point that really sticks with me is the insistence by Paul Rosenberg that Benghazi is in no way exceptional and that Bush and Reagan both lost more people and suffered more embassy attacks. All the while, he never bothers to mention the very large difference between the attacks under Reagan and Bush…

Wait, let me back up.

Paul Rosenberg has a post up over at Salon where he talks about the difference between Benghazi and #Benghazi.

In the first ten or so paragraphs, as well as the closing, Rosenberg lays out his case for why conservative white males, who I guess are the only people interested in the issue of Benghazi, reject reality and instead embrace myths. To shorten this a bit, his point is that we fear nothing but the lack of status in society, so we create stuff like Benghazi to explain our place in the world. Or some such nonsense

But like I said, that isn’t the point of this post.

This is:

In the real world, the attack on Benghazi in which four Americans were killed was a regrettable tragedy—but just one such example among all too many[emphasis added]. Just one week after the Benghazi attacks, a Pakistani newspaper published a list of 44 attacks on US embassies since 1958 (13 of them under George W. Bush), and MSNBC’s Timothy Noah topped that recently, writing:

Deadly violence against U.S. diplomats, sadly, is a frequent occurrence. The State Department counts 86 “significant attacks” against diplomatic outposts just in 2012, the year of the Benghazi attack. The death toll from these 2012 attacks was not four, but 24. And this is not a new problem. Since 1970, there have been 521 attacks on U.S. diplomatic targets, killing 500 people. The deadliest of these was not Benghazi but a truck bomb explosion in Nairobi, Kenya that killed 213 people, 12 of them Americans. Since 1977, 66 American diplomats have been killed by terrorists.

See, just another attack. Heck, Bushitler had 13 and you reality rejecting, knuckle dragging, white male, conservatives didn’t make a peep.

In case you think that I was being funny there…

Needless to say, no other attack on U.S. diplomats has gotten anywhere near the prolonged attention focused on #Benghazi. Certainly not the 1983 Beirut Embassy bombing, in which 63 people were killed, including 17 Americans, on Ronald Reagan’s watch—not to be confused with the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, six months later, in which 241 American servicemen were killed, along with 58 French servicemen, six civilians and two suicide bombers.Ronald Reagan is a beloved, god-like figure on the right, who can Do No Wrong. Barack Obama is the exact opposite. By the dictates ofmythos, investigations are arranged accordingly—the number of casualties is not even an afterthought. Facts simply do not matter in the framework of mythos and #Benghazi.

As you can see, it appears, as Rosenberg has framed it, that the fact are on his side and Benghazi really is just a bunch of conservative white males still pissed a black man is President.

But wait…

In those 13 attacks during the Bush Administration, there were precisely 2 U.S. deaths.

Oh, and Reagan definitely took heat, not to mention full responsibility, for the bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut. Liberal media hero Helen Thomas, who had to be pried from her WH reporters chair decades later when her anti-semitism started hurting the Democratic party, gleefully wrote about Reagan’s failure at the time.

The other major difference between Benghazi and the events Rosenberg attempts to use to deflect from and normalize Benghazi, and I hope I don’t understate this….

THEY DIDN’T LOSE AN AMBASSADOR NITWIT!!!

I know this is a point that the left would rather not focus on, but we had an Ambassador murdered by terrorists on September 11, 2012. The Obama Administration responded to this attack and the loss of our Ambassador’s life with what they hoped would extinguish it as a political issue going into the final stretch of the 2012 Presidential election.

They blamed it on a video when they knew it was a terrorist attack. The Administration sent Susan Rice out to lie to the American public on every Sunday News show.

This happened. It is not a figment of the collective imagination of conservative white males upset that the President is black.

In fact, had Paul Rosenberg even bothered to use the Google machine on the series on interwebs at his avail, he could have seen this post on the liberally aligned Talking Points Memo from September 12 2012 which details that only 7 ambassadors have ever been killed in the line of duty before Ambassador Chris Stevens was murdered.

According to the State Department Office of the Historian, a total of seven U.S. ambassadors have been killed in the line of duty — five of which have been killed by terrorist attacks, while two perished in plane crashes.

Oh, and none of those 7 were killed during the administrations of either George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan.

Of course there are plenty of other items within this mind-numbingly ridiculous piece of revisionist history that others in the blogospere may want to pick apart, but for me, this is enough to show that Paul Rosenberg is not just wrong and deceptive, but also lazy.

If you want to opine about mythos and logos and the left having a legitimate claim to “reality-based community”, I’d suggest not having the crux of your argument be a counterfactual strawman argument.