Yesterday has to hold the record for the most surreal press conference ever to have been held by any White House press secretary. Ever.

The topic of discussion was memos on the destruction of our consulate in Benghazi that had just been turned over to Judicial Watch based on a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit (I’ve posted on them here | here). From the transcript:

ABC News Jonathan Karl:  Jay, I guess you’re aware that Judicial Watch obtained an email from Ben Rhodes to staff members about the Benghazi attack.

MR. CARNEY:  That’s incorrect.  But go ahead.

Q    Oh, okay.

MR. CARNEY:  The email and the talking points were not about Benghazi, they were about the general situation in the Muslim world where you saw, as you may recall, protests —

Whoa. Not about Benghazi?

The sole reason that Susan Rice was making the rounds of talkshows on September 14 was because of the killing of Americans when the Benghazi consulate was pillaged. Had that not taken place, Rice would not have been on the talkshows and the protest over the ludicrous video in Cairo would have been easily explained.

The talking points prepared for Rice only make sense if it was expected that Benghazi was to be the main item of discussion.  But, ever game, Jay Carney drives on:

KARL   — the thrust of the reason for the email and the prep call was to prepare Susan Rice for those talk show appearances, which, by and large, were about the attack on the Benghazi mission.  And I just wanted to ask you about one portion of it where it says that the point is “to underscore that the protests were rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.”  It just seems that there is a political calculation that was being made in these emails that the political considerations were being made in preparing Susan Rice for those appearances.

MR. CARNEY:  Jim, again, if I may, let me read to you — this is interesting in particular — Fox News Sunday’s promo for that appearance begins, “Anti-U.S. protests are spreading across the Arab world.”  So when we prepare administration officials to appear on television, Sunday shows — when my colleagues prepare me to come out here every day, they prepare me to answer questions that we think you’re going to ask.  And what was happening that week, in addition obviously to the tragic killings of four Americans in Benghazi, was upheaval around the region.  And for that reason, there was a question-and-answer document prepared for Ambassador Rice that would respond to — that were recommended answers and anticipated questions around the upheaval in the Middle East, in the Muslim world, related to the inflammatory video that had caused so many protests around the world.

Really? Let’s go to the documents and see what the promos say.

How about ABC?

NBC?

Carney says specifically that Fox didn’t mention Benghazi… presumably the subtext here is that if the looney rightwingers at Fox didn’t cover the story no one did. What did Fox say in its promo?

See the neat little lie by omission that Carney pulled off there? He implied the sentence was about the Arab world when, in fact, the sentence is about how the attack in Benghazi is causing other attacks.

The facts in this case are obvious. The Obama regime had horribly mismanaged our foreign policy in general and the policy towards the Arab world in particular. Its weakness toward Iran and willingness to destroy a hard fought victory in Iraq and sabotage US interests in Afghanistan were, rightly, perceived as signs of a weak, corrupt, and inept administration. The attack in Benghazi took place in the context of al Qaeda filling the power vacuum created by the killing of Qaddafi, the takeover of Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood, and a failed arms smuggling scheme to support the alleged “moderate” elements rebelling against Assad in Syria. The regime panicked and made up the story about the video causing the attack from whole cloth. Apparently, they made the callous and premeditated calculation that the truth could be suppressed until it no longer mattered and that a compliant American media would not bother digging.

The truth has begun to trickle out. While there is no hope of ever holding these people to account in the way they deserve, which would entail many years in a super-max prison, we can try to hold them politically and economically accountable by ensuring wherever they go for the rest of their lives Benghazi is shadowing them  like Banquo’s ghost.