Barry Rubin writes convincingly – and very depressingly – about the pathetic Benghazi cover-up (see our post immediately below, Covering up The Big Secret):

It was well-known that in 2011 the United States was facilitating the weapons supply to Syrian rebels. The weapons were paid for by Qatar and Saudi Arabia and delivered through Turkey.

We have known for more than a year of this traffic. There were two big UN Reports on this traffic.( By the way this meant that the United States was arming Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist groups.)

What wasn’t known was a simple detail: the United States was also collecting and shipping the weapons.

That’s it! This is what was being concealed. After all, it was openly known previously that the Libyan rebels against Qadhafi were armed by the United States.

The whole mess was unnecessary!

If it was known that the CIA guys in Turkey weren’t just watching the weapons supply but delivering it, to quote Clinton, what difference would it make?

Would Congress have stopped the weapons’ traffic? No, they wouldn’t even do anything about the arms to Mexican drug gangs that killed Americans.

Would Americans rise in revolt? No.

Would it have cost one percent of the votes in the election? No.

Sure, some bloggers would have talked about parallels to Iran-Contra and a handful of members of Congress would have complained but the massive media machine would have ignored it and the majority of Republicans would have snored.

Did President Obama have to lie in a UN speech saying the ambassador was just there to supervise a hospital and a school? No.

Did a video have to be blamed so as to blame Americans and Islamophobia for the attack? No.

Was the cover-up necessary even to defend the administration’s “perfect record against terrorist attacks on Americans”? No.

The exposé of this arms’ supply channel would have bothered few and changed nothing.

But since we knew already that the administration was helping arm anti-American, antisemitic, anti-Christian, and homophobic, and anti-women Islamist terrorists I don’t think the difference was huge.

Did the cover-up have to lead to the refusal to defend properly American personnel to prevent what they were doing from leaking out? No.

In short this program of lies and deception and cover up wasn’t even necessary. Those Americans may have been rescued and those lies might have been avoided with no harm to the administration.

I think that tells a lot about how the Obama Administration treats and manipulates the American people. And it also tells about its very profound incompetence and ignorance.

While it is a bleak thought that the mass media would have ignored the truth, that only “a handful of members of Congress would have complained”, and “the majority of Republicans would have snored”, we believe Barry Rubin is right.

Roger L. Simon agrees. He comments at PJ Media:

For nearly a year, we have had no answer to why the administration lied about Benghazi — why it told the world, not to mention the parents of our murdered SEALs at the funeral of their sons, that the cause of that fatal conflagration was an anti-Islamic video no one saw, when the various arms of our executive branch (White House, State and intelligence) already knew, or strongly suspected, it was a terror attack orchestrated by al-Qaeda affiliates.

You only have to read the now infamous talking points to know that.

That this lie was deeply immoral is obvious. What still eludes us is the cause of that lie, other than the equally obvious desire to avoid embarrassment weeks before a presidential election.

But what was this embarrassment about? Recent events have supposedly unearthed a tie to secret arms shipments to Syrian rebels, but as the always cogent Barry Rubin points out, anyone paying attention to the story has known this for some time. Rumors of such shipments filled the Internet even before the Benghazi fireworks.

Furthermore, as Rubin also indicates, if that information had been immediately revealed or leaked to the public soon after the event, it would have been met by a national shoulder shrug that was firmly ratified by Obama’s loyal media claque. It wouldn’t have impacted the election much, if at all.

So is there another, more important fact that the Obama regime is covering up? Another fact that makes it so uneasy that it lies, red-faced, to America?

Roger Simon pulls it out into the daylight:

No, something more problematic was involved and I suspect I know what it was.

No one wanted to admit — or probably face for themselves — the extent to which the president, and therefore his administration, the State Department, the CIA and even the military, was in bed with Islamists.

And still is. And more and more “Islamists” are creeping into that rank and fetid bed.

That the Benghazi consulate (or whatever it was) was guarded by al-Qaeda types who surely either turned on the people they were supposed to be defending that night, or simply gave safe passage to the enemy, is only tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Like many icebergs this one has different sections and ridges. An important one was that the death of bin Laden meant the death or diminution of al-Qaeda, as Obama continually bragged during the election campaign.

Nothing could be more absurd, if you think about it, and not just because al-Qaeda is once more at the top of the news, closing down dozens of embassies before a shot is fired, but because bin Laden was just one (okay, dramatic) ripple in the Islamist story.

And he quotes the cry of “the Arab street”: “Obama, Obama, we are all Osama!”

… Obama — and therefore the administration, State Department, intelligence and military — threw in to a greater or lesser extent with the Brotherhood and their Islamist colleagues. They did this despite the Brotherhood’s obvious extreme misogyny and homophobia, which, under normal circumstances, we would assume to be anathema to so-called “progressives.”

Leaving aside that mind-boggling inconsistency, Islamists also see democracy, when they decide to engage in it, as a temporary tool for jihadist ends. (Obama’s putative buddy Turkey’s Erdogan famously said, “democracy is like a train. You take it where you have to go, and then you get off.”)

Lately, Obama has incurred the ire — with some justification, I think — of new Egyptian military strongman al-Sisi  for going against the wishes of the Egyptian people in favor of a kind of desperate nostalgia for Morsi and the Brotherhood. (Forget the rapes and the rest of it.)

So what accounts for Obama’s weird attraction for this “Muslim revivalism,” despite all its Medieval tenets and near-psychotic behaviors? …

Like so many schooled in post-modernism and cultural relativism, he has an immediate and intense enmity for anything that smacks of imperialism — and an equally intense desire to be seen as supportive of (although certainly not to live like) the downtrodden of the Earth.

Because it makes them feel good. It is the moral hubris of the Left. It is the moral narcissism of the Left intelligentsia. 

Which leads us back to Benghazi. You don’t have to be Muslim to love the Muslim Brotherhood or even, consciously or unconsciously, sympathize with the goals, if not the actions, of al-Qaeda. You just have to have been imbued with a blind hatred of imperialism. That’s all you need.

Yes – but we would have written it as “imperialism”.

What this myopia leads to, however, is consorting with people with no values at all. You get in bed with the worst of the worst. …

What the administration doesn’t want, of all things, is for these dots to be connected via Benghazi.

No wonder the culprits have not been arrested. They might talk!

The one thing the disgraceful story reveals that is not depressing, that could be taken as a sign for optimism, is this:

For Obama and his minions to go to such lengths to cover up up their cultivation of the intensely evil Muslim Brotherhood, because their Leftism trumps everything, they must – as both these commenters indicate – be very deeply ashamed.

In their shame lies freedom’s hope.