Benghazi: The Past is prologue

An old item takes on new significance:

The Politics of Incompetence

On December 26, two days after Nigerian Omar Abdulmutallab allegedly attempted to use underwear packed with plastic explosives to blow up the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight he was on, and as it became clear internally that the Administration had suffered perhaps its most embarrassing failure in the area of national security, senior Obama White House aides, including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod and new White House counsel Robert Bauer, ordered staff to begin researching similar breakdowns -- if any -- from the Bush Administration.

"The idea was that we'd show that the Bush Administration had had far worse missteps than we ever could," says a staffer in the counsel's office. "We were told that classified material involving anything related to al Qaeda operating in Yemen or Nigeria was fair game and that we'd declassify it if necessary."

That last statement is astounding: "We were told that classified material involving anything related to al Qaeda operating in Yemen or Nigeria was fair game and that we'd declassify it if necessary."

We see here the same game plan as the Benghazi cover-up. The White House-- staffed to the gills with veterans of Obama's 2008 campaign-- went into attack mode when they faced a potentially embarrassing event. Winning the news cycle was their paramount concern; telling truth to the nation was a decidedly secondary consideration.

When we look at Benghazi, the crotch bomber, and the Boston Marathon bombing, another pattern becomes clear. The White House and other senior officials immediately denied that the event had any connection to terrorist groups. Those denials were later shown to be mistaken.