Where's the Beef

Making accusations is easy, proving that something illegal or even wrong was done is much harder.

Take an event like the tragedy in Benghazi that admittedly is ultimately the responsibility of the leadership and accuse them of being incompetent, and then accuse them of covering something up.

The question that should be asked is knowing what was the situation before the event were actions not taken that should have been.  This does not mean action that could have been taken, since there are obvious restrictions and uncertainties in balancing limited resources across multiple risk areas.  It is also wrong to think that because something happened in Benghazi that we should have know something was going to happen.

Congress doesn't provide any executive agency with an unlimited budget and the security of our embassies is mostly provided by the host nations.  After all the hearings and testimony, the various committees run by partisan opponents of Ms. Clinton have really uncovered nothing of significance.  Hopefully some new risk calculations might be adopted to help deploy resources to avoid future tragedies but the State Department probably was doing that anyways.

The focus has therefore shifted to entirely different issues related to what Ms. Clinton said or didn't say to the families of the victims and by pure happenstance the fact that she used her own e-mail server.

Its very unlikely that anything was said to the families related to the reasons or causes of the events in Benghazi because in all honesty that wouldn't be protocol.  Perhaps in response to a question there was some vague response such as "maybe" or "we don't know"  but clearly what happens in those unfortunate scenarios is an attempt to comfort the families.

Even stranger is the dispute over the e-mail server.  Whatever server was used, it would be the actual e-mails sent that matter not the server used, unless, unrelated to Benghazi it resulted in a breech of security.  No such breech seems to have occurred and while the FBI director threw the committee a bone by saying the behavior was reckless, in all honesty our Government e-mail systems aren't really that secure in the first place.

Now we get to the Clinton foundation and whether it was a means of funneling funds for access.  Now lets be clear, the foundation is well documented as being a valid charitable organization that provides some wonderful services.  So the accusation is along the lines of provide money to reduce AIDs and the secretary will meet with you.  The money hasn't been diverted for political purposes and in general the number of meeting was really insignificant, despite the misleading AP statistic. There is no smoking gun since even in the cherry picked AP sample, half the meetings were with non donors.  If donors and non-donors had equal access, there is no favoritism.  It should be noted that the people with significant funds probably donate to many such foundations and since it has come out that even the current Republican candidate donated, it is hardly an issue.

What might be incriminating and which has not been demonstrated at all is someone who requested a meeting who was told the price of admission was a donation.

Now, despite the fact that there is no documented wrong doing we are faced with the current Fox news culture where accusations are made purely on speculation.  If someone can imagine a possible scenario that looks bad they are free to promote it.  If they don't have any real evidence its because they are experts at covering it up.   Millions of dollars later and hundreds if not dozens of witnesses later, still no real evidence but dig more and maybe it can be found.

Its pretty absurd really.  The issue is that we haven't as a society really adjusted to this.  So where so many accusations are made, people tend to think that with so much smoke there must be some fire.  Of course the smoke is created by the smoke bombs being flung all over the place but well there is a lot of smoke.

There is so much that this really only skims the surface of the accusations.  However, we need to ask the simple question after all the years of public service and constant attacks and examinations,

WHERE"S THE BEEF?