The road from Benghazi lined with bad intentions

When Americans are killed in a terror attack, there’s a natural, righteous need to find out what went wrong. And the trick is to do it in a way that doesn’t debase the human loss with a nasty political scrum.

For the right way, you can look at the 9/11 commission.

For the wrong way, there’s the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

And then there’s the ad a group called Stop Hillary PAC aired during the Democratic debate last week. It featured photos of the four men who died in the attack on the U.S. compound, seemingly speaking from the grave to Clinton.

The relatives were, of course, horrified. The mother of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens told The Washington Post she would sue the makers if she could.

But she can’t. The only thing that controls people like Stop Hillary PAC is a national consensus that there are places you just don’t go when it comes to political exploitation of American deaths. We’ve been through a lot of that lately, including the Jeb Bush-Donald Trump argument about George W. and 9/11. “Next week Mr. Trump is probably going to say that FDR was around when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor,” Jeb blurted out in a TV interview.

People, do you remember when you thought Jeb Bush was the adult in the Republican room? Now he’s nothing more than political toast and Trump could actually get the Republican nomination. Or Ted Cruz.

The first step on the road to national sanity is to acknowledge that our leaders all want to keep the people safe. But good intentions don’t always lead to safe results, and the second step is to figure out what went wrong in a calm and evenhanded manner. The Benghazi committee went into its investigation with a promise to be fair.

“The murder of four fellow Americans and an attack on a facility that is emblematic of our country should transcend politics,” said the committee chair, Trey Gowdy.

That was before the House majority leader bragged how well the committee had done in bringing down Clinton’s poll numbers. Before Gowdy criticized Clinton for forwarding an email containing the name of a CIA source to her aide, and in the process made the name public himself.

Also before the world learned that the Stop Hillary PAC has been a campaign contributor to Gowdy.

How do you know if politicians are transcending their parties when they’re investigating these sensitive matters? Well, do they seem interested in important but unsexy issues like the State Department security chain of command? Or are they claiming that the terrible error which was Benghazi is like the criminal conspiracy which was Watergate.

Looking at you, Rep. Mike (“worse than Watergate”) Pompeo.

While we’re reclaiming the even course when it comes to preventing terror attacks, another good step might be for Jeb Bush to say that Hillary Clinton doesn’t deserve to be pilloried any more than his brother. This came up during a Jake Tapper interview on CNN, and Bush’s response was: “Well, I — it’s — the question on then Benghazi, which is — hopefully we’ll now finally get, get the truth to, is, was that — was the place secure? They had a responsibility, the Department of State, to have proper security.”

Toasttoasttoasttoasttoast.