The GOP’s Benghazi Obsession Explained!

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Benghazi!, the long-running off-off-Broadway musical extravaganza, is still packing them in. Ed Kilgore points today to a brief review of the current state of play from NPR’s Ari Shapiro, who makes an interesting point at the end:

Benghazi has become a sort of catchword. To Republicans, it symbolizes everything bad about the Obama administration. It’s not the first word to fill that role. At the start of the president’s first term, it was Obamacare. Later, Solyndra.

….Data from the Pew Research Center suggest not every voter is following this story equally. In November, Pew found that Republicans were twice as likely to follow Benghazi closely as Democrats or independents.

That could be because conservative media hammered the story nonstop. But the discrepancy suggests that this rallying cry could be effective at ginning up the base without driving away people on the other side, who may not be paying attention.

OK, I guess that’s obvious. It’s obvious after someone points it out, anyway: If you’re going to make fundraising hay out of a pseudo-scandal, it’s actually better if you focus on something that the rest of the world thinks is too ridiculous to bother following. Not only does this help with the fundraising pitch—the liberal media is part of the cover-up!—but you don’t lose independent votes since non-wingnuts have simply tuned the whole thing out. This helps solve a mystery: why do congressional Republicans spend so much time obsessed with such palpable nonsense. Aren’t they embarrassed? Answer: Maybe,1 but it’s actually safer not to stray outside the fever swamp and take the risk of independents realizing what you’re spending your time on.

1Then again, maybe not.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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