Reports that Michael Bay, the Auteur of Awesome, may be tackling a feature film about Benghazi was both welcome, and rather exciting, news.
I have no particular interest in addressing the various controversies surrounding the attacks on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that led to the murder of our ambassador to that nation. It seems clear that the administration initially tried to downplay the idea that this was a terror attack. And they had good reason to, given that Obama had spent the last two years campaigning on the idea that al Qaeda was in retreat and, therefore, not an important issue. "Osama bin Laden is dead and GM is alive," etc. But it's all a moot point now.
What is interesting about this news is that it seems to be a perfect fit for Bay, one of our foremost populist filmmakers. It's a story that hits all the right populist buttons: honorable military/ex-military types fighting to the death to defend an American ambassador from a raging horde of foreign terrorists as the civilian elite completely and utterly botches the response to the attacks and the commander in chief jets off to a lavish fundraiser in Las Vegas. Even if Bay completely avoids all the political insinuations one way or the other—and I imagine he will, as his populism has never struck me as terribly partisan—he can still churn out an incendiary indictment of the Obama administration's handling of the crisis. On film, incompetence and malfeasance are more or less interchangeable.
Consider Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down. That is a movie that I find almost impossible to watch without feeling a rather visceral, palpable sense of anger. But anger at who? The Somalian warlords trying to kill American soldiers who had come to that backwater hellhole to distribute food aid? Sure. But also the bumbling Clinton White House and the callow fools in the United Nations. As our guys are pinned down and taking heavy fire, they're arguing over ... well, what exactly? Nothing important, certainly. Nothing as important as the lives of those men bleeding out in back alleys. Whether they were left to die for political reasons or for reasons of pure incompetence, it doesn't really matter. Not to the masses.
Which is why Bayghazi could be an effective, devastating film without making a single explicitly political argument. And it's one of the reasons there was so much gnashing of teeth in my Twitter timeline last night. The left has gone to great lengths to turn "BENGHAZI" into a punchline, a codeword for unserious fulmination about the "failures" of this administration. But it was a failure, even if it was an accidental one. Indeed, it was a rather remarkably tragic failure. It was a failure that cost us the lives of four Americans, a failure that saw the first murder of an acting U.S. ambassador since 1979, a failure that embarrassed the nation and potentially exposed reams of national secrets to terrorists intent on waging jihad.
And if a big budget reminder of this failure comes out a few months before Hillary "What difference does it make" Clinton faces voters? Well now that will be interesting.