Benghazi: the price for failure

The price for failing to prevent the first killing of a US ambassador since 1988 is, apparently, a few weeks of administrative leave:

The highest-ranking official caught up in the scandal, Assistant Secretary of State Eric Boswell, has not "resigned" from government service, as officials said last week. He is just switching desks. And the other three are simply on administrative leave and are expected back.

The only person to have suffered an actual career setback was Ambassador Susan Rice, and even now there is diligent re-writing of her failure to be considered for the role of Secretary of State as a sexist and racist conspiracy:

The fact that she [Rice] understood—as do far too many women and women of color—that we are doomed once the stereotype "code words" start flying, is tragic. It's the oldest "old boy" trick in the game. The "boys," e.g., Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham, came at her with code speak: "unqualified," "incompetent," "misleading," and "not prepared." And sadly they enlisted the help of other female senators such as Susan Collins and Kelly Ayotte. The deployment of other women to undercut a powerful woman is something we as women have all experienced, and we grimace each time it occurs.

Yes, clearly Republicans have a real downer on the idea of a woman of colour as Secretary of State. No doubt the surname "Rice" was also suspiciously Asian.

It used to be that senior politicians would take the fall for failures in their department, reasoning that their department's failure was their own. Lord Carrington is a classic example, taking the fall for failures of UK foreign policy that led to the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982. Clearly, "shame" is held to be an antiquated concept.

I realise that I'm banging on about Benghazi quite a bit, but I remain appalled that awful failures in the US military and State Department led to the death of an ambassador, information officer and two extremely ballsy embassy security personnel, where ample time was available to the military to intervene and save lives but someone decided that inaction was better than reaction and left US citizens to die. The attempt post-attack to cover up what happened and blame Sam Bacile's "The Mohammed movie" just made it worse.