So remember how the question of whether Barack Obama said the right words at the right time about the Benghazi attack was the most important thing happening in the world and a burgeoning scandal that we absolutely had to get to the bottom of lest Americans' faith in our democratic system be destroyed? Eh, not so much:
In the post-debate spin room Tuesday night, Romney campaign aides and surrogates tried to make up for a botched exchange on the Libya attacks by promising to aggressively prosecute President Obama's handling of the situation - but 36 hours later, no such prosecution has materialized.
Instead, Mitt Romney spent the next day on the stump criticizing the president for his lack of a second-term agenda, and conspicuously avoiding the Libya issue.
Asked why the issue was absent from Romney's public remarks, senior adviser Kevin Madden told BuzzFeed the campaign decided to focus their post-debate Virginia swing on exposing Obama's lack of specific proposals, and challenge him on gas prices and the economy.
What lesson can we take from this? Well, 95 percent of what we talk about during campaigns is irrelevant bullshit, driven only by a decision by one side or the other that there's something they can make some momentary hay out of. Now that Romney has decided to drop it, reporters will not bother discussing Libya any longer. If it really was of surpassing importance, you'd think that they'd make an independent decision to continue reporting on it. But they never thought it was important (not the attack itself, just the question of whether someone could be pilloried for it and whether Barack Obama himself could be blamed). So they'll just move on, and whatever idiocy pops up tomorrow, they'll treat it as though it were truly vital to coming to a full understanding of which of these two men should be president for the next four years. Since there are two and a half weeks left, I predict there will be three more stupid controversies, at least one of which will be a strong contender for the stupidest controversy of the entire campaign.
