The eleven-hour Benghazi! marathon revealed that the wingnuts have a weird obsession about Sydney Blumenthal:

Time and time again, Republicans returned to Hillary Clinton’s relationship with Blumenthal, who has never been in Libya nor served in Clinton’s Department of State. On numerous times they brought up the emails that he sent her, the influence of his advice, where his missives were passed along and whether his communications were truly unsolicited.

Their justification for their focus on a side character in Clinton’s universe seemed Clinton emailed Blumenthal — a personal friend of the Clintons– more than she did Ambassador Christopher Stevens, one of the four Americans killed in the attack. The name Sidney Blumenthal has become something of a dog whistle in right-wing circles — for Clinton cronyism, rank politicization, and self-dealing — but it remained unclear after hours of testimony how his emails further implicated Clinton in the Benghazi tragedy.

Blumenthal sent HRC lots of witty and snarky emails about stuff going on in politics and international affairs. It appears to be mostly gossip. Blumenthal is a long-time friend of the Clintons going back to their Arkansas days. Clearly, anybody with such a long association with the Clintons must be the boogyman. As near as I can tell, the entire eleven hours was a probe into why HRC got so many emails from Blumenthal and none from the late Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. (Um, because ambassadors don’t contact the State Department via email?)

See also:

On the Frenzy Over Sidney Blumenthal by James Fallows and (from last May) The Fake Clinton Scandals Are Back by Joe Conason.

Charles Pierce explains it all:

Did she hand them their own asses? Of course she did. She was cool and she was poised and, by the end of the day, she was even out-arguing them about the role of the video in the attacks across the Muslim world, which was the ur-point of this fiasco in the first place.

This whole thing started because of a ginned-up controversy about what Susan Rice had said about the attacks on​ Meet The Press in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. (Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio is still howling about this.) Responding to a question from Cummings, HRC actually got to explain that the video at least was partly responsible for the rage that broke out from Indonesia to Tunisia. That, alas, was beside the point. So also was Congressman Adam Schiff’s boot in the ass in which he pretty much demonstrated that Blumenthal’s appearance before this committee—the transcript of which Gowdy refuses to release—​was a fishing expedition after material about the Clintons that could be used for future ratfcking purposes.And not even Hillary Rodham Clinton’s ability to stand up against the gales of innuendo and fakery will make it less so.​

This was a performance piece for the people residing within the conservative media bubble—​who already are hip to the lies of the lamestream media, and who already are too smart to be fooled by the Hildebeast and her alleged facts because Mark Levin has told them that they are too smart to be so fooled, and who watch their favorite TV news stars every night, where there is always Another Question, or Another E-Mail, or, for all I know, Another Witness who saw the ghost of Vince Foster wandering through the Mena Airport with Kathleen Willey’s cat in his mouth. The people out in the world are one problem, but now they’re pretty plainly electing each other to the national legislature. That makes it our problem.