Senator Lindsey Graham summarizes the memo, but he relies more on what he knows in his heart about motivation than he does on actual content.

What do you think they were worried about when she went on TV? Tell me about the property damage in Cairo? Explain the loss of the property in Cairo? They were worried about explaining the death of four Americans.

They knew America would be upset by losing the first ambassador in 33 years and other brave Americans. To say that this wasn't trying to shape the Benghazi story is inconsistent with the document itself, flies in the face of the facts, and yet another false, misleading lie.

- Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), May 1, 2014

Bill O'Reilly provides a motive for the conspiracy.

The President and the White House created a political agenda, saying a spontaneous demonstration led to the murders, not a coordinated terror attack. And they did this because the President was running for re-election on a platform that he had broken al Qaeda and any evidence to the contrary might have hurt his campaign.

- Bill O'Reilly, Fox News, April 30, 2014

It really is the coverup, isn't it, that implicates more than the crime that's being covered up?

The conspiracy theory does have a major flaw.

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Although most opponents of civil rights laws through the 1960s were openly motivated by race, this was not true for everyone. Barry Goldwater had quietly opposed segregation in Phoenix. He later described his efforts as a series of private appeals.

The Goldwater argument against Civil Rights law was based on a largely libertarian interpretation of Constitutional rights. "You can't legislate morality." The liberal response at that time was "The Hell you can't!"

Author Jim Fedako adds a wrinkle with a sort of goose and gander logic. If customers can pick and choose which businesses they will purchase from, why can't business owners make similar choices about which patrons they will serve? If government is to restrict the right of a business to choose its customers, why not dictate to customers from whom they must buy?

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You can't just poll voters, if you want to predict how voters will choose. You have to poll voters who will choose. If a voter isn't going to vote, that voter will not have much effect on an election.

It is hard to figure out who is going to vote. Some pollsters go by past elections, taking into account what percentage of different ages, races, income groups, and educational levels have voted. So, if you find you're over-representing left handed people with blue eyes, you just count their numbers less. It's called weighting.

But weighting depends on past patterns holding in the future. Patterns are getting tricky.

It's getting harder to figure out who is going to vote for another reason. Republicans have been taking steps to make it harder for minorities and college students and working class people to vote. At the same time, courts are beginning to take a harder look at voter suppression. So it's hard to predict who will have their voting rights taken away by conservatives.

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