Poor Oliver North. All this talk about President Obama’s Syria speech and military strikes has distracted our country from what’s important. Not jobs or the economy. No, the vital topics that we should be discussing, according to him, are the Republicans’ trumped up Benghazi and IRS scandals.

Media Matters has some excellent debunking of the phony Benghazi and IRS “scandals.” But even if you buy that there’s something amiss in those situations and that there's more to investigate, it’s hard to make a case that either of them are more important than national security and the question of whether or not the U.S. should get involved militarily in a serious conflagration in the Middle East.

But not to North. Oh, sure, he complained on On The Record last night that Obama’s speech earlier in the evening demonstrated a “flaccid, low-T, impotent foreign policy” that “is a disaster for this country.” And North said Obama gave Putin, who “heads a dying country” credibility “he does not deserve.” North added, “He has oil, he has nuclear weapons and now he has credibility in a part of the world where we ought to be the most credible nation.”

It’s laughable for a congenital and convicted liar (his conviction was overturned on a technicality) like North to criticize anyone else’s credibility. But it’s even more laughable for him to suggest that President Obama is solely responsible for lost credibility in the Middle East without mentioning a little invasion of a country called “Iraq” under false pretenses. It was an invasion, not so incidentally, for which North acted as a cheerleader and continued to support as recently as March of this year.

Not that host Greta Van Susteren questioned his credibility. That’s no surprise given that North is her colleague and has been rehabilitated by her bosses at Fox News into an uber war hero and patriot. But it’s worth pointing out that even the conservative Reader’s Digest has skewered him as dishonest. She did, however, nicely challenge North to explain what should be done instead – which he could not do. So North changed the subject to another avenue of attack against Obama:

Tomorrow morning, Syrians are still gonna be dying by the thousands because even if he doesn’t use chemical weapons again, the advantage has all gone to Assad. And so the rebellion that we theoretically were supporting, at least rhetorically, no longer has a chance over there. What we’ve got to be looking at is a Congress that was more than likely going to vote ‘no’ on the use of force.

I mean, all of the things that have taken place for over two years - when you consider where all this started - is not good for American foreign policy. And worst of all, it distracts us from things like the Benghazi, the IRS, all of those investigations like NSA spying and now we’ve got tomorrow, the anniversary of what happened on 9/11/01.

Just to recap: North claimed that Obama's Syria policy is a "disaster" that has now given Russia - in addition to the nuclear weapons and oil it already possessed - new, undeserved credibility in the Middle East. But what we should really be focusing on is Benghazi and the IRS.