Benghazi is not a topic I follow. I thought I would wait for the judgment of history on that one. However, I was given a subscription to a little magazine called “The Week: The best of the U. S. and International Media,” and it had a story touted as the “Final Verdict” on Benghazi, so I looked to see if the judgment of history had been issued. The story leads off:
It won’t matter to the true believers, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post, but the Senate Intelligence Committee last week confirmed what rational observers have known all along about the Right’s beloved Benghazi obsession: “There is no there there.” After a 16-month investigation, the bipartisan committee concluded that the 2012 attack on the U. S. diplomatic mission that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, was “likely preventable,” but found no cover-up by the Obama Administration. Potential rescuers weren’t ordered to “stand down,” as reported by Fox News. There was no evidence that al Qaida leaders planned or directed the attacks. …
They said that it may turn out that the attack really was the result of street rage over an offensive YouTube video as Ambassador Rice originally said. Who knew?
Spun the other way, the same story reads this way.
And for something completely different, it is reported that “password” is no longer the most common Internet password. It’s now “123456.”
“They said that it may turn out that the attack really was the result of street rage over an offensive YouTube video as Ambassador Rice originally said. Who knew?”
Anyone who read the contemporaneous newspaper accounts by reporters who were on the ground during the attack. Who noted that the attackers were a mixed bag of people from various groups, many (but not all, it would seem from the way the stories were worded) of whom told the reporters that they were there specifically to avenge the insult to their Prophet.
I suspect that readership includes the people who drafted the “talking points”, given the similarity of their initial description of events.
I guess General Ham can breathe a sigh of relief, since it’s now official that he wasn’t sacked for insubordination for ignoring the mythical “stand down order”.
Not so much so for the Senate, all of whom will soon be Put On Notice™ that they’re now part of the “cover-up”.
Scotte will be heartbroken. He has been harping on and on and ON about Benghazi to everyone that will listen in a Fox Mulder “I only want to find the truth” chant for the past year. Its one of his lists of scandals that will break the Obama administration “eventually the truth will come out.”
I troll him sometimes about “Whistleblower Wednesday” (where he spend two weeks crowing about how some whistleblowers were about to blow the whole thing wide open, but never mentioned it again when it turned out to be a damp squib) but I haven’t bothered going over to his multiple threads on the political forum in well over a month. Boring is boring.
Also I read the this week article, which seems to be a collection of talking points from around the web and I found this really funny
Well gee, I guess that Iraq and Afghanistan are bastions of democracy in the middle East, and Bush and Cheney are blameless in their 10 year total failure to admit they were wrong about that. And SUDDENLY Ambassador Stevens is a bad guy who almost deserved to die after being held up as the next thing to Mother Teresa for over a year.
These guys change direction without missing a beat as long as the end result is running over their President.
The real scandal of Benghazi is how Republicans in Congress have tried to turn an awful tragedy into propaganda for political gain, particularly to damage Hillary Clinton’s cloak of invincibility for 2016. For the Republicans it has all been about how to muscle up their own “talking points” rather than conducting a dispassionate and objective examination of what went wrong so we can take steps to prevent a similar tragedy in the future.
Yes, the Obama administration failed to recognize and act upon a deteriorating security situation in Libya. But the reality is we can’t be all things in all places all of the time. It’s a dangerous world out there and sometimes, despite our best efforts, we can’t prevent every bad thing from happening.
And some of the worst of it was they way they pissed on the people who saddled up and rode into what they knew either could be (in the case of Delta Force), or actually was (for the locals in Benghazi and those coming from Tripoli,) combat with a larger force to effect a rescue, by claiming “No one did anything, and left those people to die”.
Someone on Facebook who I know yesterday posted a link from a conservative website asking when Congress is going to hold hearings on Benghazi. Those people apparently don’t pay attention, because hearings on Benghazi have been held by at least five different House committees, plus the Senate committee.
Ignorance reigns supreme.
Oh, they pay lots of attention: they just pay attention to the wrong sources.
The chain email about Obama being called “African-American” on his BC, and Kapi’olani not having the right name for the time, is making the rounds again. And, apparently (I haven’t verified it) a lawyer sent it as an LtE to his local paper. So now the birfoons (having forgottent that it was debunked years ago) are taking it up (or “throwing it up”, as in “mindless regurgitation”) again. It’s like bein in that Adam Sandler movie: “50 First Debates”.
You would think that a lawyer, whose livelihood depends on his (perceived) ability to do research and get it right, would’ve been more careful about his public statements. Maybe ODS has more of an organic effect on the brain that we realized…
It isn’t an investigation until it reaches the conclusions they want it to reach.
And Conservatives never understood why Issa never gained any traction with his witch-hunt.
I have said over and over to Conservatives that I would strongly support a truely bi-partisan investigation that was for the purpose of finding out what went wrong and learning from our experiences in order to prevent it in the future.
But it was pretty obvious that Issah and his pack were never interested in that. Which is why they focused on trying to convince America that Obama had lied about what happened- rather than on what happened.
The guy posting on facebook probably means “hearings to impeach the POTUS”. They want to see blood…
Probably a warning shot to tell Hillary “if you dare to run, we can trump up fake charges galore since you’re responsible for a lot of things as secretary of state”. I don’t think they seriously thought they could gain anything substantial from this particular case. They were just showing off their guns.
They must be devastated that nobody talks about any of the faux “scandals” (Fast & Furious, IRS, AP phone records) anymore, and even Obamacare doesn’t seem to do it for them.
(If they’re lucky, the NSA issue will leave a dent, but from what I perceive, this is a much bigger issue here in Europe, whereas in the US too many people would have a hard time accusing Obama of the same things that happened under Bush and everyone cheered for after 9/11.)
Remember that for the wingnuts, the “scandals” are something entirely different than for Republicans and the real world:
F&F = DOJ funneling guns to drug cartels
Benghazi = government funneling guns to Al-Quaeda (WTF?)
AP = government wire-tapping journalists
Etc.