If nothing else, the need to hold numerous redundant meetings speaks to the incompetence of the GOP members to really get anything done the first time.
The 1970s were violent years; FOUR American ambassadors were killed in the line of duty during that decade.
Our ambassador to Sudan, his deputy, and a Belgian diplomat were killed when the Black September faction of the PLO stormed the Saudi embassy in Khartoum during a diplomatic reception in 1973. A year later, the U.S. ambassador to Cyprus and his secretary were killed by sniper fire during a protest at the embassy in Nicosia. In 1976, our man in Lebanon and a subordinate were kidnapped by Palestinian separatists in Beirut and subsequently shot; the American ambassador to Afghanistan died during a failed rescue attempt after his kidnapping in 1979. The Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations were not the subject of massive witch-hunts, no.
(The only other American ambassador murdered on duty was the ambassador to Guatemala, assassinated by rebels there in 1965.)
Ronald Reagan didn’t send some horse faced female out to spin the 241 Marines killed by claiming it was a protest that got out of hand .
Tell me what the attractiveness of the spokesperson matters with regards to the message
Good enough for Trump, good enough for the Navy.
I’m sure Trump will have only the best-looking stooge to explain his massive failure and subsequent denial of any responsibility.
Do you know who asked for the intelligence community to draft unclassified talking points based on poor information? The Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee.
And when that same committee investigated the talking points, they found in 2014 that they were flawed, but nobody attempted to mislead anybody. Link. And yet, two years later, people ignore their findings.
So we have a situation where Party A asks Party B for a summary of an issue. Party B prepares the summary for Party A, but it is not accurate. Party A investigates for a year and a half and concludes, “Well, they shouldn’t have been wrong, but we now understand it was an honest mistake.”
Well, now Party C comes in with sexist comments saying that Party A got it all wrong. My question to you is, on what planet do we have reason to think that you are more expert on the talking points than the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee?
Funny you should mention that. I’ve got some reading for you: The Oversight Congress
It’s almost like they “stopped governing in order to devote the entirety of their time to obstruction, denial, and one politically motivated “investigation” after another”
At first I thought this was satire. Now I think you’re serious, so I’m going to ask a question: what do you mean by “lies such as Beghazi”?
I’m not sure if you’re trying to make a point here or what it might be. Could you please elaborate?
The fact that the GOP has blamed Clinton for Benghazi and despite eight investigations, some of them entirely Republican-led, finding no fault on Clinton’s part, continue to push that Clinton is to blame.
Witness the presence of Pat smith at the debate tonight and the speech she gave at the RNC convention, claiming that Clinton was directly responsible for her son’s death.
Your post almost is clever enough to make readers gloss over the straw man that is implicit in your rebuttal.
Literally nobody is saying that Congress, no matter which party is in control, should not conduct investigations. The fact that any particular Congress conducts more investigations is not the complaint, and I think you should acknowledge this simple fact.
The issue here is is whether after ten congressional committee have held hearings or investigations, after an independent bipartisan review board released a public report, after a dozen other reports have been completed and released, literally several hundred witnesses being interviewed, after all of those reports failed to find any “stand down order” or other debunked nonsense, whether anyone should think that the House starting a 13th investigation involving nearly 50 staffers costing millions per year and ending up becoming one of the longest (if not the longest!) congressional investigations in history.
Contrast this to other major investigations that Congress has undertaken. Iran-Contra, 9-11, CIA torture, whatever. The practice has not been to conduct an investigation, come up with basically no smoking gun of wrongdoing, and then immediately open another investigation in a pretty obvious attempt to find something that is a problem. And let’s get real, the Select Benghazi Committee has focused more on emails - a tangential issue to be charitable - than the actual events on that September night.
For example, when Sidney Blumenthal - a person of whom I have literally no opinion at all - is deposed and asked 550 questions, one would think that there were important issues raised about what happened that night, or perhaps in relation to events leading up to it. However, only 20 questions had some relation to Benghazi.
I disagree with you a lot but you’re a very bright guy. Surely you can acknowledge that these investigations set new precedents for coming up empty but trying again anyway, for not being able to finish its work and reach conclusions, and being pretty much transparently focused on political attacks on one person with virtually no interest or results in fixing any problems with government. If you disagree, I’d like to hear specifically how the Benghazi Committee has contributed a new understanding to what happened that night that was not known before this waste of time and energy.
Truthfully, I didn’t pay that much attention to the Benghazi hearings. I just didn’t find it a very interesting or engaging topic. But my main point here is that a very significant portion of the Senate and House’s time is spent on political theater (and both sides do it). When they’re in power, they try to use parliamentary procedure to maneuver for votes on subjects that will give them easy attack lines on their opponents in the next election (“My opponent voted against the Puppies and Rainbows Act. He hates puppies.”). When they spend time “debating” a bill, it’s not a real debate. No one is trying to convince the other side to change their vote. There are no undecided Congressmen that just need to be won over through logic and facts. They all know how everyone’s going to vote well ahead of time. It’s just political theater, for the constituents back home, something to put in the newsletter or post on Facebook. The filibusters are usually cynical ploys to get attention and media coverage. There’s no real expectation that they’ll change anything. It’s all just posturing for the next election. And the same thing is true of investigations. It’s to try to catch the other team in a “gotcha” and embarrass them. Have you listened to the questions that both sides pose in hearings? They’re not serious questions that they need answered to get to the bottom of matter. There’s no “just the facts, ma’am”. They’re little mini-speeches, and worded in a way to try to score points for their side. I think it is lawyers that invented the rule, “never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to”, but Congress-critters seem to live it well.
So were the Benghazi hearings “unprecedented”? I don’t think I have enough detail to say for sure one way or the other, but it certainly seems to fit right into a well-worn pattern of behavior by Congress to use every opportunity they can for partisan advantage. If there’s something new about it, it’s a matter of degree, not direction. Did they go one small step further than Pelosi did with Bush? I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible, but if they did, it’s just one more small step down the path, not some earth-shaking new game-changing way of doing business. It’s more of the same shit Congress has done for years now.
Oh, how about, “The President ordered troops to stand down, who were ready to be dispatched to rescue the Ambassador.” We heard that one a lot.
Well, there you have it. If only a White House spokesman hadn’t misstated the reasons for the attack, the Ambassador would still be alive!
In order to illustrate the religious hatred and bigotry?
Of course the name hussein is one also used by the Mizrahi Jews as well, so it is a Islamo-Judaic name.
You can get then a religious hatred double for the name.
So, the key concern here is that some “female” was horse-faced. I guess that means the Trump Messiah wouldn’t want to grab her p***y.
The 241 dead Marines are irrelevant; the Ambassador’s life is irrelevant. It’s all about Hillary being ugly.
Maybe we’d better bump this educational thread just for you, Navy draftee.
I think I understand what you’re saying, and suffice it to say that you have pretty strongly held opinions that this is business as usual even though you haven’t really tracked the issue enough to know with confidence whether this is business as usual.
In the first quoted post, you question why the death of anyone who is not an ambassador should be noteworthy, and in the second quoted post, you try to imply that you did not say that the deaths of the marines was not noteworthy.
You are holding a rather contradictory position there.
People elect a Muslim sympathizer with the name of HUSSEIN while we are fighting Muslim terrorists?
(may be that explains why Barack HUSSEIN Obama can’t bring himself to say…" radical Islamic extremists " )
Imagine in the 1940’s if a Nazi sympathizer with a middle name of ADOLPH ran for president.
I doubt he would get elected.
We won that war in the 1940’s.
Voters were smarter back then.