Re Bengazi post closed by Marley23 in Elections

[Oakminster]

@BobLibDem

She’s going to run, she’s going to win, and she’s going to be re-elected in 2020.

She might run, she won’t win, and thus re-election is moot. On the off chance that she somehow did win, it would be an unmitigated disaster for the country. She’s a horrible human being, and the country would be best served if she quietly retired and disappeared from public view.

[eschereal]

@Ibn_Warraq

Anyway, back to the OP.

Unless more damning evidence comes up, I seriously doubt it.

Robert Gates, a Republican who was SecDef under both Bush and Obama, and is currently the Chancellor of William and Mary has argued that those who think that Secretary Clinton could have somehow gotten military assets into position to stop the attack have a “cartoonish impression” of the capabilities of the the US military.

The US military can be likened to your Lamborghini Gallardo: you spent a lot of money for that thing, only to find out it is not much good for going to the grocery store.

[BrainGlutton]

Here’s a good summary of what this is all about: “What the fuck is all this Benghazi shit?”

In increasing order of craziness, here’s what the proposed and possible scandals are:

• The scandal is the State Department’s failure to adequately protect and secure the Benghazi compound, despite requests to do so from Ambassador Stevens. This is an actual, documented failure, and basically everyone agrees that it is a scandal, and it is what the State Department’s own report, released in December, found: “Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels…resulted in a Special Mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.” It’s also not what anyone in Congress seems to care about.

• The scandal is the administration’s failure to undertake immediate military action as soon as it heard that attacks were taking place. This week House Republicans paraded a series of witnesses in front of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to testify that the Obama administration and the Pentagon didn’t do everything they could have to save the Benghazi consulate. The idea seems to be that there is some badass special operations team that could have been instantly deployed to rescue the Benghazi personnel—but the Pentagon has flatly denied this, and the numbers don’t add up anyway.

• The scandal is that the administration attempted to cover up the fact that Benghazi was a terrorist attack, so the news wouldn’t harm Obama in the election. This is the one that has mainstream conservatives salivating. They’re specifically interested in the talking points used by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who (during appearances on Sunday talk shows) said that the attack grew out of spontaneous protests; today, ABC’s Jonathan Karl released a series of a memos showing how the State Department successfully lobbied for the removal of some references to terrorists. This, Republicans claim, proves—uh, well it proves that White House Press Secretary Jay Carney lied about there being no “substantive” revisions to the talking points, depending on how you define “substantive.” The memos don’t make the State Department look noble, but they also show that before and throughout the revision process the top talking point across all memos was still about spontaneous protests—and that the motivation was more inter-agency cover-your-ass jockeying than protecting Obama.

• The scandal is that the Benghazi consulate was a CIA front being used to sell arms to Syrian rebels. This is what, uh, Senator Rand Paul seems to believe (or at least seems to think it’s convenient for him to seem to believe): “I’ve actually always suspected that, although I have no evidence, that maybe we were facilitating arms leaving Libya going through Turkey into Syria,” he told CNN. In fairness to Paul, part of whatever confusing and misdirection was happening around Benghazi was the CIA lying because the CIA lies without regard to party. (One thing those ABC memos do show is the CIA trying to foist all blame off on the State Department.) But as Paul himself acknowledges, this particular conspiracy theory has almost nothing to do with the mainstream “Obama was unready and tried to cover up the terrorism” line—it’s more of an InfoWars thing than a Daily Caller thing. Nevertheless, it insinuates that something bad happened, so it gets play.

• The scandal is that the Obama administration colluded with terrorists, possibly to fake a kidnapping that would result in the release of the 1993 World Trade Center bomber Omar Abdel Rahman, as an October surprise. The Atlantic Wire’s Elspeth Reeve runs this one down. I don’t even know.

[Justin_Bailey]

@Smapti

In any event, if the worst thing about the administration’s actions re:Benghazi that the GOP can prove to be true is “they weren’t entirely candid in their initial press release”, then I’d say it’s time to stop beating a dead horse.

Someone needs to hang this on a billboard facing the Republican headquarters of every city in the country. I mean Christ, I haven’t been following it closely, but from what I’ve been able to figure out after all the Hitlery/Hilarious nonsense is filtered out is that this whole thing is basically one big game of “Uno!” Except Hilary and Obama were supposed to be playing “Terrorist!” and because the Republicans said it first, Hilary is supposed to lose a turn.

[Lobohan]

@Oakminster

She might run, she won’t win, and thus re-election is moot. On the off chance that she somehow did win, it would be an unmitigated disaster for the country. She’s a horrible human being, and the country would be best served if she quietly retired and disappeared from public view.

Speaking of* cartoonish impressions*.

She’s pretty clearly the most prepared of all the likely candidates, and ignoring any nonsense conspiracy theories (do you think she killed Vince Foster?), I don’t see any character defects worse than any male politician.

[Bryan_Ekers]

@David_H_Singanas

Calling the SecState Hildabeast, Hitlery, and Hilarious is good humor

It strikes me as childish at best. In fairness, I feel the same way about referring to Bush43 as “Shrub”.

[Oakminster]

@Lobohan

I don’t see any character defects worse than any male politician.

She’s a power hungry liberal elitist from New York. That’s a particularly disgusting combination, and one that should never hold national office.

[Fear_Itself]

@TriPolar

It is synonymous with misfeasance. Not great to have on your record when you’re running for president.

Misfeasance is not synonymous with malfeasance, which is what I was arguing against. Misfeasance is an order of magnitude less damning than malfeasance.

[jayjay]

@Oakminster

She’s a power hungry liberal elitist from New York. That’s a particularly disgusting combination, and one that should never hold national office.

Yes. Because power-hungry conservative elitists from Texas are A-OK.

[Lobohan]

@Oakminster

She’s a power hungry liberal elitist from New York. That’s a particularly disgusting combination, and one that should never hold national office.

That’s not an intelligent argument. Liberal elitist is just gibberish you heard somewhere. It has no meaning.

As for NY, well, I suppose that you can think that people that live in cities aren’t real Americans if you want. No law against irrational prejudice.

[Simplicio]

@Lobohan

As for NY, well, I suppose that you can think that people that live in cities aren’t real Americans if you want. No law against irrational prejudice.

Plus you need a pretty loose definition of “from New York” for Hillary to qualify. She grew up in Illinois, lived in Arkansas for twenty years and has been in DC more or less constantly since. She moved her official residence to NY to run for the Senate, but I think these last few months since her stepping down as SoS is the only period she’s ever actually lived there.

[BrainGlutton]

@Oakminster

She’s a power hungry liberal elitist from New York. That’s a particularly disgusting combination, and one that should never hold national office.

Like Teddy Roosevelt?

[Billdo]

@BrainGlutton

Like Teddy Roosevelt?

Or Franklin D., for that matter.

[42fish]

@Oakminster

She’s a power hungry liberal elitist from New York.

I recall that when she ran for Senate one of the slams against her was that she wasn’t a real New Yorker but was carpetbagging. Funny how flexible the anti-Hillary arguments can be.

[David_H_Singanas]

@42fish

I’d have thought the fact that the OP considers ‘Hitlery’ et al to be ‘good humor’ would have been the tip off.

There is no sub rosa hidden agenda by the OP. Just a senior moment that held
back the word “nomination.” It should have said “the Demo presidential nomination.”

“Hitlery”, “Hildebeast”, “Pelosi Galore”, Eisenhoover, Rosenfelt, and Ray-gun are
all good examples of figurative language. Life is much too important to be taken
seriously.

[SeldomSeen]

Quote:
Originally Posted by Oakminster

She’s a power hungry liberal elitist from New York. That’s a particularly disgusting combination, and one that should never hold national office.

Quote: BrainGlutton

Like Teddy Roosevelt?

Quote: Billdo

Or Franklin D., for that matter.

Or Nelson Rockefeller?
SS

[Bryan_Ekers]

@David_H_Singanas

“Hitlery”, “Hildebeast”, “Pelosi Galore”, Eisenhoover, Rosenfelt, and Ray-gun are
all good examples of figurative language. Life is much too important to be taken
seriously.

I take life seriously, when necessary.

I don’t take people who use these terms thinking they’re clever seriously, ever.

[Oakminster]

@42fish

Funny how flexible the anti-Hillary arguments can be.

There’s so much to despise about that woman, people can hate her from a variety of perspectives.

[Xema]

@Smapti

Or it might have been possible that there was classified information involved

There may well have been. I’m unclear on how this justifies persisting with an explanation easily determined to be fictional.

Or it might have been that the administration didn’t want to show its hand too soon by letting Ansar al-Sharia know that they knew they were involved.

So they concocted a clever scheme of deception centered on a story they knew to be false? Sound interesting & devious - but when it becomes obvious to everyone this is bogus, why not come clean?

Or it might have been that the government isn’t omnipotent, and the day after the attack took place they had reason to suspect that the violent attack against a diplomatic building in Benghazi just might be related to the violent attacks on diplomatic buildings in dozens of other countries on the very same day.

They might have had such reason, but no evidence for this seems to have surfaced.

This (marginally) works to cover the first 24 hours or so. But once they had time to talk to those present during the attack (which really should have happened within a few hours at most) it pushes the video-demonstration story into the “pure fiction” category.

… “they weren’t entirely candid in their initial press release” …

For values of “weren’t entirely candid” that include “concocted (and stuck with) a story that had no basis in fact”.

[Xema]

@Fear_Itself

Or they were simply mistaken. That is not synonymous with malfeasance.

Definitely not.

But until some sort of plausible evidence of a video-protest demonstration in Benghazi emerges, citing this as an explanation for the attack isn’t a “mistake” - it’s much closer to a lie. When you have folks who were present during the attack in Benghazi, who you can talk to whenever you wish, and who know that this story is way off base, it’s laughable to suggest that what happened recently in Cairo has any particular relevance.

And again, this explanation - lame in the short term - collapses entirely with the passage of time. It might barely work to cover what was said in the immediate aftermath, but this should have been put right within a day or two at most.

We should also consider the fact that the talking points began with a reasonably accurate description of events. It was only after a number of edits that they became misleading.