Beautiful! Absolutely spot on, a perfect parallel. The Benghazi bashers are exactly that preposterous.
Well, this thread IS pointless, as is any thread on Benghazi, because the whole thing is the veriest fantasy of the right wing. It’s been over a year, countless Congressional hearings, millions of dollars wasted, and nobody fucking cares about what Issa and his ilk are saying except Issa, his ilk, Fox News and the brainless Teabaggers. This is a huge nothingburger to everyone else. It always has been.
I’m not saying “Forget those dead people…who cares about them?” But bad things happen in dangerous occupations, which every Foreign Service employee KNOWS and accepts. Everyone who actually has any security responsibility in that region has said that nothing was done WRONG, according to the then-current protocols. Those protocols have been rewritten and modified since then to take the kind of attack that happened at Benghazi into account.
The whole thing is political grandstanding for the entertainment of people who should’ve been Soylent Greened for complete braindeath long before this.
Come again? Bridget Anne Kelly’s email saying “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee” is smoking-gun evidence of a scandal. Not necessarily a *Chris Christie *scandal, sure, but certainly a Bridge Anne Kelly scandal.
Bill Clinton’s semen splayed all over Monica Lewinsky’s dress contrary to his denial of a sexual relationship is evidence of a Bill Clinton scandal.
Yes, such evidence is rare, especially evidence incontrovertibly implicating the president himself. And, indeed, bona fide presidential scandals are thus relatively rare. The burden of proof is thus pretty high–certainly higher than what has been produced in the alleged “Obama scandals.” But you can’t say that my standard is unreasonably high. In fact, I can’t think of a principled, defensible alternative. Can you?
Sure. “When I believe it.”
We’re not erecting a legal system, we’re talking about the court of public opinion here.
Sounds more like the court of the opinion of Yogi Berra. What I foresee is a good chunk of the American people thinking that there was a cover-up, but also an even larger number that will think how useless this is and wondering why it is important to reveal even more about of how the security of our embassies and overseas locations is done.
Because that was the impression I got after Issa and others tried early to get “to the bottom of this” and they revealed several secrets just in the attempt at making anything stick.
Scenario #1: A planned terrorist attack on our consulate killed the Ambassador on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks because we didn’t have beefed up security on that date in Libya (not Paris or London, but fucking Libya) really making the executive branch looking like a bunch of dumbasses…or
Scenario #2: A spontaneous response to a racist video on Youtube that nobody could have seen coming.
Which scenario is more or less likely to make the President look bad? I don’t know if there was a coverup, but this denial of the reason first put out about the attack being related to the video in simply 1984-esque. The entire administration, including the President, cited the video as the reason for the attack.
Scenario #3: Obamacare is successful, the IRS “scandal” proved to be a bunch of crap, and Fox News and talk radio cannot live without something to scare old white men, so they reanimate another phony “scandal” that they had given up on a couple of months ago.
With the added bonus of being able to use it to tar the assumed Democratic presidential candidate for 2016.
The evidence I have seen tell us that both scenarios are not exclusive. Now what?
The point here for me is that this investigation will not solve anything and it is really following the play book used by the climate science deniers in climate gate: obtain a mess of emails from the targeted group, quote with very little context, organize investigations based on those cherry picked emails to unsettle and disrupt the target. Profit!
For me, like with the scientists in the climate gate faux scandal, there is the confidence that there are other reasons than science why we have these modern digital fishing expeditions. Now I and many know how silly these accusations of a cover-up are, but like with climate gate there is a chunk of people that are ready and eager to consume more misleading information.
It’s reasonable to believe that, at the time, that was the explanation the administration was leaning towards, based on conflicting information from various sources (and there’s no evidence that the administration knew for sure, at the time, that the protests to the video were not involved) – though they qualified every statement they made with ‘we don’t know yet and need to wait for further investigation’ or similar.
Basically, it’s not a big deal that the administration said ‘we think it’s explanation A but don’t know for sure and it’s premature to make a definitive conclusion’ in the immediate aftermath, when no investigation had come close to concluding anything. The Republicans are trying to make a big deal out of it for political reasons, but there’s no actual interest in finding actual facts – only in harming the President and former Secretary of State.
If so, then you should welcome them to investigate and look so foolish, right?
Or are you going to go with “I am appalled at this foolish and uneccessary distraction from the important work of the American People™”
Or making the Republican-led House of Representatives look like dumbasses, for cutting funds for diplomatic security. That’s why this part isn’t the key to the drumbeat of criticism: it reflects badly on the Republicans.
Also it shows jtgain is working under a cloud of misinformation about the issue.
It was the Ambassador’s decision to be there that day. The place he was wasn’t an embassy, it was a local office and a secret compound. And no amount of security can deflect mortar fire or RPGs. So unless the security improvements involved a force field or building a fortress, little could be done. And it’s not like he wasn’t offered:
[
](2012 Benghazi attack - Wikipedia)
But because of FOX and RW Radio, otherwise intelligent people are arguing with a separate and imaginary set of facts. And because of partisan blindness, I’ll bet people who read this post will still repeat the same nonsense misinformation, again. Because the repetition of the echo chamber beats out the dissonant tone of reality.
No quibble there. The problem is with her statement that the attack began “spontaneously … as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo”.
It didn’t begin spontaneously and it wasn’t a reaction to events in Cairo: everyone knows that now, and the White House was in possession of information that clearly indicated this then. Which leads to the conclusion that they sent her out to lie.
Ok. We might be getting somewhere here. I have a couple questions.
One: what specific information was the WH in possession of at that time that clearly indicated that the attack wasn’t spontaneous? And, to be clear, what is your understanding of “not spontaneous?” (That is, in your book is any attack by well-organized armed militants BY DEFINITION not spontaneous, or would you allow that some attacks by such groups could qualify as spontaneous, as the case may be?)
Two: Am I to understand that the “lie” you refer to is Susan Rice saying “we don’t know yet whether it was planned [months in advance]” in response to Bob Schieffer’s question, as opposed to having said “yes Bob [it was planned months in advance]?” Or was the lie something else?
I’m trying to make sure we’re speaking in the same terms here.
By the way, for reference this is the Face the Nation segment with Bob Schieffer:
BOB SCHIEFFER: But you do not agree with him that this was something that had been plotted out several months ago?
SUSAN RICE: We do not-- we do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.
BOB SCHIEFFER: Do you agree or disagree with him that al Qaeda had some part in this?
SUSAN RICE: Well, we’ll have to find out that out. I mean I think it’s clear that there were extremist elements that joined in and escalated the violence. Whether they were al Qaeda affiliates, whether they were Libyan-based extremists or al Qaeda itself I think is one of the things we’ll have to determine.
What makes you think that I did not think about Voltaire’s only prayer that he needed to be granted by god when Issa and the other Republicans were “investigating”? 
Nah, the first one will do, but as I mentioned, there is a good chunk of Americans that will see that foolishness and call it a triumph. What I do think is that many more Americans will not see it that way and even here and in other threads I have seen conservatives wondering once again if the mad Tea Party is grabbing the wheel again after being told to cool it down for the next election.
What we’re getting at is the totally unnecessary mission of Rice in the first place. There was no reason for her to go in front of cameras. There was no reason to prep her with a message.
And so had the White House rejected all requests for an official to appear on news programs, you would NOT have claimed a cover-up at that point? Give me a break.
If Issa wants to waste even more time on even more investigation, that’s his privilege, and it’s up to the voters of his district to decide whether he’s doing any good.
What is NOT his privilege is to state, for the record, " … the American people have learned that you cannot believe what the White House says. You cannot believe what the spokespeople say. You cannot believe what the president says," to kick off that investigation. In fact, a statement like that absolutely disqualifies him from any participation in an honest investigation.