FOOLS AND KNAVES: SEVEN THESEShttp://www.powerlineblog.com/archive...ven-theses.php
The Benghazi hearing before the House Oversight Committee had been previewed over the weekend in stories featuring some of the highlights of the witnesses’ testimony to staff behind closed doors. In the event the testimony of the witnesses was if anything more dramatic than we might have anticipated. The bombshells were flying Fast & Furious.
Three New York Times reporters have a good story summarizing the testimony. John Podhoretz renders a judicious assessment in a the New York Post. See also Andrew McCarthy’s preview.
The exercise of common sense to the events belied the line being peddled by President Obama, Secretary Clinton and their minions in the days after the massacre. The information added yesterday continues to round out the picture of the deceit in which the administration has engaged. I want to offer seven conclusory theses based on what we have learned to date.
1. The witnesses who appeared before the committee yesterday — Gregory Hicks, Mark Thompson and Eric Nordstrom — were credible, compelling and devastating. These gentlemen are a credit to the State Department. Hicks showed what a true friend of Ambassador Christopher Stevens would do and say about the events leading to his death. Clinton and Obama’s professions of devotion to their late friend “Chris” are shot through with a nauseating falsity. These men show their bosses to be the fools and knaves after whom this series is named.
2. The Muhammad YouTube shtick was a fabrication from the outset. Yet it was peddled incessantly by Obama and Clinton. These folks think we’re stupid and that their media adjunct are both stupid and malleable. They haven’t been proved wrong yet. Getting to the bottom of the story is the most that we can hope for.
3. The fabrication had a political purpose. It was the administration that politicized the massacre in formulating the misinformation it peddled for public consumption.
4. The emergence of Cheryl Mills in yesterday’s testimony was a clarifying moment. It lent a certain context to the underlying disgraces. Mills is an old Clinton hand, adept in the arts of coverup and scandal management. She harks back to Monica and impeachment. As Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, she put her experience to use acting as consigliere to bully subordinates and keep the lid on the Benghazi disgraces. Jeffrey Lord elaborates on the Clinton school of scandal management in “From bimbos to Benghazi. ”http://spectator.org/archives/2013/0...os-to-benghazi
5. As scandal management, Clinton’s convening of an Accountability Review Board (report here) amounted to something like performance art. How did the estimable men of the ARB miss Gregory Hicks in the information gathering phase of their work? The ARB was like Nixon’s desired resolution of the controversy of the Watergate tapes: The Stennis Compromise. Bring in some eminent but hearing-impaired older man to check out the tapes and report back. Only Democrats can get away with something like that.
5. Hillary Clinton is the author of “the vast right-wing conspiracy” theme that set the table for Bill Clinton’s survival in the early days of the Monica scandal. The comparable moment here is “What difference – at this point, what difference does it make?” Answer: It depends on the meaning of “at this point.” Jeffrey Lord draws on Clinton’s
6. Who gave the orders to the military assets in Tripoli to stand down, and why?
7. Clinton’s 2:00 a.m. call with Greg Hicks must have been an hour too early to wake her up, but where was Obama? To borrow the old Spanish expression, the man was a zero to the left as commander in chief confronting the attack on our men in Benghazi. We may not be able to do better than Derek Hunter: “#WhereWasBarackBenghaziN ight Choom Gang reunion?”
For more in the way of theses, see Bryan Preston, Charles Hurt and Tom Bevan. And Rich Lowry arrives to remind us: Filmmaker Nakoula is still in jail.
- Whirlaway
- 05-09-2013, 06:11 AM
From Scott Johnson at Powerlineblog.com
- i'va biggen
- 05-09-2013, 06:15 AM
snick
- Whirlaway
- 05-09-2013, 06:18 AM
FAILINGS OF BAM AND HILL LAID BARE
By John Podhoretz at NY Post
After a remarkable House hearing yesterday, we can say this with almost complete certainty: The Obama administration knew perfectly well that last year’s Sept. 11 attack on Americans and American facilities in Benghazi was a terrorist act — yet chose to characterize it falsely as a spontaneous response to an anti-Islam YouTube video.
We can say this because we learned during the hearing that on Sept. 12, State Department official Beth Jones said flatly in an e-mail, “The group that conducted the attacks, Ansar al-Sharia, is affiliated with Islamic terrorists.”
We can say this because we heard the testimony of the No. 2 US diplomat in Libya, Greg Hicks — in which he said no one on the ground in Libya had any doubt it was a planned assault by Ansar al-Sharia. The first thing his boss, Ambassador Chris Stevens, told Hicks over the phone was, “We’re under attack.” Stevens was murdered shortly thereafter.
We can say this because we learned last week that the State Department Operations Center sent out a bulletin on Sept. 11 stating that Ansar al-Sharia had claimed responsibility.
Hicks said that in his conversations with State Department officials back home, including Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, neither he nor they nor anybody else said anything about a spontaneous demonstration or anything about a YouTube video.
So Team Obama knew. But Team Obama also knew there had been protests in Egypt around the embassy there that had been staged in response to the YouTube video. And at some point in the days that followed, the administration decided to conflate the two events and assign blame for the attack in Benghazi on the video.
It sent out UN Ambassador Susan Rice on Sept. 16 to say, as she did on CBS’s Sunday chat show, “Our assessment as of the present is . . . what began spontaneously in Benghazi [was] a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo.”
We don’t know why the Obama administration chose to do this. We can speculate. We can guess it did so because it had developed a story line for the 2012 election in which al Qaeda was dead, and this muddied that story line.
But there’s a very good counter-argument that, politically, Obama missed an opportunity: He could have gotten up and said, “I’m the man who got bin Laden, and we’ll get these men, too.” That would’ve rallied the country. Who would’ve objected? Who would’ve criticized?
The point is, all we will have is speculation until someone on the inside gives up the goods in a memoir, if anyone ever does.
Is this an impeachable offense? No. Will Hillary Clinton’s evident involvement in the revision of the administration’s line on Benghazi harm her presidential chances in 2016? No.
Will this be of great political utility to Republicans? No. Will this harm Democrats terribly? No — even though Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings did say, “Death is a part of life,” in response to the fact that four Americans were slaughtered by terrorists.
So what’s the big deal?
We can say it’s a big deal because of the testimony of Eric Nordstrom, the regional security officer in Libya at the time of the attacks. “It matters to me personally and it matters to my colleagues at the Department of State,” Nordstrom said as his voice cracked with sorrow and he paused several times to choke back tears. “It matters to the American public for whom we serve and, most importantly, it matters to the friends and family of Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods, who were murdered on Sept. 11.”
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/nationa...NvmfD7eACUM4BJ
By John Podhoretz at NY Post
After a remarkable House hearing yesterday, we can say this with almost complete certainty: The Obama administration knew perfectly well that last year’s Sept. 11 attack on Americans and American facilities in Benghazi was a terrorist act — yet chose to characterize it falsely as a spontaneous response to an anti-Islam YouTube video.
We can say this because we learned during the hearing that on Sept. 12, State Department official Beth Jones said flatly in an e-mail, “The group that conducted the attacks, Ansar al-Sharia, is affiliated with Islamic terrorists.”
We can say this because we heard the testimony of the No. 2 US diplomat in Libya, Greg Hicks — in which he said no one on the ground in Libya had any doubt it was a planned assault by Ansar al-Sharia. The first thing his boss, Ambassador Chris Stevens, told Hicks over the phone was, “We’re under attack.” Stevens was murdered shortly thereafter.
We can say this because we learned last week that the State Department Operations Center sent out a bulletin on Sept. 11 stating that Ansar al-Sharia had claimed responsibility.
Hicks said that in his conversations with State Department officials back home, including Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, neither he nor they nor anybody else said anything about a spontaneous demonstration or anything about a YouTube video.
So Team Obama knew. But Team Obama also knew there had been protests in Egypt around the embassy there that had been staged in response to the YouTube video. And at some point in the days that followed, the administration decided to conflate the two events and assign blame for the attack in Benghazi on the video.
It sent out UN Ambassador Susan Rice on Sept. 16 to say, as she did on CBS’s Sunday chat show, “Our assessment as of the present is . . . what began spontaneously in Benghazi [was] a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo.”
We don’t know why the Obama administration chose to do this. We can speculate. We can guess it did so because it had developed a story line for the 2012 election in which al Qaeda was dead, and this muddied that story line.
But there’s a very good counter-argument that, politically, Obama missed an opportunity: He could have gotten up and said, “I’m the man who got bin Laden, and we’ll get these men, too.” That would’ve rallied the country. Who would’ve objected? Who would’ve criticized?
The point is, all we will have is speculation until someone on the inside gives up the goods in a memoir, if anyone ever does.
Is this an impeachable offense? No. Will Hillary Clinton’s evident involvement in the revision of the administration’s line on Benghazi harm her presidential chances in 2016? No.
Will this be of great political utility to Republicans? No. Will this harm Democrats terribly? No — even though Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings did say, “Death is a part of life,” in response to the fact that four Americans were slaughtered by terrorists.
So what’s the big deal?
We can say it’s a big deal because of the testimony of Eric Nordstrom, the regional security officer in Libya at the time of the attacks. “It matters to me personally and it matters to my colleagues at the Department of State,” Nordstrom said as his voice cracked with sorrow and he paused several times to choke back tears. “It matters to the American public for whom we serve and, most importantly, it matters to the friends and family of Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods, who were murdered on Sept. 11.”
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/nationa...NvmfD7eACUM4BJ
- Yssup Rider
- 05-09-2013, 08:55 AM
SNICKETY SNICK
- Guest032516
- 05-09-2013, 10:27 AM
Johnny Cash would never put up with someone so infantile.
Is it your opinion that you can somehow control this board by starting 15-20 Benghazi threads over the course of a few days thereby forcing all other threads off the first 2 pages?
You would have made your points much better if there were 2 - maybe 3 - threads that you updated.
Instead, you look like an obsessive compulsive stalker.
Is it your opinion that you can somehow control this board by starting 15-20 Benghazi threads over the course of a few days thereby forcing all other threads off the first 2 pages?
You would have made your points much better if there were 2 - maybe 3 - threads that you updated.
Instead, you look like an obsessive compulsive stalker.
- Whirlaway
- 05-09-2013, 11:55 AM
Ahhhhh ExNyer wanna be a rebel got his panties all wet, quoting Cash..what's next you gonna tell us Waylon wants us all to behave in the Sandbox...your a fucking foolish squirt!
Get real you phony from north Dallas via New York.
Get real you phony from north Dallas via New York.
- Whirlaway
- 05-09-2013, 12:02 PM
Correction: Far North Dallas!
- Guest032516
- 05-09-2013, 12:05 PM
Ahhhhh ExNyer wanna be a rebel got his panties all wet, quoting Cash..what's next you gonna tell us Waylon wants us all to behave in the Sandbox...your a fucking foolish squirt!Where did I "quote" Cash? I have a picture of him giving the finger as an avatar. Because I like the attitude.
Get real you phony from north Dallas via New York. Originally Posted by Whirlaway
And I don't "wanna be a rebel". I just don't have patience with idiots. Those are two different things.
- CJ7
- 05-09-2013, 01:11 PM
GUFFAW GUFFAW
- JCM800
- 05-09-2013, 01:20 PM
Whirly, if you're going use Johnny Cash in the title you at least gotta toss in some tunes...