The Benghazi report

By Mustang Bobby

The Senate Intelligence Committee released their report on the attack on Benghazi. They criticized everyone, including the State Department, the CIA, and the Defense Department, basically saying that Libya was a post-revolutionary mess.

The Republicans are seizing on the conclusion that the attacks were “preventable,” crowing over this as if this seals the end of Hillary Clinton’s hopes for the White House in 2016 because she was the Secretary of State at the time.

I’m no military strategist or anything of the sort, but haven’t we all learned that just about every surprise attack in the history of modern warfare was “preventable”? Didn’t we have clues to the Japanese intentions on Pearl Harbor in 1941, or the Vietcong’s plans for Tet in 1968? Oh, and what about the memo to President Bush in August 2001 that noted “bin Laden determined to strike within U.S.”? Yes, hindsight is great if you’re focusing on someone else’s hind end.

I’m not trying to pull a Benghazi deflection on the Benghazi report; if the attack was preventable and people didn’t do their jobs, then they should be held accountable. And as Bryan at Why Now? points out, there’s also the role that Congress played in not providing adequate funding for the security at the embassy. But then since this report came from the Senate, they are, by necessity, blameless in all of this.

This report will now, as Charlie Pierce notes, deteriorate into a political skunk fight between the bug-eyed on the right (Gohmert, Bachmann, and Steve King), and the infantile obsession the Villagers have for the freak show that heralds a presidential campaign. And none of that is preventable.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Right-wing hack Lara Logan returning to 60 Minutes

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Politico:

Lara Logan and Max McClellan, the '60 Minutes' journalists who were put on a leave of absence following their now-retracted report on Benghazi, are set to return to the program early next year, POLITICO has learned.

Logan and her producer, who had unfinished projects in the works when they left in November, have started booking camera crews for news packages, network sources said. Their return could come as early as next month.

*****

Logan and McClellan took leave following public pressure over an Oct. 27 report in which security contractor Dylan Davies claimed to have been present and active at the Sept. 11 raid on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi. Reports later indicated that Davies had told both his contractor and the FBI that he was not present at the compound on the night of the attack. Logan later apologized and "60 Minutes" retracted the story.

Despite public criticism and internal frustrations among some members of the "60 Minutes" team, CBS News chairman and "60 Minutes" executive producer Jeff Fager decided to stand by Logan. Earlier this month, he held a meeting with CBS News staff in which he defended the 42-year-old journalist, saying that as EP he was ultimately responsible for failing to catch the mistake.

Ah, but it wasn't really a mistake, was it? Logan gullibly (and also willfully) went with the story because it fit her political agenda, and she wasn't about to conduct even the simple checks on her source that would have exposed him as a fraud. It was the right-wing narrative that mattered, not the facts.

In any event, I'm not sure we should care. What with this bogus story and this past Sunday's shameful puff piece on the NSA, which essentially served as pro-NSA propaganda served up by the NSA itself through its gleeful CBS mouthpiece, this once-venerable news program has less than zero credibility. Having Logan back only proves the point.

Benghazi still not a scandal

By Frank Moraes 

So what is this stuff about Benghazi I wrote about earlier? Last Thursday, CNN broke a story suggesting that the CIA was running guns from Libya to Syria out of the Benghazi proto-embassy. This, supposedly explains the administration's "cover up" of the attack. The big problem I see here is that the story is an answer to a question no reasonable person is asking. But okay, I'll bite.

CNN claims that they've learned that "dozens" of CIA operatives were "on the ground" in Benghazi the night of the attack. I want to start with the vague number "dozens." It literally means at least 24. Yet the article later claims that there were only 35 people total at the compound and that there were 21 at the annex, which is claimed to have been run by the CIA. Still, 21 is a lot of people.

But why would this make us believe that it had (1) anything to do with gun running and (2) anything to do with the attack? CNN doesn't even have a source for the first connection. All it says is this, "Speculation on Capitol Hill has included the possibility the U.S. agencies operating in Benghazi were secretly helping to move surface-to-air missiles out of Libya, through Turkey, and into the hands of Syrian rebels." Note all the weasel words here: speculation, included, possibility. As for the second connection there is nothing at all.

The article also gives major time to Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA). He believes that we need to have public hearings with everyone who was in Benghazi the night of the attack. I'm all for that, but I don't think that Wolf is an honest broker here. This is a man, after all, who thinks that Edward Snowden is a traitor. He's said some nice things against the surveillance state, but I suspect if a Republican where in the White House, he wouldn't even go that far.

It seems to me just another Republican witch hunt with the vaguest of targets. After all, even the CNN article provides no reason to believe that anything the CIA was doing had anything to do with the attack. So what would Wolf's hearings be but an open ended opportunity for the Republicans to snipe at the Democratic administration?

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Louie Gohmert just can't stop reminding us he's the stupidest member of Congress

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Hill:

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said Monday that the Obama administration is making the United States look "like a bunch of cowards" by closing 19 embassies amid intelligence reports about possible terrorist attacks.

Gohmert, guest-hosting on Sean Hannity's radio program Monday, said the administration failed to learn from last year's deadly attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans.

"We don't want any more people to die," Gohmert said in response to a caller's question. "But it brings us back to the question that [then-Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton asked, what difference does it make at this point?

"The difference it makes is, that if you will bother to find out exactly what went wrong, why you didn't have security where you needed it, where you need security to shore up, what you can do to make sure that doesn't happen again, you don't have to close your embassies like a bunch of cowards that go running away," he continued.

It's possible that the U.S. government hyped (or largely made up) the threats against its facilities overseas as a way to support its case for (essentially universal) surveillance, just as justification for the entire war on terror has been based largely on government fearmongering about threats that the public, given lack of access to evidence, has no way of proving one way or the other -- and the media are playing right along, hyping the "worldwide alert," as CNN blared, without a shred of evidence -- but Gohmert's suggestion that closing embassies is cowardice is just plain stupid.

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Karl Marks: Who is the real Jonathan Karl?

By Mustang Bobby

It's a right-wing tactic to attack the messenger, but in the case of Jonathan Karl, he does have a resume that suggests he might be a tad inclined to see things from a right-wing point of view:

Karl came to mainstream journalism via the Collegiate Network, an organization primarily devoted to promoting and supporting right-leaning newspapers on college campuses (Extra!, 9-10/91) -- such as the Rutgers paper launched by the infamous James O'Keefe (Political Correction, 1/27/10). The network, founded in 1979, is one of several projects of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which seeks to strengthen conservative ideology on college campuses. William F. Buckley was the ISI's first president, and the current board chair is American Spectator publisher Alfred Regnery. Several leading right-wing pundits came out of Collegiate-affiliated papers, including Ann Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza, Michelle Malkin, Rich Lowry and Laura Ingraham (Washington Times, 11/28/04).

The Collegiate Network also provides paid internships and fellowships to place its members at corporate media outlets or influential Beltway publications; 2010-11 placements include the Hill, Roll Call, Dallas Morning News and USA Today. The program's highest-profile alum is Karl, who was a Collegiate fellow at the neoliberal New Republic magazine.

After a stint at the New York Post, Karl soon found his way to CNN, but he was still connected to ideological pursuits; he was a board member at the right-leaning youth-oriented Third Millennium group and at the Madison Center for Educational Affairs -- which, like the Collegiate Network, seeks to strengthen young conservative journalism. After moving to ABC in 2003, Karl contributed several pieces to the neo-con Weekly Standard, such as his April 4, 2005 article praising Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as out to "make her mark with the vigorous pursuit of the president's freedom and democracy agenda."

Karl's high profile at ABC demonstrates that conservative messages can find a comfortable home inside the so-called "liberal" media.

Does that mean that he can't be a fair and objective reporter when it comes to doing his job?  Not at all. A lot of journalists work for news organizations that have a political point of view but still are able to do their job without seeming to inject their point of view into their work. (Of course, to hear the right-wingers tell it, all journalists are left-wing shills for Saul Alinsky, Noam Chomsky, and George Soros, but send a kid to college on a scholarship from National Review and he's the soul of objectivity.)

It's not what he thinks but how he acts that matters, and so far Mr. Karl's response (see here) tend to lend credence to the notion that in the case of Benghazi his background and job history do matter.

In his case, you wonder why he's not working as the head of the Washington bureau of Fox News.

(h/t to digby)

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Relentless Republican outrage and the fake scandals that failed to bring down Barack Obama

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Another fake scandal.

It wasn't really such a bad week for President Obama, just a bad week for President Obama according to a Beltway media establishment desperately looking for some excitement and more than willing to go right along with the ongoing Republican assault on everything the president does.

The point is, while it was a week of annoying scandalmongering, and surely incredibly annoying to the White House, what really happened is that the Republicans pushing the scandals along with their media enablers were finally exposed as a bunch of frauds. Consider:

Benghazi: This has long been over, but Republicans won't let it rest. They thought they had a smoking gun in leaked White House e-mails that suggested political interference in post-attack talking points, but the story, after the White House released the full e-mails, is now rightly about how Republicans altered those e-mails and how ABC News was played and/or in on it. End result: Republicans look bad.

IRS: Conservatives freaked out and Republicans ultimately blew their load. The IRS could and should have handled their investigation of Tea Party groups with greater care, but there's no scandal. Obama didn't order any sort of Nixonian investigation of his enemies and the IRS invesigates the tax-exempt claims of groups across the spectrum. End result: Obama found a scapegoat in the IRS commissioner, which is a shame, but it's clear the IRS did nothing fundamentally wrong. Republicans don't look bad as much as they look hypocritical.

AP: The federal government's subpoenaing of the media organization's phone records may be the only real scandal here, and initially the Beltway media were up in arms, but there's no one really driving this one other than Obama's critics on the civil libertarian left (e.g., Glenn Greenwald, and I tend to agree with them). Everyone knows that this sort of thing has gone on for a long time (Patriot Act, anyone?) and everyone knows that Obama has maintained much of the Bush-Cheney national security state. And Republicans have no interest in defending the media from the left. They're not saying anything because they agree with the Justice Department. End result: Obama and Holder deserve criticism, but this one's done.

Oh, but Republicans are as desperate as ever to try to bring down the president (as well as the person they see as their likely nemesis in 2016, Hillary Clinton). Indeed, what this week proved is not that the president is being brought down by scandal (given that these are faux scandals pushed by Republicans and sensationalized by their media enablers) but that Republicans have nothing but obstructionism and outrage to hurl in his direction. His approval numbers are fine, Obamacare is becoming the law of the land, and while they've successfully blocked him in Congress (e.g., voting down the extremly popular Manchin-Toomey background check gun bill) their electoral prospects remain dim. They tried for four years to tear him down. This is just more of the same. It's all they've got.

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Affinity bias and the White House scandals

By Frank Moraes 

I've been thinking a lot about why so many journalists I follow went so wrong on the supposed White House Scandals this week. I think it has a lot to do with affinity bias. And that does not speak well for the state of journalism.

A lot of people wonder why, for example, conservatives often hold opinions that are just wrong. Throughout the Bush administration, Fox News viewers were systematically misinformed about important issues. Why was that? It's quite simple: they trusted Fox News. And that is not only acceptable, it is necessary. We can't independently become experts on every issue we hear about. So we find people who we trust as experts and believe what they say.

Of course, it pays to be selective. Anyone who gets their information from cable news is cruising for a bruising. In general, I think that MSNBC is a lot better than Fox News. But that isn't always case. I think Fox News has done a better job under Obama than they did under Bush. It's all been pretty bad, though. MSNBC has done better generally, but I think they were soft on Obama during the campaign. At times they act as apologists for the Obama Administration -- especially certain shows. Regardless, I think that MSNBC does a better job of informing liberals than Fox News does informing conservatives. Of course, the best conservative print publications are better. Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review and Josh Barro of Bloomberg View are both fact based. I wish a lot more conservatives got their news from people like them.

There really is a difference between what liberals and conservatives think about things even when they are working off the same set of facts. And that should be enough. But instead, generally conservatives get different facts than liberals do. I think this is about 90% the fault of conservative media, but it hardly matters. My point is that we've got to trust someone.

I've worked very hard to find people who I feel I can trust -- people who will not knowingly deceive me and will admit when they are wrong. I still feel very dependent on these people. But not always. For example, most of them went crazy this last week. They acted as though there was something to all these scandals. There were damned few people like me who were pushing back against this. And my question is: why?

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Death, Teapot Dome, and Benghazi, Cuba

By Frank Moraes 

According to Public Policy Polling (pdf), 74% of Republicans think that the Benghazi scandal is worse than Watergate. But I wonder: do these people even know what Watergate was about? That scandal has come to be a blanket term for a whole lot of presidential malfeasance. The Watergate break-in was just the loose thread that once pulled unraveled the whole shirt. But we can't know what these Republicans think about Watergate because they weren't asked. They were, however, asked if Benghazi was worse than Iran Contra and only 70% thought it was. And even more interesting, 74% think Benghazi is worse than the Teapot Dome scandal.

(Note: the worst thing about the Benghazi "scandal" is that it has forced me to learn to spell it! Look people: I have a hard enough time keeping the spelling of all the really useful words in my mind. There's only so much space. I blame the Republicans.)

What are we to make of these numbers? I think it's pretty simple: Republicans don't like Obama. Because let's face it, I doubt that 5% of Republicans have even heard of Teapot Dome and 1% know what it was. I suspect if you asked Republicans if Benghazi was worse than Judas betraying Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, they would say, "Yes!" I even know their argument: only one person died in Jerusalem whereas four people died in Benghazi! Okay, maybe they wouldn't say that because most of them are Christians, but it does make as much sense as the argument, "No one died as a result of Watergate!" (Interestingly, the whole Benghazi "scandal" has been about what the White House said about Benghazi after the attack: the controversy is the "talking points." No on died as a result of the talking points either, but that isn't mentioned.)

If you think I am overstating the ignorance of the Republicans, just check out another part of the poll. PPP asked the "worse than Watergate" respondents where Benghazi was. Of them, 39% didn't know. Here's what they said:

• 10% Egypt (Close!)
• 9% Iran (Only 1,500 miles off!)
• 6% Cuba (6,000 miles!)
• 5% Syria (1,000 miles)
• 4% Iraq (1,000 miles)
• 1% North Korea (5,600 miles!)
• 1% Liberia (2,600 miles, but it does sound the same)
• 4% Didn't know (Good answer!)

(I got the distances from this great tool: Distance From To. Check it out!)

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Behind the Ad: Progressive group targets Karl Rove

By Richard K. Barry

Who: The Bridge Project.

Where: Web ad.

What's going on: Karl Rove is already attacking Hillary Clinton over Benghazi even though she hasn't declared her candidacy for 2016, and the premise of his attack is absurd. Enter the Bridge Project, which is giving as good as Hillary gets by going after Rove as one of the slimiest operatives in the history of politics.


(Cross-posted at Phantom Public.)

Blogging and tweeting in a time of fake scandal, media hyperbole, and Republican insanity

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I've been without home Internet access the past few days, hence my lack of blogging. It's now back up and running, and so I'll be getting back to it later today.

I have, however, been tweeting a lot from my phone, tweeting being easier than blogging. Highlights include celebrating the Maple Leafs' crushing loss last night and coming under assault from typically delusional teabagging wingnuts over Benghazi and the IRS (and, of course, pushing back with reality and the facts on my side).

You can find me on Twitter @mjwstickings, and I also have a Twitter widget with my updated feed over on the right sidebar of this site.

Anyway, thanks as always to Richard for taking care of things, even more so than usual. He's a fine, fine editor, and a great partner in this blogging endeavor of ours.

We'll have more from the team throughout the day. I'll be back with new posts later.

I hope you're all having a nice day.

**********

Oh, by the way, did you hear that a White House e-mail from then-Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes, obtained by CNN, contradicts recent media reports that suggested the White House was possibly involved in a nefarious plot regarding the Benghazi talking points?

I expect a full and unambiguous apology from media outlets, like ABC News, that breathlessly reported on the leaks in a way that enthusiastically heaped blame on the White House, as well as from all others, mostly Republican, who jumped on that bandwagon of lies.

Cue "The Sound of Silence" by Simon & Garfunkel:

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made

The Benghazi scandal that isn't: How Republicans and the media are distorting a tragedy

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Another day, another breathless report of something supposedly "new" in the whole Benghazi saga, which really just amounts to a media-enabled Republican assault on the the Obama Administration -- first the president himself as the target, now, with Republicans looking ahead to 2016, Hillary Clinton.

Today it's from Jonathan Karl of ABC News, who "reports" the following:

When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story.

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department.  The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

Okay... and? 

As ThinkProgress notes:

[T]he ABC report suggests the State Department "scrubbed" the talking points of terror references as some sort of nefarious cover-up of what really happened in Benghazi for political reasons. This, of course, playing into the GOP's conspiracy theory that President Obama was trying to preserve his campaign theme that his policies has significantly crippled the terror network. 

And I would note that Karl's piece seems to be written from the perspective of those conspiracy theories. At the very least, Karl is playing right along with the right's obsessions. ThinkProgress continues:

The story soon set reporters and Twitter alight. "Scrubbing the truth from Benghazi," a National Journal headline read. Even the BBC speculated that "heads will roll."

But absent in ABC's report is the key point that Obama and various members of his administration referred to the Benghazi assault as a terror attack on numerous occasions shortly after the incident (thereby negating the need to "scrub" any references in the talking points) and that then-CIA Director David Petraeus said the terrorist references were taken out to, as the New York Times reported, "avoid tipping off the groups" that may have been involved.

Basically, the State Department -- specifically former Cheney advisor Victoria Nuland -- was more involved in the development of the talking points than previously reported.

Republicans and their various enablers in the media -- who may think they're digging for the truth but are really just doing the Republicans' bidding -- seem to think this rises to the level of, well, something possibly worse than Watergate.

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Behind the Ad: The Benghazi attack ad that never aired

By Richard K. Barry

(Another installment in our extensive "Behind the Ad" series.)

Who: The Republican National Committee.

Where: Never aired.

What's going on: Jonathan Karl of ABC News got his hands on an ad created by the Republican National Committee to attack Obama over Benghazi, though it was never aired.

It was made last fall in the final weeks of the 2012 presidential campaign.

It begins with a replay of Hillary Clinton's famous "3 a.m. phone call" commercial from the 2008 campaign that she used to criticize Barack Obama's political experience and then moves to an image of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in flames:

Over the images of the attack – in which four Americans were killed – words appear on the screen:

"The Call Came … On September 12, 2012." As the screen goes black, the words continue: "Security Requests Denied. Four Americans Dead. And an Administration whose story is still changing. The Call Came."

Karl writes that a source familiar with the creation of the ad said it was approved by the RNC leadership but didn't run because Romney's campaign was afraid it would detract from their efforts to focus on the economy.

Whether or not that was the right call by Romney's people, something tells me we haven't heard the last of this approach, which I suspect will be used against Clinton should she run in 2016.

As with so much of the politicking the GOP does, it appeals to the already converted rather than helping to  expand their base. In other words, it's pure Fox News theatrics.



(Cross-posted at Phantom Public.)

Tempest in a teapot that doesn't exist: The Republican "outrage" on Benghazi

By Michael J.W. Stickings

So we were told by Fox News and pretty much the entirety of the Republican conspiracy machine that yesterday's testimony before the (Republican-led) House committee "investigating" the Benghazi attack and its aftermath would provide the evidence that would finally expose President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, and anyone and everyone else the Republicans have been targeting as liars, and therefore as worthy of impeachment or whatever other severe punishment the vindicated Republicans wished to mete out.

Alas, it was nothing of the sort. Instead the testimony of the key Republican witnesses only served to crush the various right-wing conspiracy theories -- e.g., fighter jets could have been sent but weren't, a special forces team that could have helped was held back in Tripoli, Ambassador Rice's statements on the Sunday talk-show circuit were evidence of partisan-political interference -- that have become gospel among Republicans, not just with the crazies in the House and throughout conservative media but with media-promoted superstars like John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

Kevin Drum sums up the whole nonsense:

Was Benghazi mishandled? Maybe. Are there lessons to be learned? Probably. Is there a scandal or a coverup? There's never been any evidence of it, and there still isn't. This is a show that goes on and on without end, but it never delivers a payoff. Issa and his colleagues need to start paying more attention to stuff that actually matters, and give up on the Fox-friendly conspiracy theories that never pan out. Enough's enough.

Yes, but it won't be for Republicans, because it's not really about Benghazi. (If Republicans really gave a shit, maybe they wouldn't have voted against funding for diplomatic missions. As usual, their outrage is completely faux.) Before last November's election, it was about taking down the president. But now, with Obama secure in his second term, it's about taking down the Republicans' worst nightmare for 2016, Hillary Clinton. It's obvious. Steve M. looks ahead:

They're going to let up a little on Obama after 2014, and Hillary's going to become the most evil person in the world again. They may even decide they kind of like Obama, if they can figure out a way to use that against her. It's going to be bizarre. And it's going to be as ugly as the Obama-hate has been.

It's ugly, it's vicious, it's pathetic, and it's pretty much all they've got. So expect much, much more of it.

Winning votes with smears, lies, and ridiculous conspiracy theories. It's the Republican way.

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Benghazi again

By Mustang Bobby

Republicans never run out of dead horses to whip: 

Republican lawmakers, who have spent months seeking to tie President Obama to last year's deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, are increasingly focusing their probe on a new target: former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The GOP-led investigation of the Sept. 11, 2012, assaults that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others now centers heavily on the State Department and whether officials there deliberately misled the public about the nature of the assault.

Three State Department officials are scheduled to testify before a House committee on Wednesday about the Benghazi attack and its aftermath.

"I think the dam is about to break on Benghazi," Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) wrote on his Facebook page Tuesday. “...We're going to find people asleep at the switch when it comes to the State Department, including Hillary Clinton."

On Monday, a Fox News anchor asked Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) how damaging the issue is for Clinton. "I think it's damaging because it happened under her watch," replied Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is holding Wednesday's hearing.

It's pretty obvious that this is a preemptive attack on Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, and the Republicans are going all in on it; Mike Huckabee said this will be worse than Watergate. (Note: Watergate is the Godwin's Law of scandals: the longer the discussion goes on, the chances that someone will compare a scandal to Watergate increase to a factor of dead certainty.)

It was terrible that people were killed in the attack in Libya last September. But it's worse that the Republicans are exploiting it for no other reason than politics, and their crocodile tears over the death of Ambassador Stevens wouldn't seem so craven if they had bothered to look into the lies and deceptions that killed and wounded several thousand American soldiers in Iraq.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

The New York Post is the worst newspaper in the history of newspapers

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Unless you're a right-wing prick, you know Rupert Murdoch's Post is nothing but a shit-stained tabloid full of offensive right-wing trash. Consider its cover yesterday:

The vicious Republican assault on Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, and the Obama Administration generally, over the Benghazi consulate attack has been nothing but a propagandistic pack of lies.

But even if you think McCain et al. have a point, this anti-Hillary cover is inexcusable. The secretary of state was determinedly fending off the Republican assault and stating the facts in contrast to their lies, not exploding with rage. And why bring Bill into it? Just to suggest that Hillary is an emasculating bitch who flies off the handle?

The sexism... well, it's as obvious as it gets, right? Think a man would be treated like this?

Craziest Republican of the Day: Steve King

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Quite a few Republicans are still suffering from Benghazi fever, and wingnutjob extraordinaire Steve King of Iowa has it worse than most: 

I believe that it's a lot bigger than Watergate, and if you link Watergate and Iran-Contra together and multiply it times maybe 10 or so, you're going to get in the zone where Benghazi is," Mr. King said. "I don't think the public has any idea, and I tell you, I don't either, of the chronology of the events — what took place, and who was where doing what and why. And all the way down through — we still haven't seen an autopsy report on the ambassador yet. Simple questions that you would ask in the first 24 hours have not been asked yet. 

So... he doesn't have a fucking clue what happened -- he admits as much -- but he's sure it was really, really, really bad. Like, the worst scandal ever. By far.

As ThinkProgress notes, "mainstream media outlets have extensively reported emerging details about the assault, many of which have undercut Repubican attempts to create a faux-scandal out of the events, over the past three months." (Have a look at TP's extensive timeline.) 

I've also written about it here, here, and here.

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The next Republican ploy to take down Susan Rice

By Mustang Bobby

Now that the attempt to turn the attack on Benghazi into the next Watergate has gone up like a popcorn fart, the Republicans who aren't yelling at Susan Rice to get off their lawn are now demanding that the next secretary of state be "independent." Huh?

I heard Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) make such a demand the other day on NPR. He thinks Ms. Rice is too much of a "loyal soldier" to the Obama administration to be effective in the job as Secretary of State. The Los Angeles Times picks up the story:

Corker, who will be the ranking Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the new congressional term, implied that he considered Rice too much of a partisan and urged Obama to pick a more "independent" person as chief diplomat.

"All of us here hold the secretary of State to a different standard than most Cabinet members," he said. "We want somebody of independence."

He implied that Rice, who is close to the president, was, instead, a "loyal soldier." Corker also seemed to contrast Rice and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, with whom he said he has had a positive and "transparent" relationship "from day one."

Collins said that after a 75-minute session with Rice she still had many unanswered questions and remains "troubled" that on the Benghazi issue Rice played "a political role at the height of a contentious presidential election campaign."

This is really very pure bullshit, the kind you can only get from the finest kind of partisan wingnut.

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Rice and Benghazi: Why is this so fucking hard for Republicans to understand?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

And so the Republican obsession with the tragic Benghazi attack and its aftermath -- and specfically with comments Ambassador Susan Rice made on the Sunday talk shows about how the attack wasn't pre-meditated (and so not a planned act of terrorism) -- continues. Rice met with key Republicans on Capitol Hill the past couple of days, but apparently the meetings didn't go well. Or, at least, these key Republicans didn't emerge from the meetings content with what they heard:

The Wednesday meeting in a secure briefing room in the Capitol basement came a day after a similar sit-down Rice had with three key voices on foreign policy and defense issues went terribly wrong. GOP Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte, all members of the Armed Services Committee, said they were more "troubled" about the Benghazi affair than they had been before their meeting with Rice.

And Graham and Ayotte went so far as to say they would place a hold on her possible nomination.

And this gang of three was joined by one of the Beltway's overhyped "moderates":

Even Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, just the type of moderate Republican who might help break a filibuster on a nomination, said there were still too many questions about why Rice incorrectly characterized the Sept. 11 assault in five Sunday talk show interviews as the result of spontaneous protests at the same time the Libyan president was calling it a terrorist attack.

"I don't understand why she would not at least qualify her response to that question," Collins told reporters after emerging from a 75-minute, closed-door meeting with Rice.

Troubled... don't understand...

Seriously, are they fucking stupid?

I've said this before, but I'll say it again: "On Benghazi, it's desperately partisan Republicans vs. Obama, the CIA, and the facts."


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Rice burners

By Carl 

It strikes me that the Republicans are being a little disingenuous in their efforts to derail the not-even-announced nomination of UN Ambassador Susan Rice to Secretary of State, replacing the resigning Hillary Clinton.

Her CV, for one, suggests an intelligent and gifted person who would be adept at managing foreign affairs for the Obama administration, perfect for the job. In this, she would outshine the presumptive second choice, Senator John Kerry, which is no easy feat.

The controversy, as you know doubt know ad nauseam, is Rice's comments in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the Benghazi compound of the American ambassador there.

The facts are pretty clear: an organized attack occured on the compound on September 11. Either coincidentally or in a coordinated misdirection, there was also a protest in Egypt over some bloody idiot's idea of a prank on the same day. It doesn't really matter how Egypt played into this, except it also made a convenient excuse to buy a little time if needed.

Rice went on the Sunday talk shows, and implied that the Egypt attack may have been a part of the Libyan massacre, even if tangentially. This was the talking point the CIA had handed up to the administration, which greenlighted it as an interim explanation, even though it was clear from the get-go this was a terrorist attack.

Why the deception? The CIA had assets on the ground in Libya that would have been exposed if their information had been made public.

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Rice burners: McCain, Graham, and Ayotte continue to bully Susan Rice over Benghazi

By Mustang Bobby

This was doomed from the outset:

What was supposed to be a make-nice meeting on Tuesday seemed only to make things more contentious between the White House and Senate Republicans over U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's comments following the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Rice came face to face with some of her harshest Republican critics, hoping to allay their concerns about whether she misled Americans regarding what precipitated the assault. President Obama has staunchly defended Rice and is said to be considering her for his next secretary of state, but the meeting apparently only served to deepen GOP skepticism.

"Bottom line, I'm more disturbed now than I was before," said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.).

Rice and Acting CIA Director Michael Morell met privately with Graham and Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), three members of the Senate Armed Services Committee who have been leading the GOP charge against the administration since the attack that led to the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

Ayotte said she left the meeting with Rice "more troubled, not less."

McCain told reporters that he and his colleagues remain "significantly troubled by many of the answers that we got and some that we didn't get concerning evidence that was overwhelming leading up to the attack on our consulate that we tried to get."

Unless Ms. Rice had gone into the meeting and slit open her wrists, there wasn't going to be any other outcome than what we got, so the only thing you can say is that at least she tried. She would have been excoriated if she hadn't made the effort.

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