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- Senator Johnson doesn’t know his what from a hole in the ground?
Benghazi. We got caught with our pants down and four Americans were killed. Why? We didn’t know when it happened–except that we didn’t have enough security after Congress voted down the State Department request for more funds for security. Now everyone agrees it was al-Qaeda.
But the grandstanding goes on. First, the Republican Party, also known as Fox News, tried and tried and tried again to embarrass President Obama with it during the election. Why didn’t he know it was an orchestrated terrorist attack five minutes after it occurred? After all, the Bush Administration knew who committed the 9/11 attacks–they had all these memos they’d been ignoring since Georgie was in office. Evidently, they’ve never heard of the word “investigation” before. When you don’t know what happened, you have to spend a little time trying to find out what did. You don’t, say, blame it on Saddam Hussein when he had nothing to do with it, do you?
Well, that didn’t get any traction because nobody thought Mitt Romney would have any more of a clue (and probably less). But that hasn’t stopped the grandstanding. It rolled off Obama’s back, let’s see if we can land it on Hillary.
Ahhh, Hillary Clinton, don’t mess with her boys–she takes no prisoners. Her testimony delayed by a concussion and blood clot near the brain–which the noise machine tried to get people to believe was faked–she testified last week and wiped the floor with Senators Johnson and McCain. Poor Ron Johnson, not only was he smacked down by Hillary, but he tried to call her emotional response faked and got smacked down by Soledad O’Brien! McCain used his five minutes of “questioning” to be the querolous old man he’s become. Hillary smacked him down by smacking down Congress for NOT providing the security funds that were needed, effectively tossing the hot potato back at him.
That’s Republican obstructionism in a nutshell–prevent the Obama administration from doing something that needs getting done. Then, when the consequences of not getting it done come home to roost–blame it on Obama.
The right has gotten one win out of this–they forced the withdrawal of Susan Rice from consideration as the new Secretary of State so that John Kerry could be persuaded to withdraw from his seat in the Senate, a strategically bad move for the Democrats.
But what gets me in all this is that the one word the media uses consistently to describe Hillary Clinton is “polarizing”. A poll recently put her favorable rating at 65% and unfavorable rating at 29%–very close to the same percentage of people who consistently supported George Bush. In other words, Republicans. Republicans hate Hillary. Republicans hate Obama. The media intones that Obama is the most polarizing President in U.S. history. Why doesn’t the media get a clue? It’s the Republican party that is the polarizing element in America because they hate anyone who isn’t one of them. And these so-called patriots are going to cause the country they claim to love to crash and burn.
And what will they do? Blame it on somebody else.
Like usual.
Greg Uchrin is a satirist, cartoonist and professional cynic in Alexandria VA. This diary is cross-posted to his blog Intravenous Caffeine, the post-Bush era successor to HAIL DUBYUS.
2 Comments
I’m no McCain fan, but your depiction of his testimony is not correct. Senator McCain made a strong speech, which can be looked at in the c-span transcript records. In the abstract, disregarding the main fact never brought up in these hearings, that there was no stability in the country of Libya that could support any consul or consulate designation for anything other than as a front for the CIA – still, if ‘diplomatic’ people are put in harm’s way and then killed, the manner in which this was reported on to the American people should have been a clear signal that something is very wrong in this State Department – and no belligerent display on Hillary’s part requesting more funds can paper that over. You didn’t need more funds to do the things Senator McCain points out were not done in this situation.
“…Were you and the president made aware of the classified cable from Chris Stevens that said that the United States consulate in Benghazi could not survive a sustained assault? Numerous warnings, including personally to me, about the security were unanswered or unaddressed. It took a CNN reporter looking through the consulate to find Chris Stevens’ last warning.
When were you made aware of that cable? When were you made aware of the attack on the British ambassador and the assassination attempts and the closing of the consulate there? And what actions were taken? What was the president’s activities during that seven-hour period?
On the anniversary of the worst attack in American history, September 11th, we didn’t have Department of Defense forces available for seven hours. …
I categorically reject your answer to Senator Johnson about, “Well, we didn’t ask these survivors, who were flown to Ramstein the next day, that they — that this was not a spontaneous demonstration.” To say that it’s because an investigation was going on?
The American people deserve to know answers, and they certainly don’t deserve false answers. And the answers that were given the American people on September 15th by the ambassador to the United Nations were false — in fact, contradicted by the classified information which was kept out of the secretary (sic) to the United Nations’ report, who by the way in the president’s words, “had nothing to do with Benghazi,” which questions why she was sent out to start with.
Why is it that the administration still refuses to provide the full text of the e-mails regarding the deletion of references to Al Qaida and terrorism in the talking points? Why do we care? Because if the classified information had been included, it gives an entirely different version of events to the American people…
So, here we are four months later and we still don’t have the basic information. Now, if you want to go out and tell the American people what happened, you should at least have interviewed the people who were there, instead of saying, “No, we couldn’t talk to them because an FBI investigation was going on.”
And by the way, as I said at the time — I just happened to be on one of those talk shows — people don’t bring RPGs and mortars to spontaneous demonstrations. That’s a fundamental…”
I do agree with your title, though. Is anyone listening? My point would be (and I know this wasn’t McCain’s) we had no business being in that country in the first place.
“…we had no business being in that country in the first place.”
Precisely.