Why Do Conservatives Care More About Benghazi Than About The Iraq War?

Outside of perhaps Fox News, a/k/a, Faux News, and some of the lunatic fringe elements of the far right, it is now widely accepted that the Iraq War was launched by George W. Bush/Dick Chaney based on lies and manufactured intelligence.  The financial cost to America ranges between $1.7 to $3.0 trillion dollars.  In terms of casualties, a total of 4,491 U.S. service members were killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2014, and more than one in four U.S. troops have come home from the Iraq war with health problems that require medical or mental health treatment.  The Benghazi incident in Libya, in comparison, saw four (4) deaths.  Yet American conservatives remain obsessed over Benghazi even though eight committees have failed to show  fault on the part of Barack Obama and/or Hillary Clinton.   Why the obsession on the one and near total silence on the other?  The Foreign Policy offers some thoughts:

I don’t understand the disproportionate focus on a half day in Benghazi vs. more than a decade in Iraq.

When people say they just want the facts, I think: We still don’t know when the decision was made to invade Iraq, or who was involved. We still don’t know why the intelligence was so warped. We don’t even know how many Americans died in Iraq, because there has been very shoddy record-keeping on contractors’ deaths.

Yet some people, many of them in Congress, keep on calling for more info about Benghazi. What am I missing?

I asked some smart friends recently. One, retired Army Col. Charles Krohn, wrote back that:

Tom, it’s easier to understand the simple (Benghazi) than the complicated (Iraq). On the scale of misleading the Republic into acting against its best interests, however, Iraq is a million times more shocking, exactly as you suggest.

There’s another issue, somewhat sensitive. A lot of us (me included) supported the war in Iraq because we believed the WMD argument, especially after Colin Powell embraced it. So it’s a trifle embarrassing for the masses to acknowledge we were manipulated. For those who lost life or limb, embarrassing is hardly an appropriate expression.

That’s disturbing.

The other possible answer?  The reptilian brains of the far right who STILL have not gotten over a black man occupying the White House and the agitators of talk radio.. 

Benghazi Committe Backfires: Support for Hillary Grows

Many have argued - and some Republicans have slipped up and admitted - that the GOP lead House Benghazi Committee was a political witch hunting from the very beginning with only one goal: to damage Hillary Clinton.  A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal Survey seems to indicate that more Americans now see the Committee's hearings for what they really have always been.  The result? Hillary Clinton has seen a rise in support even as more view the Benghazi Committee as nakedly partisan and seeking to to impact the likely Democrat presidential nominee.  Here are highlights from Politicususa.com: 

The new NBC News/Wall Street Journal Survey contains some great news for Hillary Clinton. Since her appearance in front of the Benghazi Select Committee, there has been a nine-point swing in her favor on the issue of her emails.

According to the survey, before her Benghazi committee testimony, 47% of those polled said that Clinton’s emails were an important factor in deciding whether or not to support her, and 44% said the emails were not an important factor. After Clinton’s testimony, 48% believed that the emails were not an important factor, and 42% said they were. There was also a five point increase in the number of respondents who thought the Benghazi investigation is unfair and partisan. 

The NBC News poll reveals that having Hillary Clinton testify in front of the House Benghazi Select Committee was a major mistake by the Republican Party The hearing gave Clinton a platform and allowed her to turn public opinion on her emails in her favor. Republicans thought they would use the high-profile hearing to stop Hillary Clinton. Instead, they shot themselves in the feet.

According to all the recent polling, Clinton is a stronger presidential candidate today than she was before she testified in front of the Benghazi Committee. She now leads in every early state and nationally. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) gave Clinton a surge in momentum when he admitted that the Benghazi Select Committee was a partisan political stunt.

A hearing that was supposed to yield talking points and thirty-second campaign ads for the Republican side has rallied Democrats around their frontrunner and put her on a steady march towards the White House. 

Hillary Slays Dragons, Loses 3 Opponents in One Week

Some on the right in particular thought that October would be a disastrous month for Hillary Clinton.  With only a week left, so far the month has turned out to be the complete opposite.  Yes, her campaign is still fraught with dangers, but she has seen three would be opponents end their campaigns and the Benghazi Committee failed to do her any damage despite the best efforts of the GOP members.  Pieces in Vanity Fair and Salon at Hillary's surprisingly positive month.  First are excerpts from Vanity Fair:

On Friday, former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee announced that he would drop his bid for the White House, making him the third Democrat to either drop out or forego joining the race against Hillary Clinton.

With his exit, Chafee shall be forever remembered in this cycle as the third Democratic Clinton rival to disappear in a single week: former senator Jim Webb exited the race on Tuesday, and shortly afterwards, Vice President Joe Biden, whom many saw as a potential challenger to Clinton, announced that he would not seek the bid. 

That, combined with her well-received performance at Thursday’s 11-hour-long hearing before the House’s Select Committee on Benghazi, has made this a pretty good week for Clinton.

Then there are these excerpts from Salon:

The end of the [Joe] McCarthy witch hunt did not end conservative hostility to the State Department. 

This suspicion of the State Department has continued even in Republican administrations. During the Reagan administration Secretary of State George Schultz was famously at odds with Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger and there was little love lost between the Bush administration’s Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. When the Democrats have the executive branch it’s much, much worse. There is just something about the State Department that drives conservatives a little bit crazy.

Of course nothing on earth drives them as crazy as Bill and Hillary Clinton, their most hated enemies. The Republicans wasted tens of millions of dollars back in the 1990s trying to destroy them.
It should, therefore, come as no surprise that when the radical right’s decades-long mistrust of the State Department combined with their decades-long crusade against Hillary Clinton, the result would be an incoherent howl of suspicion, confusion and inchoate rage. Throughout that marathon hearing yesterday, if there was a theme, a theory or even a rough guess about what Clinton was supposed to have done, it was extremely hard to see what it was. Under the leadership of Trey Gowdy, a man reputed to be a crack prosecutor, the Republicans were disorganized and unprepared, lurching from one topic to another without connecting any dots or explaining to the nation just what in the world this torturous exercise was supposed to achieve. 

So it’s about spies in the State Department. As usual. Only this time it’s Hillary Clinton, their most hated nemesis, the one who simply won’t go down no matter how hard they hit her. The frustration was palpable.

Joe McCarthy was eventually brought low by his own hubris. A man named Joseph Welch put the final point on it when he said, “at long last sir, have you no decency?” It was Congressman Elijah Cummings who made the similarly powerful moral statement in the hearing yesterday when he said:

“I don’t know what we want from you. Do we want to badger you over and over again until you get tired, until we do get the gotcha moment he’s talking about?

“We’re better than that. We are so much better. We are a better country. And we are better than using taxpayer dollars to try to destroy a campaign. That’s not what America is all about.”

The good news is that if yesterday’s hearing is any example, today’s witch hunters are all ham-handed Kevin McCarthys instead of Tail-gunner Joes. Right wing conspiracy nuts aren’t what they used to be. Maybe we’re making progress after all. 

The Benghazi Bust

You know things are not going well when Fox News drops its coverage of an event that is supposed to have been Hillary Clinton's Waterloo long before the end of Hillary's appearance before the GOP inquisitors.  With no new sensational information discovered and much self-embarrassment accomplished, one has to wonder if the House Republicans will finally cease their partisan inspired witch hunt.  Rather than hurting Clinton, their circus event may have actually helped her.   A piece in Salon looks at the failed GOP effort.  Here are highlights:

There’s not really any good news for the GOP in the aftermath of yesterday’s House Benghazi Committee interrogation of Hillary Clinton. There had been some flickers of hope among conservative activists that the committee Republicans, led by chairman Trey Gowdy, would finally produce the long-rumored “smoking gun” that would prove once and for all that Hillary did… whatever evil thing she supposedly did with regard the Benghazi. Or maybe they’d goad her into making a terrible gaffe that would ruin her politically. But that’s not what happened.

After weeks of damaging stories about the Benghazi committee’s partisan agenda and vanishing credibility, it might have done Gowdy some good to put together a quiet and informative hearing that was befitting the “serious investigation” that he insisted he was leading. Instead, Gowdy took the lead role in proving correct each one of his Republican colleagues who said the committee was focused on damaging Hillary Clinton’s presidential chances.

Gowdy’s implication – that Stevens either lacked access to Clinton or that Clinton prioritized her communications with Blumenthal – was flagrantly false, and Gowdy knows it was false. Stevens had access to Clinton through a variety of means and could have been in touch with her at a moment’s notice if he’d wanted. But Gowdy used the frequency of email communication – and only email communication – to give the impression that Blumenthal was in the loop while the ambassador was not.

This theme was picked up on by his Republican colleagues, who weren’t nearly as subtle in their dishonesty as Gowdy was. 
Democrats used their time to make clear just how pointless they believe the entire investigation is and allowed Clinton her opportunities to offer sanitized and carefully worded defenses of the Libya intervention. At least one member of the committee used the hearing to pose useful and interesting questions about issues that arose from the Benghazi attack: Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL). She asked Clinton about policies for outsourcing security to local militias and security contractors, which has caused problems for the State Department and other government agencies.

All in all it was a bust for Gowdy and the Benghazi committee, to the point that conservative pundits were griping about how poorly the Republicans fared against Clinton. Anyone who doubted that the committee was a partisan exercise in Clinton-bashing came away free of doubts. The only sliver of good news for the Republicans is that it likely won’t matter. The notion that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton engineered some sort of evil Benghazi cover-up is already assumed to be true in the minds of conservatives and Republican voters. The fact that Gowdy and crew spent the day stepping on rakes and scoring own-goals in a failed attempt to “prove” it won’t change their minds.

Other than hoping to hurt Hillary's presidential bid, the only other motivation behind the Benghazi Committee has been to play to the delusional base of the GOP that have an obsessive hatred towards her  that will never change regardless of what she does or doesn't do.  This obsession traces back to the Bill Clinton years in the White House and will never end.  Meanwhile, for most Americans, the Clinton years look pretty good compared to the economic and foreign policy disasters brought on by the Bush/Cheney years of misrule.

Republicans Fail To Take Down Hillary Clinton

After squander millions of taxpayer dollars in the partisan witch hunt, the GOP controlled House Benghazi Committee failed to do any damage to Hillary Clinton today.  Not doubt there is much gnashing of teeth in Teabagistan over the fact that no "smoking gun" was revealed.  Not that one was reasonably expected to be found given the fact that numerous other committees failed to find evidence that would send the spittle flecked, knuckle draggers of the GOP base into orgasms.   As for committee chair, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), a former prosecutor, one is left wondering how he ever got convictions if this circus is typical of his investigations.  The Huffington Post looks at the failed GOP efforts.  Here are highlights:

Hillary Clinton maintained a calm, unruffled demeanor for 11 hours Thursday, as Republican after Republican grilled her in relation to the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi and about her use of a private email server as secretary of state. 

"So far today, I've said, 'good morning,' 'good afternoon,' 'good evening.' So let me go ahead and say, 'good night,'" Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) said around 8 p.m., acknowledging that the hearing had began at 10 a.m. (with some short breaks throughout the day). 

Despite the long hours, Republicans failed to catch Clinton off her guard or come up with significant new revelations to argue that she was negligent in her duties that led to the death of four Americans in Libya. 

Her appearance is likely to give her a boost with the base, especially coming off from a strong performance after the first Democratic debate last week. Republicans weren't able to score any major hits and knock her off her feet, and Clinton showed she had the stamina to withstand the GOP attacks -- a fact that Republican lawmakers grudgingly seemed to acknowledge.

Indeed, many of the members seemed more exasperated than Clinton as the day wore on. 

"I don't know what we want from you," ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said, his voice rising during hour 10 of the hearing. "Do we want to badger you over and over again until you get tired, until we do get the 'gotcha' moment that he's talking about? We're better than that. ... We're better than using taxpayer dollars to try to destroy a campaign. That's not what America is all about. So you can comment if you like. I just had to get that off my chest."

But some of the most heated debates were between the Republican and Democratic lawmakers, who disagree about whether the committee should exist at all. 

Indeed, the opening statements of Cummings and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the committee's chairman, both focused on intra-committee politics. Gowdy tried to argue why, although there have been seven other investigations into Benghazi, his is still necessary. Cummings called for Congress to disband the committee. 

"It is time now for the Republicans to end this taxpayer-funded fishing expedition," Cummings said. "We need to come together and shift from politics to policy. That's what the American people want, shifting from politics to policy."

Clinton was the only one who actually spent her entire time discussing the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi.

 As for Gowdy, is it just me, or does he come across as a peevish closet case?

Today's GOP Benghazi Show Trial

Love her or hate her, today Hillary Clinton will testify before the House Benghazi Committee in hearings about as objective as Stalin's show trials of the 1930's that had no purpose other than to destroy Stalin's chief rivals.  Exposing the truth bore no role in the trials orchestrated by Stalin and the same holds true for the circus that Republicans will oversee today.  As the image above underscores, there have been many more embassy staff deaths under George W. Bush, yet there have been no comparable hearings or committees.  No, the Benghazi Committee has one real goal only: damage Hillary Clinton. Along the way, of course, Republican members of the committee will get to grandstand for the spittle flecked, knuckle dragging members of the GOP base that hate Clinton no matter what she does or doesn't do.  In some ways the hearings are the logical outcome of the GOP's descent into insanity and the alternate reality that it's base lives in daily.  A piece in Salon looks at the Committee and it's pure political agenda.  Here are highlights:

Today Hillary Clinton will appear before the House Select Committee on Benghazi in a likely futile attempt to rebut the fever dreams of cover-up and conspiracy that the committee’s Republican members have gleaned from the comments section at Breitbart. It will be a fantastic piece of theater so far removed from the terrible events that occurred at the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012, that it might as well be occurring on the other side of a galactic wormhole. The hearing’s participants could speak gibberish for all we are really going to learn about the attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others. Assuming there even is anything more to learn that seven prior congressional investigations have not turned up.

It is a truism of modern political horse-race coverage that reporters are not really interested in accurately explaining a candidate’s positions and policies to the audience. The reason the TV cameras are turned on the candidate every single second is in hopes of catching a gaffe, that race-altering goof that undermines the message he or she is trying to pitch to voters.

The hope of inducing that type of campaign-altering gaffe is really the reason why the select committee is dragging Hillary Clinton up to Capitol Hill today. No matter what the most rabid right-wingers think, these hearings are not about investigating a cover-up the way the Watergate or Iran-contra hearings were. They are not about figuring out what really happened in Benghazi, because we already have dozens of reports produced by other congressional committees, federal agencies, and the military to explain what happened and why.

No, what the Republicans want – what they need in order to justify the colossal effort they have put into building Benghazi up to be worse that Iran-contra plus Watergate and Teapot Dome times eleventy billion – is a Clinton gaffe along the lines of “What difference does it make.” Only worse. Something that will rip off the Democratic frontrunner’s carefully spit-polished image and reveal the shrill, corrupt, power-mad harridan underneath.
[T]his has been the Republican way with Hillary Clinton for 25 years now. No matter how many investigations clear her of any wrongdoing on an issue, the GOP just cannot accept it. There must always be one piece of information it did not turn up, one thread it failed to pull until the whole sweater unraveled. 

The only question is how they will go about it. Will they grill her like a salmon, coming at her from every angle, interrupting, badgering, trying to confuse her until the internal dam that has always successfully kept her bottomless evil at bay finally bursts? Or, as Brian Beutler argues, will they be polite and restrained while testing her memory of isolated details to try and trip her up? 

[A]t heart, this is all just one long political attack ad, a sequel to “Hillary: The Movie“ in the guise of a congressional investigation. It’s theater of the absurd for an audience of suckers.

As noted before, to be a Republican nowadays, one has to lack any integrity, and be either insane, a white supremacist, a religious fanatic, motivated solely by greed, or a combination of the foregoing.  It is a very ugly reality. 

Donald Trump: George W. Was President on 9-11

The August 6, 2001 Briefing to Bush

As noted yesterday, Donald Trump has had the audacity to bring up a fact that Republicans find particularly inconvenient given their Benghazi witch hunt against Hillary Clinton which is ultimately based solely on the fact that she was Secretary of State at the time: George W. Bush was president on September 11, 2001 and, by their theory against Hillary, is responsible for the massive security failure on that fateful date.  Of course, the truth is that Bush had much more warning about a potential Bin Laden back attack that existed in the Benghazi situation.  But in the GOP alternate universe, none of this matters - or at least did not until The Donald spoke the truth (for a change).  Talking Points Memo looks at the continuing dispute roiling the GOP.  Here are excerpts: 

On Friday, Donald Trump generated substantial controversy when he asserted that George W. Bush was president at the time of the 9/11 attacks.

“When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time,” Trump said. “He was president, O.K.?”

Jeb Bush immediately pushed back, calling Trump’s comments “pathetic” and insisting “my brother kept us safe.”

The media jumped on to the burgeoning controversy. According to The New York Times the idea that Bush was president on 9/11 and failed to stop the attack is a “break from the GOP.” 

According to ABC News, George W. Bush spent the entire month of August 2001 on vacation at his ranch in Texas, which is not typical behavior for someone who is president. Other reports, however, reveal Bush continue to receive the “Presidential Daily Brief” at the ranch, strongly suggesting he was still president.

According to ABC News, George W. Bush spent the entire month of August 2001 on vacation at his ranch in Texas, which is not typical behavior for someone who is president. Other reports, however, reveal Bush continue to receive the “Presidential Daily Brief” at the ranch, strongly suggesting he was still president.

If Hillary has guilt for Benghazi, the GOP and Bush have much more guilt for the massive failure to stop 9-11 from occurring.

Trump Blasts George W. for 9-11 Attacks

With the House Republicans running the Benghazi partisan witch hunt against Hillary Clinton have unwittingly opened the door for much deserved attacks of George W. Bush's failure to protect the nation against the 9-11 attacks.   If Hillary is liable because Benghazi occurred on her watch, then Bush is liable for the 9-11 attacks.  Now, Donald Trump has seized the opening and gone on attack referring to George Bush's "reign."  Talking Points Memo looks at the this entertaining turn of event.  Here are highlights:

Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump implied that George W. Bush bore some responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in a Friday interview with Bloomberg.

“He was President,” Trump said. “Blame him, or don’t blame him, but he was President. The World Trade Center came down during his reign.”

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Trump asserted that unlike the George W. Bush, he would be “a leader” who could command the United States during national crises. 

“I think I’m much more competent than all of them,” Trump said, referring to George W. Bush and President Barack Obama.  “Say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time,” Trump told Bloomberg. 

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush took to Twitter to criticize his GOP presidential rival for the remarks, writing that his brother “kept us safe.”

2nd Republican Congressman Admits Benghazi Committee Designed To Harm Clinton

Every once in a while Republicans tell the truth, although most often it is by mistake or inadvertently.  Breaking that mold is Rep. Richard Hanna (R-NY) who has confirmed what Kevin McCarthy slipped up and stated last month: the main goal of the House Benghazi Committee has been to harm Hillary Clinton in anticipation of the 2016 presidential election.  Millions of dollars spent and hearings that have now gone on longer than the Watergate hearings - all for the partisan purpose of harming a political opponent.  Think Progress looks at this latest admission of the real agenda of the House Republicans behind the Benghazi hearings.  As the image above indicates, there were far more deaths of State Department personnel under George W. Bush, yet there was no GOP outrage.  Here are article highlights:

A second House Republican has now conceded that the overarching purpose of the House Select Committee on Benghazi has been to attack former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In September, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) argued that one of House Republicans’ successes has been using the Benghazi Committee to drive down Clinton’s poll numbers. Though McCarthy tried to walk back his controversial comments, Rep. Richard Hanna (R-NY) argued on Wednesday that the Majority Leader had it right to begin with.

“Sometimes the biggest sin you can commit in D.C. is to tell the truth,” Hanna said in an interview on Keeler in the Morning, a radio show in upstate New York. The third-term congressman paused for a moment, perhaps recognizing the importance of what he was about to say, before going on to agree with McCarthy’s original statement.

“This may not be politically correct, but I think that there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people and an individual, Hillary Clinton,” Hanna said.

For years, House Republicans had claimed the Benghazi probe was about investigating the events surrounding the 2012 attack in Libya that left four Americans dead, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, rather than undermining Clinton’s potential presidential bid.

But after McCarthy’s Kinsley gaffe, which was among the factors that doomed his seemingly-inevitable rise to the House Speakership, and now Hanna’s admission, there is growing doubt even among GOPers about the Benghazi Committee’s true purpose.

McCarthy and Hanna aren’t the only Republicans to publicly declare that the Benghazi Committee has been on a partisan quest. Over the weekend, Maj. Bradley Podliska, a Republican investigator formerly working on the Committee, revealed that he had lost his job for refusing to solely focus his investigation on Clinton. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), who heads the Committee, denies the charge.

Clinton is set to testify before the Committee, which has now continued longer than the Watergate probe, on October 22nd.

Benghazi Farce Blows up in GOP’s Face

From its outset, the GOP controlled House Benghazi committee has been a partisan witch hunt with only one goal: Damage Hillary Clinton as much as possible and Barack Obama as well should the opportunity present itself.  The GOP hit men have conveniently developed amnesia on the issue of their own cuts to funding for State Department security.   Meanwhile, they have near orgasm leaking selective tidbits to the media - which is itself part of the problem - with the knowledge that lazy journalists will likely run with the proffered GOP sound bite/talking point.  Thankfully, the charade is now getting unwanted scrutiny that shows that the committee's work has been akin to one of Josef Stalin's show trials in the 1930's.  A piece Salon looks at the GOP's wet dream unraveling.  Here are highlights:

The chaos and dysfunction currently roiling the Republican majority in the House of Representatives has made life difficult for the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Under the leadership of Trey Gowdy, the committee had been maintaining a low profile, keeping quiet and staying out of the news as it dug up dirt on Hillary Clinton to strategically leak to the press. The low-profile game plan was shot to hell by Kevin McCarthy, who bragged of the committee’s political agenda on national television, and was then forced to walk back his comments and deny saying the thing he said several times over. Suddenly, Gowdy and his committee were facing the one thing they’d hoped to avoid: scrutiny.

That scrutiny has taken the form of a front-page New York Times investigation into what the committee has been up to over the past year and half. What the paper turned up is an investigation that didn’t really seem to be going anywhere until Hillary Clinton’s emails emerged as an issue, at which point its focus “shifted” from the actual attacks in Benghazi to Clinton’s electronic communications. 

As the Times notes, the official response from the Republicans on the committee is to “dispute any suggestion that their inquiry… has been partisan or ineffective or that it has changed course.” . . . though it became harder to maintain that fiction in the aftermath of McCarthy’s inopportune truth-telling.

But the unofficial Republican response to the committee’s recent troubles is a bit more enlightening:

Senior Republican officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing confidential conversations, said that Mr. Boehner had long been suspicious of the administration’s handling of the attacks and that Mrs. Clinton’s emails gave him ato keep the issue alive and to cause political problems for her campaign.

[[N]ow Republican officials are dishing to the Times about how it was all the outgoing Speaker’s idea to focus on Hillary’s emails for political benefit. This has all the hallmarks of a cover-your-ass operation – Paul Waldman sees this as Gowdy and his people working to push away any responsibility for what is turning into a damaging story for his committee.

But it doesn’t really matter what excuses Republicans come up with. The Times story has punched a hole in the committee’s credibility and made clear just how little trust one can place in the public statements emerging from the Benghazi investigators.

The three-pronged investigation was supplanted by a singular focus on Clinton’s emails. The interviews they promised would happen were, per the Times, “never followed up on.” And its mandate seems to have been abandoned in a messy political fight that is threatening to blow up in their faces.

Ex-GOP Staffer: Benghazi Panel on Partisan Mission to Destroy Hillary

First Kevin McCarthy slipped up and made it clear that the real mission of the GOP organized Committee conducting hearings on Benghazi is to destroy Hillary Clinton. Now, a former GOP staffer who has left working for the committee has confirmed McCarthy's slip up and confirmed that the Republican majority is conducting a politically motivated probe of Hillary Clinton.  Truth be told, the GOP doesn't give a rat's ass about Benghazi except as a vehicle to destroy Hillary who they see as the main presidential rival for whichever occupant of the GOP candidate clown car ultimate gains the GOP nomination.  A piece in Politico looks at the statements of Major Bradley Podliska who was fired because of his refusal to engage in the partisan with hunt. Here are highlights:

An ex-GOP investigator for the House Select Committee on Benghazi says the Republican majority is conducting a politically motivated probe of Hillary Clinton.

Major Bradley Podliska, who was fired from the committee in June after about 10 months on the job, told CNN the panel has veered off its original course to investigate the Sept. 11, 2012 attack that left four Americans dead — instead zeroing in on Clinton following news that she used private email while Secretary of State.

The segment, to be broadcast on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, is sure to feed the partisan fire surrounding the committee, which has been on defense for more than a week after comments Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) made suggesting the committee’s work has hurt Clinton on the 2016 campaign trail, where she is the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.

A GOP Benghazi panel spokesman in a statement called Podliska's allegations “transparently false.”

The Air Force Reserve intelligence officer, who told CNN that he himself is a Republican, said he’s planning to file a lawsuit against the panel next month for wrongful termination after “resisting pressure to focus his investigative efforts solely on the State Department and Clinton's role surrounding the Benghazi attack," reads a CNN preview. 

He also alleges he was fired for taking time off the job to fulfill his military duties.

"I was fired for going on military service and I was fired for trying to conduct an objective, non-partisan, thorough investigation," Podliska will say, according to the CNN preview.

Podliska will say his firing had more to do with his unwillingness to focus his probe solely on Clinton and State — something the panel says it’s not doing — and a leave of absence he took to fulfill military service obligations. 

Podliska told CNN he was only now talking about the matter because of the panel’s continued focus on Clinton.

"I'm scared. I'm nervous. I know that this is, you know, I'm going up against powerful people in Washington. But at the end of the day I need to live with myself," he is quoted saying in the CNN report. "I told my wife, I will view myself as a coward if I don't do the right thing here."

Obviously, the GOP committee members have every reason to be lying.  For Podliska, the benefits are far less obvious.

Hillary and the GOP's Big Benghazi Mistake

The right wing Republican hearings in the House of Representatives on Benghazi have always been a witch hunt intended to damage Barack Obama and, perhaps more importantly, Hillary Clinton, whom the GOP sees as the most likely opponent of whatever political whore/charlatan the GOP manages to nominate as its standard bearer in 2016.  But even if this has been the reality, it is not good politics to admit it.  Yet that is precisely what would be House Speaker Kevin McCarthy did last week.  Now, both Hillary Clinton and other Democrats are jumping on the admission and are calling out the GOP.  Indeed, in a new ad, Hillary that calls the Benghazi hearings and the e-mail server story line as nothing more than political hatchet jobs aimed at harming her political standing.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this gift from McCarthy to Clinton and Democrats.  Here are excerpts:

When House speaker-in-waiting Kevin McCarthy claimed credit for the decline in Hillary Clinton's poll numbers because House Republicans had formed a congressional committee investigating the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, I knew it was a bad political mistake. I may have underestimated just how bad.

Consider how Clinton responded to a question about her private e-mail server during a New Hampshire townhall hosted by NBC's "Today" show co-host Savannah Guthrie on Monday:

"This committee was set up, as they have admitted, for the purpose of making a partisan political issue out of the deaths of four Americans," she said. "I would never have done that, and if I were president and there were Republicans or Democrats thinking about that, I would have done everything to shut it down."

Throughout the interview, Clinton referenced McCarthy's comments — made during a contentious interview with Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity — as a means to do something she's been unable to do ever since the e-mail story broke in March: Play offense.

She's impassioned and right on the edge of anger. Anger is, of course, not always a good thing for politicians.  But in this case, it shows Clinton at her best: Partisan, passionate and convincing.

[W]hile the Benghazi committee was aware that Clinton was the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, the GOP leadership had been very careful to frame it as simply a fact-finding effort that happened to include the former secretary of state.

McCarthy, of course, changed all that with his comments to Hannity. What McCarthy said doesn't mean that the who, what, when, where and why of Clinton's exclusive use of a private e-mail server while at the State department isn't still an issue for her. What it does mean though is that she now has a way to change the subject — or at least the terrain on which she is fighting.

That all changed with McCarthy's comments.  Now, Clinton can do exactly what she did in New Hampshire n Monday morning: Quickly acknowledge her error then turn to the "real" issue, which is how Republicans are exploiting the deaths of four Americans for their own political gain. That narrative — coupled with Clinton's passion for it — is a winner, or as close as she can get to it on an issue that has caused tons of problems for her campaign. 

It's possible that this past five days or so is simply a blip in the broader context of the campaign and the Clinton-plays-defense storyline will reassert itself. But, the Clinton team thinks that McCarthy has handed them a massive political gift, and I tend to agree.

Clinton is not the only Democrat jumping on the band wagon that the GOP has foolishly provided.  As MSNBC reports, others are now sounding off.  Here are highlights:

It’s always interesting to see what happens when a charade ends. For quite a while, congressional Republicans tried to keep up appearances, pretending their Benghazi committee was a legitimate, non-partisan search for truth – a claim no one, anywhere, seriously believed – but House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) accidental candor last week ripped off the mask.

The Washington Post reported this morning:

Democrats are taking the unprecedented step of releasing excerpts from a closed-session interview the House Benghazi committee conducted last month with Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills, accusing the panel’s Republican Chairman Trey Gowdy (S.C.) of selectively leaking information to damage Clinton in the presidential race.

In a letter signed by all five Democratic members of the panel, the lawmakers told Gowdy, “It has become obvious that the only way to adequately correct the public record is to release the complete transcript of the Committee’s interview with Ms. Mills…. [W]e plan to begin the process of correcting the public record by releasing the transcript of Ms. Mills’ interview. Since you have indicated your unwillingness to do this in a bipartisan manner, we plan to do so ourselves.”

They have the transcript – the whole thing, not excerpts edited by Republicans to advance a partisan agenda – and they want the public to have it, too. 

I’m not entirely sure what, if anything, Gowdy can do at this point to (a) keep the truth shielded from public view; and (b) punish the Democrats on his committee for going around him.

 

But as the masquerade ends and the Benghazi committee is exposed as the partisan exercise it has always been, the politics surrounding the scheme are clearly intensifying.

 

Hillary Clinton is Not Spiraling Downward

If there is one thing that is a given in today's mainstream media it is the reality that reporters and newspapers prefer to report  the sensational (or fabricate it) rather than report the full news and refrain from editorializing.  Thus, be it online outlets or other media outlets - e.g., POTUS satellite news - one hears breathless pundits and lazy reporters buying into the meme that Hillary Clinton is spiraling downward in her prospects of winning the Democrat nomination much less the 2016 general election.  A column in the Washington Post lays out why reports of Hillary's demise are premature.  Here are excerpts:

There’s no question which is the more interesting and dynamic primary campaign right now, which inevitably leads reporters covering the other one to search for something new to write about. And in a race where there’s an obvious (if not quite certain) nominee, there will always come a point at which the press will decide that that candidate is spiraling downward, the cloak of inevitability is torn and tattered, the campaign is in crisis, the whispering from party loyalists is growing louder, and the scramble is on to find an alternative before the fall occurs.

This is the moment we have come to with Hillary Clinton.

First there was the fevered speculation about Vice President Biden running against her, based on second-hand reports that Biden has had conversations about the possibility of running. I’m sure that Biden thinks about being president about as often as he brushes his teeth, but that doesn’t mean there’s an actual candidacy in the offing. But it isn’t just him. ABC News reports that “a one-time high-ranking political adviser to Al Gore tells ABC News that a group of friends and former aides are having a ‘soft conversation’ about the possibility that Gore run for president in 2016.” Gore himself is not interested, but who cares?

If there’s one thing that stories like these should never be based on, it’s the mere fact that people who used to work for a particular politician would like that politician to run. Longtime political figures like Gore and Biden trail behind them a tribe of former staffers, advisers, fundraisers and the like, all of whom have entertained fantasies about either a job in the West Wing or at least a heady proximity to the most powerful person on earth. 

[R]ight now there’s virtually no evidence that the Democratic field is going to expand beyond the current five candidates. And what about the idea that Clinton is in a drastic decline? Bernie Sanders has generated plenty of interest and some support, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Democrats are rejecting Clinton; if there’s any evidence that Sanders supporters won’t be perfectly happy to back her if and when she’s the nominee, I haven’t seen it.

If you look over the long term at Clinton’s favorability ratings, you do see a drop, but it’s not a huge one, and not the kind of precipitous decline you’d associate with a campaign in free fall. Her favorability is down substantially from when she was Secretary of State, but that’s a natural consequence of her becoming a partisan political figure again. A year ago her favorability was just under 50 percent, and now it’s around 41 or 42 — not what she’d like, surely, but hardly a crisis.

As Nate Silver observes, whether or not the movement in the polls is terribly meaningful, reporters have an incentive to describe it as such, and then run with the implications:

Even if there were no Clinton scandals, however, she’d probably still be receiving fairly negative press coverage. The campaign press more or less openly confesses to a certain type of bias: rooting for the story. Inevitability makes for a really boring story, especially when it involves a figure like Clinton who has been in public life for so long.

Instead, the media wants campaigns with lots of “game changers,” unexpected plot twists and photo finishes. If the story isn’t really there, the press can cobble one together by invoking fuzzy concepts like “momentum” and “expectations,” or by cherry-picking polls and other types of evidence.

 [T]he race will have some ups and downs, Bernie Sanders may even win a primary or two, and in the end Clinton will prevail. .

That’s not as dramatic a story as a reporter covering the campaign might like. But at this point it’s still the most likely outcome.

 

Will Benghazi Testimony Work to Hillary's Advantage?

As noted numerous times on this blog, Republicans - or perhaps I should clarify, and say lunatics in the party base - are obsessed with Benghazi.  No conspiracy or rumor is too far fetched to not be grasped and believed by spittle flecked Christofacsists and Tea Party loons who seemingly all have IQ's under 70 (no offense intended to the retarded).  Given this reality, GOP House members have decided to have yet more hearings on Benghazi in order to  further prostitute themselves to the unwashed swamp dwellers of the party base.  Some suggest, however, that this exercise could backfire and actually work to Hillary Clinton's advantage.   Here are excerpts from a piece in Politico that thinks the GOP is unwittingly helping Hillary:

Three out of four Democratic insiders in the early states believe testifying before Congress about the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, will work to Hillary Clinton’s advantage.

This week’s survey of The POLITICO Caucus, a bipartisan group of the most influential activists, operatives and elected officials in Iowa and New Hampshire, found that most Democrats think it would be beneficial to Clinton when she is called to discuss the matter before Congress, something she is expected to do at some point, likely this summer.

Democrats were skeptical that Clinton would get a fair hearing, but were confident she would do a good job shutting down questioners in the hopes of moving on from the issue.

“Republicans prefer the safety of manufactured outrage on Benghazi. In person, I think Clinton will crush their questions,” said an Iowa Democrat.

Added a New Hampshire Democrat, “As she has proven many times before, Hillary is not afraid to testify and is a very good witness; she will walk out of the hearing room enhanced.”

A majority of Republicans — nearly 60 percent — also said it would be helpful for Clinton to address the issue head-on (she appeared before Congress once before on this issue in 2013). Several Republicans warned some in their party could overdo the confrontation, which could work to Clinton’s advantage if she appears to be answering questions openly and honestly.

“It is a real opportunity for her to face this and defuse it—the R’s will not be able to resist the temptation to gang up and it may actually engender some sympathy for her, hard as that is to imagine,” said a New Hampshire Republican.

Another Granite State Republican acknowledged, “Hillary is at her strongest when she answers her critics head-on. She should embrace it — and hope her opponents overplay their hands. Which they could do, easily.”

74 percent of Democrats and 22 percent of Republicans — including one-third of the 15 New Hampshire Republicans who responded this week — say that the Benghazi attack is not quite as much of a hot-button issue for the GOP base as it was in the aftermath of the attacks and during the 2014 midterm elections.

“The nut job conspiracy theorists on the fringe love the issue. Everyone else sees shades of gray in a horrible, messy, tragic situation, and how it was handled,” said a New Hampshire Republican. “Could have happened just as easily in a Republican administration.”

Sadly, nowadays "nut job conspiracy theorists" describes a majority of the GOP base. Logic, reason and objective reality are now scorned by the GOP base, especially among Christofascists.