For eleven hours on October 22, 2015, former, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sat before a committee of mostly Republicans, whose only goal was trying to make her look bad before the nation. This was simply because she had the temerity to run for president of the United States and was subsequently beating the brains out of all their candidates in the polls.
Of course that wasn’t the announced reason for this ridiculous farce. Chairman Trey Gowdy tried to tell us that they were looking for the reasons Benghazi had happened and solutions to the problem of it ever happening again. Gowdy failed to mention that Benghazi was not alone, that since 2001there have been more than 100 terrorist incidents affecting American installations all around the world. Of course none of them involved a former Secretary of State who was now running for President. The Committee is an interesting, if laughable, take on a futile attempt at character assassination, which fell flat on its face and provided the final proof of what Speaker of the House candidate Kevin McCarthy had already told us, that this was simply a smear and really had nothing to do with Benghazi. It has, according to most reactions, also succeeded in establishing Hillary Clinton as the prohibitive favorite to be the next President of the United States.
It took, Democrat Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, the only veteran on the panel, who lost both legs in combat, to go after the stated, yet all but ignored, reason for the panel to exist. She was the only one who seemed at all aware that what they were supposed to be doing up there was figuring out a way that Benghazi wouldn’t happen again.
The Republicans on the panel, a pathetic collection of angry dolts, who, for the most part were loud, stupid and disrespectful in their questioning, proved McCarthy’s premise that this Committee was only there to attack the next president of the United States.
For the most part Clinton buried them, showing them up for the gang of slow witted, inconsistent, ill informed phonies that they proved themselves to be.
It wasn’t as if the hatchet men and women of the GOP were even subtle about their goals, none of which agreed with Chairman Gowdy’s stated one.
But still the Republicans kept asking the one question that we all know the answer to; how come they didn’t send help to Benghazi. We have always known that the reason was that a Republican Congress wouldn’t appropriate money for this defense.
At the end of the day Gowdy was asked if they had learned anything new by this wasted and very expensive day. His answer was that he didn’t know, that he’d have to go back and look at the transcript. Jesus Christ man, you were sitting there all day. Didn’t you at least pay attention to what was being said or were you just too upset my the fact that the morons that you had employed in this pathetic attempt at political vengance were too incompetent to do their jobs?
The biggest problem with the committee was that they didn’t know what they were trying to pin on Clinton. One clown was worried that she didn’t care enough, another that she had blamed the attack on the infamous anti-Muslim video when it was actually a terrorist group. So what! The identity of the attackers was only relevant to the process of their annihilation. The only questions that needed to be answered were how to get early warning and how to defend or abandon, and the only committee member who was interested in that was the aforementioned Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat who wasn’t there to smear Hillary.
The committee learned noting new about why we went into Libya, nothing about the result of our incursion, nothing about what we gained or lost here, nothing about those that carried out the attack and absolutely nothing abut what could have been done to protect our people and what needs to be done to prevent further attacks of this kind against our installations around he world.
On top of that they didn’t touch Hillary, who cut them all off at the knees, who looked more presidential than ever and who handled their disrespectful incompetence with a dignity and intelligence that those on the panel could, desperately, have used, themselves.
Just to give the reader an idea of the lack of intelligent approach that the GOP Committee members indulged in: Susan Brooks R-Ind.: Carried on about the difference in size of two piles of emails, one from 2011 and one from 2012, as if that actually had some relevance to how to protect our diplomatic core in the future. She didn’t seem to understand that everyone but her knew that Steven’s assignment was a risky one. It was a big surprise to Brooks that Stevens knew he was on a dangerous assignment and that he took it and tried his best to accomplish it. What does she think we were doing over there in a war zone, playing tiddlywinks?
Congressman Lynn Westmorland, R-GA apologized for speaking slowly and used being a southerner as an excuse but those who heard his questions realized that his slow speech was really the result of a slow thought process. He kept demanding yes or no answers to multiple-choice questions. I guess this is typical in the Westmorland home.
Then came Jim Jordan R-Ohio a particularly nasty little snark who seemed to be completely hung up on whether the attack was motivated by a disrespectful video of which we are all aware, or by a planned attack by an Al Qaeda like group. Jordan seemed to be so hyped on this that he could think of nothing else? It probably never occurred to him that the attack, by terrorists was probably inspired by the video. Jordan didn’t seem to understand that it was not the cause of the attack but how to deal with the attack and others like it, that was the reason for the Committee to exist. Even Trey Gowdy has stated, that was the purpose of the hearings. So why was this nasty little fool pushing so hard on this matter? Was it because the GOP members of the committee have nothing else? Was it because this whole hearing was a sham?
Jordan was not only out of line because his whole line of questioning has nothing to do with substance but he was particularly rude and obnoxious. I am sure that it will be Hillary’s pleasure once she is president to step on this cockroach and grind him into the slime he wades in.
There was also a very unsubtle, fat, smarmy hatchet man named Mike Pompeo R-Kansas with no point of view, no concept of finding out what went wrong and how to fix it but a very pointed agenda of trying to make Clinton look bad without having the facts to accomplish that feat.
The functioning reality of the mess we just witnessed, is that three different Republicans, starting with the nominated Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, followed up by an investigator for the Committee itself, who claims that he was taken off the military aspect of the attack and forced to go after Hillary, and finally Senator Richard Hanna ® NY, have all confirmed that the committee wasn’t after facts about the attack but innuendo about Secretary Clinton
All you have to do is look at Gowdy’s attention to what he’s interested in and you get the real picture. So far Gowdy has attended fewer than 10 of the Committee’s 53 interviews. He was there for interviews with Cheryl Merrill, Brian Fabiano, Jake Sullivan, and Sid Bluminthal, all of whom were involved with Clinton’s email server. He wasn’t there for three of the four security agents who survived the attack or for the testimony of the CIA director. To all but the fanatic GOP follower this would indicate that Gowdy is fascinated by Hillary’s emails, but doesn’t give a good God damn about what really happened in Benghazi or who is responsible for it.
Gowdy and his sycophants keep whining that they only want the truth about Benghazi but what they really want is some small hint that Hillary has done something, anything, that they can nail her for. The fact that this small something just isn’t there, has no effect on them, nor does it direct their misguided actions to anything but their tunnel vision attempt to get something on her. Meanwhile they are throwing away millions in taxpayer money that the GOP claims to be trying so jealously to protect
Democrat Adam Smith who is on the Benghazi Committee was on the tube attacking the committee for being “partisan” and for knowing, absolutely, that what they seek just isn’t there. When an actual member of the Committee says that they are wasting taxpayer money it’s really time to shut them down and for Attorney General Loretta Lynch to start issuing indictments for fraudulent use of taxpayer funds. Daryl Issa should be the first to be called to answer for his nakedly obvious partisan behavior, along with John Boehner and Trey Gowdy.
Gowdy himself was on the tube trying to slither out of the whole mess that he is leading, saying that Hillary is only one of seventy witnesses and that the Committee’s interest in her is not related to her email. Okay Trey, then how come all you talk about is her email? How come it was this investigation that led to the noise over her email?
Gowdy bumbles into the fact that he is a former prosecutor and in that vein is asked how, as a former prosecutor, he would react, to the people who are coming out of the woodwork and claiming that the aim of the Committee is to attack Hillary, not to uncover anything new about Benghazi. Gowdy babbles about those people having no knowledge of what he and his henchmen are doing. Then he goes on to say that when Boehner called him to form this committee he never mentioned Clinton. Yeah and I have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.
The facts are that there have already been seven committees, all of them headed up by Republicans, all of which found that Hillary and Obama had no responsibility for the Benghazi attacks and the deaths of our people there. Even more important, anyone who knows how government works knows that the Office of the Secretary of State does not command troops in the field. In this case, it was the responsibility of the CIA and the Pentagon, along with the Department of State Security forces. If any of those government offices had any inkling that the U.S. Mission was in any danger it was their job to protect it. They screwed up, no question, but the White House and the Secretary of State had nothing to do with that. It was below their pay grade.
All these things have already been established in previous committee hearings so why another committee now? Simple. Hillary was busting the polls and the GOP came up with this simplistic strategy to cut into her lead. Only an intellectually challenged five year-old child would buy anything else. This description may fit many Republican voters as well as many of those they have put in office, but anyone with any intelligence can only look at the facts and know that this is a political operation and that it has nothing to do with what happened in Benghazi, all of which has long ago been revealed. Gowdy, Issa and Boehner, as already stated, belong in jail over this one.
After 17 months the head of the CIA, the organization that ran this station, has not been called in to testify. Why not? The military commanders have not been called in. Why not? Gowdy claims to have interviewed 70 witnesses and is planning to see 50 more. Who the hell is he interviewing? Do they have any significance? Elijah Cummings, a democratic member of the committee says that it’s all bullshit and that Hillary has done nothing that she has been accused of. Seven previous investigations have found this to be true and now this one is just wasting taxpayer’s money.
It all comes down to what Jeffery Goldberg, the National Editor of the Atlantic says when he explains very clearly that the committee has been asking the wrong questions and looking for the wrong answers. What’s really important as it relates to Hillary is why did you support a Libyan intervention when it was the wrong thing to do and by the way failed miserably. That’s the question that should be asked and hasn’t been. The committee should be all about the role of intervention and the role that we should be playing in the Middle East. It was a half assed intervention, it failed and that country is now in ruins. That’s what’s important, not the crap that Gowdy’s group is talking about.