Moe Lane

Cynical, but more or less correct:

The hundred pages of Benghazi e-mails released this week tell us almost nothing about how four Americans came to die so tragically in that Libyan city. But they are a case study in why nothing works in Washington.

Rather than reading these messages for their substance on Benghazi (on which officials were still basically clueless three days after the attack), try perusing them as an illustration of how the bureaucracy responds to crisis — especially when officials know they will be under the media spotlight.

What you find is a 100-page novella of turf-battling and backside-covering.

Also: damning.  We were told that this administration was different, somehow.  Which was, of course… a false thing, told to people who are now learning better, and we have to remember that people do not deserve to be lied to, even if they had been warned ahead of time.  The point is that Barack Obama – and his entire staff, explicitly including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – is a creature of the system, not its nemesis.

No, seriously, this is the angle that they’re going to run with:

“We’re portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots,” said one Obama administration official who was part of the Benghazi response. “It’s actually closer to us being idiots.”

Personally, I take the position that the administration needs to embrace the healing power of ‘and,’ here. But as the philosopher once put it: men must paddle before they can swim. (more…)

You picked a hell of a week for this subtitle, Powers:

We are coming off four years of being oversold one fantastical story after another about the evils of Obama-land; stories that didn’t pan out.

You want to call for a mulligan? – I’m only going to offer it because you were horrified about the Kermit Gosnell case.  I’m a fair-minded man.

Moe Lane

PS: I just watched that Jay Carney press conference.  Not many journalists there thought that there wasn’t a Benghazi story…

McClatchy (!) has decided to get in on the Benghazi dogpile, probably because, hey, no line for this one*!

Lost in the controversy over who requested revisions of CIA-written talking points on September’s attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans is one key fact: In every iteration of the document, the CIA asserted that a video protest preceded the assaults, and no official reviewing the talking points suggested that that was in error.

Yet interviews with U.S. officials and others indicate that they knew nearly immediately that there had been no protest outside the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi before attackers stormed it, setting a fire that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and Sean Smith, a State Department computer expert. A subsequent attack on a CIA annex nearby killed two security contractors, former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.

Why the CIA insisted that there had been a protest tied to a YouTube video that mocked the Prophet Muhammad for several days after the attack, mirroring some news reports, has never been publicly explained.

Well, never been publicly explained by the CIA. Everybody reading this knows that the actual reason that the protest was linked to the video is because the Obama administration could argue that there’s no realistic way to predict when a random event like a ‘spontaneous demonstration’ would go deadly. But a planned terrorist operation? Yeah, the American public has an expectation that counter-terrorism agencies are supposed to catch that sort of thing. Goodness knows that the Obama administration has been pushing itself as being hyper-competent and on-the-ball; a disaster like Benghazi** might have destroyed that narrative.  Which is why they kicked the can down the road by claiming that nonsense about a video. (more…)

Alt title: Jim channels ME – God help him – on CNN.

Which is to say: he said pretty much what I would have, assuming of course that anybody was ever insane enough to put me on CNN.

The short version: Jim did some vigorous pushback on the excuse of Oh, well, we’d cover this story except that there’s some random person on the Right pounding the table so we can’t look like loons that far too many people in the media like to use. As Jim put it in his Morning Jolt:
(more…)

John Dickerson took perhaps too long to get to this paragraph, and he wrote it through gritted teeth, but he does put a finger on the central problem for the Obama administration right now:

The substantive differences between the president and Republicans on the budget may be insurmountable, but now it seems like even if the pipe dream of a substantive budget agreement could be reached it wouldn’t be enough. Even if Republican senators can engage in a trust-building exercise with the White House, how can they convince their constituents that the president is offering them a fair deal on the budget? A poisoned well is now roiling. Any Republican who tries to convince their constituents about a deal will now likely get funny looks. Their constituents would wonder why they were engaged in negotiations with an administration that has told evolving stories about its response to the attack in Benghazi and that houses an IRS targeting conservative groups.

(more…)

Just checking.

Pat Smith wishes Hillary Clinton a Happy Mothers day, noting that Hillary’s got her kid but “I dont have mine – because of her.”

Video at the link – and no, that’s not particularly out of context, either.  I’ll be honest; I don’t buy into the absolute moral authority argument.  But a large section of the antiwar movement did, and so I’d like to hear them either a). admit that it was all hypocritical BS on their part; or b). start savaging Hillary Clinton just as viciously as they tried to savage George W. Bush.  Either will suit, really.  Because, again: under the Left’s own rules this woman absolutely must be answered.  Not my rules: the Left’s.  I expect the antiwar Left to live by its own moral code, even if it can’t live by a mainstream one…

Moe Lane

PS: Winding up Cindy Sheehan all those years ago and releasing her in the direction of George W Bush – all to try to win a Presidential election – was pretty contemptible.  Just wanted to remind people.

(H/T Instapundit) This editorial had me …well, shrugging and conceding that there was a possibility… until this point:

And just in case Benghazi does end up costing [Hillary] Clinton the White House, there’s someone else ready and willing to take her place in the 2016 race.

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Yeeeeeeah. Do you know what we do to liberal Democrats from Massachusetts who run for President in this country? Do you, do you? That’s right! We rip their hearts out and then throw the hearts on the ground and then we make them dance on their own hearts!  We do that until they have no dignity left!  And then we smack them in the face, laugh, and elect the other guy. (more…)

Apparently nobody told the n-dimensional geniuses over at the White House that it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.

Transcript of remarks, courtesy of the Weekly Standard:

“There is something called Benghazi going on,” said [NBC's Lisa] Myers. “And I think the Democrats now are starting to worry about it. I started–I got calls from a number of Democrats yesterday trying to undermine Greg Hicks’s testimony, saying he wasn’t demoted, etc. So I think they feel that some damage was done by those three witnesses on Wednesday.”"

(more…)

So, apparently this ad was ready to go last year, but didn’t run it because of the Mitt Romney campaign.

Free advice to the RNC. Don’t ever make a weapon like that again, only to hide it because the nominee got cold feet. LEAK IT, YOU FOOLS.

Moe Lane

P.S. Aaron Gardner argues on Twitter that  ABC put this up in order to hit the RNC/Romney one last time, and not because of, you know, dead Americans.  I am not quite that cynical on that particular subject, but I can see it from here.

Now this, ladies and gentlemen, is how you leak something.

As in, you tell somebody that there’s something in a particular bloc of testimony that’s important, only you can’t talk about it at all, so never mind. Because, of course, that always works to keep people uninterested.

…will be judged by future researchers to have started to slide off of the beam:

[Hillary] Clinton — how much she knew, when she knew it, and whether she willingly participated in a cover up — was a central theme of the [Benghazi] hearing. And Wednesday, the story did move a large step closer to Clinton. Star witness Gregory Hicks, who was the Deputy Chief of Mission in Libya the night of the attack, charged that Clinton’s key State Department lieutenant and longtime family retainer, Cheryl Mills, made a concerted effort to block him from meeting with a Congressional delegation and that he had never been interviewed by the FBI in connection to the attack. Hicks said that he had been demoted after asking too many questions of his superiors about their response to Benghazi.

Republicans repeatedly raised the fact that Mills, a former deputy White House counsel and Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, personally called Hicks to express that she was upset that he had met with Rep. Jason Chaffetz without a lawyer present. So was the fact that administration lawyers had told Hicks and the Regional Security Officer not to speak with congressional investigators, as well as Hicks’ claim that he briefed Clinton the night of the attack and characterized it as an act of terror.

(more…)