“No Dramatic Headlines Here”: Benghazi Select Committee Hearings Begin; Craziness Inevitably To Follow
There’s a lot going on in the world: we have a new war ramping up, Ebola is spreading, and various NFL players are discovered beating the crap out of women and children (and I for one am shocked that a group of men who have spent their lives being rewarded for cultivating their most violent instincts and abilities would turn out to be prone to violence). So it may have missed your notice that today marks the beginning of public hearings in the select committee on Benghazi, or as Ed Kilgore has termed it, Benghazi! In advance, Democrats on the committee have set up a website showing how all the questions the committee is asking have already been answered, while a Republican PAC is already airing Benghazi-themed ads against Hillary Clinton. But if you were hoping to tune in this afternoon for thundering denunciations and dark warnings of conspiracy, you may be disappointed, as David Corn reports:
In a surprising move that might disappoint right-wingers yearning for proof that Benghazi is Obama’s Watergate (or worse!), the session will not focus on whether the White House purposefully misled the public about the attacks on the US diplomatic compound in that Libyan city that claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Nor will it probe the favorite right-wing talking point that President Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, for God-knows-what reasons, ordered US forces to stand down and not respond to the murderous assault. Instead, the committee will examine the State Department’s implementation of the recommendations made by the Accountability Review Board, an independent outfit that investigated the attack and in late 2012 issued proposals for improving security for American diplomats and US diplomatic facilities overseas.
That’s actually a worthy topic of discussion! I suppose committee chair Trey Gowdy deserves some credit for starting things off by trying to show everyone that this is going to be a serious undertaking. That isn’t to say there won’t be plenty of time given over to bashing Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, because there surely will be. But on its first day, the committee looks unlikely to generate dramatic headlines.
So how is this all going to play out? As I see it, there are three general possibilities:
1. For the most part, the committee goes about its work in a responsible way. While there are some angry confrontations with witnesses, on the whole things are pretty boring. Without much in the way of fireworks, press coverage of the hearings is rather perfunctory. Base Republicans wind up feeling disappointed and even betrayed, assuring themselves that the Republicans on the committee wimped out, perhaps because they knew that if they got too close to the truth, State Department assassination squads would take out their families. The true scope of the conspiracy remains buried under a mountain of lies and cowardice. Odds: 37%
2. Full-on circus. Republicans on the committee do a great deal of shouting; photos of the aftermath of the attacks are repeatedly projected on the wall of the hearing room. News coverage is somewhat greater, as nothing draws a crowd of reporters more than politicians yelling at each other. Despite the fact that the “truth” is never fully revealed, the GOP base is pleased. Yet the net effect of the whole thing is to make Republicans look like crazy people. In a cruel irony, this result greatly aids the presidential campaign of one Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is able to say that she’s being attacked by a bunch of crazy people, and say it with a smile that drives Republicans around the bend. Odds: 62.99%
3. The committee actually discovers that there was a sinister conspiracy that led to the Americans’ deaths, with high-ranking administration officials at its center. All their accusations, not to mention the creation of this committee, are vindicated, and the moral rot at the heart of the Obama regime is finally revealed for all to see. Odds: .01%
Those are my predictions, anyway. But who knows — maybe they’ll surprise us.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 17, 2014
“Pretending To Be Relevant”: Man Who Failed Twice At Becoming President Thinks He’d Be Better At Being President Than Hillary Clinton
Mitt Romney, once governor of Massachusetts and a failure at winning presidential elections, pops up every now and again to tell us that he is not running for president. These TV interviews can be grating, but they’re also charitable: Romney gets to pretend he actually is relevant, or even president, and his opinion is afforded the sort of faux-weight that only a Sunday news show can provide. It’s political cos-play.
This week, it was Romney on Barack Obama’s follies, and Romney on Hillary Clinton’s presidential bona fides.
You will likely not be surprised to hear that Romney shared his disappointment with Obama in an appearance on Fox News Sunday. “I think the president is really out of touch with reality,” Romney said of the man who twice accomplished what he, himself, could not. “He’s so out of touch with reality that he hasn’t taken the necessary steps. . . . He’s too busy on the golf course. I don’t know if you can see the reality from the fairway, but he doesn’t see reality.” (Nailed it, Romney thought after letting go of that zinger.)
Obama’s foreign policy is fundamentally flawed because it is “based on common humanity, and humanity is not common,” Romney said. “Bad people do bad things.” Apparently the president is not hip to the fact that ISIS is “bad.”
Romney is, per Romney, a more skilled politician that not just the current president, but also the Democratic frontrunner for 2016. Asked if he would deliver a better performance in the White House than Clinton, Romney said there was “no question in my mind,” though he conceded one complicating factor: “The American people may disagree with me.”
During both of his failed presidential campaigns, Romney tried to use his record as a businessman as proof that he knew how to run the government (because he ran companies, remember?). He repeated that winning line on Sunday: “You’ve also got to have people who have actually run something. . . . I don’t think Hillary Clinton has that experience.”
“My time has come and gone,” Romney said, during the nationally televised interview.
If Romney changes his mind and reneges on his oft-repeated promise not to run for president again, perhaps he can point to comments by high-profile supporters such as himself as evidence of his political vitality. In Mitt he trusts.
By: Kia Makarechi, Vanity Fair Daily, September 8, 2014
“Policies And Attitudes, That’s Just How They Roll”: Why Republicans Can’t Solve Their Problem With Women Voters
I’ll give Republicans credit for this: they keep trying to figure out why their party remains unappealing to large and important groups of voters. They’ve been mulling over their problem with Latino voters for some time, and now Politico has gotten a hold of a study commissioned by some GOP bigwigs to figure out why women keep giving more of their votes to Democrats:
But in Washington, Republican policies have failed to sway women — in fact, they appear to have turned women off. For example, the focus groups and polls found that women “believe that ‘enforcing equal pay for equal work’ is the policy that would ‘help women the most.'”
“Republicans who openly deny the legitimacy of the issue will be seen as out of touch with women’s life experiences,” the report warned, hinting at GOP opposition to pay-equity legislation. It’s the policy item independents and Democrats believe will help women the most.
The groups suggest a three-pronged approach to turning around their relationship with women. First, they suggest the GOP “neutralize the Democrats'” attack that Republicans don’t support fairness for women. They suggest Republican lawmakers criticize Democrats for “growing government programs that encourage dependency rather than opportunities to get ahead.” That message tested better than explaining that the GOP supports a number of policies that could help fairness for women.
The last time a Republican presidential candidate won a majority of women’s votes was 1988, and it’s hard to see it happening again soon unless there’s a huge blowout. While it’s all well and good to investigate the issue to try to understand it in as much detail as possible, I have some bad news for Republicans: This isn’t a problem they’re going to be able to solve.
That’s because both their policies and their attitudes are working against them. It isn’t just that Republicans oppose reproductive rights, though that doesn’t help. And it isn’t just that they oppose mandating contraceptive coverage in insurance, though that doesn’t help either. It’s that when they articulate those policy positions and others like them, they can’t keep themselves from doing so in the most hostile, contemptuous ways imaginable. That doesn’t apply to all of them, of course; maybe not even most of them. But any debate about an issue affecting women in particular is 100-percent guaranteed to feature at least a few prominent conservatives, including those who have their own radio and television programs, saying loudly that the women who disagree with the Republican position are sluts and whores. That’s just how they roll.
Karl Rove can say to his compatriots, “Let’s ease up on the ‘legitimate rape’ stuff, fellas,” but unfortunately for him and the other people who spend time thinking about the GOP’s challenges, a party can’t speak with one voice. Whenever a discussion starts about an issue like equal pay, everybody gets to weigh in, from the most sober senator to the most rabid Tea Partier to the most hateful talk radio host. And since we now have a highly developed outrage industrial complex, the appalling comments will be repeated and distributed, ensuring that everyone hears them. And even when they aren’t being outright offensive, Republicans are more likely to communicate their believe in condescending, outdated gender norms.
All of which means that the idea that Republicans are none too friendly to women is constantly reinforced, in ways both substantive and emotional. If you’re a woman, you’re not happy when the Republican party blocks equal pay legislation. But when you then hear some of them try to argue that the wage gap isn’t really a problem in the first place, and maybe you should just be staying at home with your kids anyway, well that’s going to really piss you off. And having a bunch of GOP bros tell you that they’re the real pro-women party because they don’t want people to depend on government isn’t going to go too far to change that.
Now take all that, and imagine what the atmosphere will be like if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee in 2016. There will be a tsunami of misogynistic hate directed at Clinton, which we know because she’s always generated a particularly ugly brand of male sexual panic in conservatives. If she’s actually threatening to become president, it’ll be worse than ever. In the face of that, the Republicans who try to argue that their party has something to offer women voters are going to get laughed right out of the voting booth.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 28, 2014
“Your Choice Mr. Speaker”: House Intel Committee Finds No Benghazi Scandal; Will Boehner Ignore Its Findings?
According to Representative Mike Thompson, Democrat of California, a report from the Republican led House Intelligence Committee on the September 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, “confirms that no one was deliberately misled, no military assets were withheld and no stand-down order (to U.S. forces) was given.”
Late last week, before Congress headed out of Washington for August recess, the body voted to declassify the document.
After nearly two years of investigations, millions of dollars spent, tens of thousands of pages of documents handed over by the administration, a Republican-led committee is about to release a report stating that there is no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the Obama White House. In fact, nearly all of the accusations levied against the White House over the past year by conservatives in Congress, and amplified by the media, have now been determined to be false—by a Republican jury.
House Speaker John Boehner is now left with a choice. Will he allow Rep. Trey Gowdy’s kangaroo court, formulated in the guise of a select committee, proceed with its Benghazi investigation, covering ground already delved into not only by the House Intelligence Committee, but by the House Armed Services Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Accountability Review Board and numerous other investigatory panels?
Doing so would now be nothing short of an explicit vote of no confidence in House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican. What will Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, discover that two years of investigations by his GOP colleagues could not? If the House leadership views the Intelligence Committee as that incompetent, shouldn’t its chairman be replaced?
As The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake reported in May,
“There is deep unease within the Republican leadership that the select committee, which has yet to announce a schedule of hearings, could backfire, and badly. Investigate and find nothing new, and the committee looks like a bunch of tin-hatted obsessives. Investigate and uncover previously-hidden secrets, and it makes all of the other Republican led panels that dug into Benghazi seem like Keystone Kops.”
But what is even more clear now than it was a few weeks ago is that, for Boehner, the appointment of the Benghazi Select Committee has nothing to do with finding the truth about the attack that took the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens, along with those of Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods. It was theater—and bad theater at that.
Attempting to placate the ideological fringes of the Republican conference by using a taxpayer-funded investigation is at best the most cynical form of politics. To continue the charade after a Republican chairman releases findings that undermine the very core of your investigation is outright fraud.
But the Benghazi Select Committee will keep on moving forward. And it will not end after the 2014 elections. If Hillary Clinton chooses to run, the committee will become a principal tool in the conservative movement’s campaign apparatus against her, holding hearings designed to obscure the truth and smear Clinton during the least opportune moments of the electoral cycle.
And if Clinton is elected in 2016, there is little doubt the work of the committee will continue as long as Republicans continue to control the House of Representatives. Why surrender a taxpayer-funded campaign attack dog, especially one endowed by Congress with subpoena power?
By: Ari Rabin-Hayt, The American Prospect, August 4, 2014
“A Republican Chronic Affliction”: From Clinton To Obama; Why GOP Impeachment Fever Is Now So Predictable
Making predictions is a perilous practice for any political journalist. Too often, the would-be seers turn out to be dead wrong – as can be attested to by George Will, Michael Barone, Larry Kudlow, and the humiliated boy genius on Fox News, all of whom projected a big victory for Mitt Romney in 2012.
Yet there is at least one future event that could be safely forecast years ago, almost as soon as Barack Obama entered the White House: a movement among House Republicans to impeach the president.
In the conventional wisdom that chronically afflicts Washington, all the current muttering about impeachment is merely a theatrical display for the GOP’s wingnut base – as Democrats use the same threat to stir emotions (and donations) among Obama loyalists. Such complacent analysis misreads not only the mood and character of the Republican Party’s dominant Tea Party wing, but the recent history of impeachment as a political instrument of the far right.
The same forces that have sought to ruin Obama from the beginning were hatching schemes to remove Bill Clinton from office long before the unveiling of his reckless indiscretions with Monica Lewinsky. Back then, the talk of impeachment among zealots who schemed against Clinton, ranging from Pittsburgh billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife and disgraced former attorney general Ed Meese to an assortment of back-bench congressmembers and religious hucksters, could be easily brushed aside. Today, many of the survivors among that old cast of characters are peddling Impeach Obama bumperstickers– notably including Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily, which features an “impeachment store” online.
Claims that Clinton had committed a high crime or misdemeanor worthy of impeachment under the Constitution dated as far back as 1994, the year after his inauguration, when the teamwork of determined right-wing activists and incompetent mainstream reporters ginned up a series of phony scandals. At secret meetings, the leadership of ultra-right organizations such as the Council for National Policy persuaded themselves that Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted (for something), and that Bill Clinton could soon be impeached (for anything).
The itch to impeach Clinton gathered momentum in 1997, not long after his re-election, a democratic victory that did not impress his right-wing enemies. As with Obama, they wanted to undo his presidency not because he had committed a supposed constitutional offense, but simply because his “liberal, globalist, socialist” politics offended their sense of morality. Of course, they feel the same way about Obama today. Indeed, from the perspective of the insurrectionary Tea Party Republicans and other self-styled “patriots,” elections hardly matter at all, unless their candidate wins. To them, a Democratic president lacks legitimacy by definition.
For a pungent whiff of irony, remember that electing Obama in 2008 was supposed to preserve us from another decade of political trench warfare, instigated by those polarizing Clintons. Electing Hillary Clinton would lead America back into the partisan psychodrama of the Nineties, or so the Washington pundits warned us; better to choose that nice, inspirational, bipartisan-sounding senator from Illinois, they advised.
And how did that work out for us? Scarcely through any fault of Obama, the result has been no different from the scary projections of a divisive Clinton presidency: legislative gridlock, economic brinksmanship, kooky conspiracy theories, and now congressional lawsuits accompanied by loud talk of impeachment. Clinton and Obama are just names for the object of hate, against whom any slanderous, mendacious, and vacuous attack can be mounted.
That was why gullible rubes once bought hundreds of thousands of videotapes accusing the Clintons of murder – and why the same kind of suckers bought into the race-baiting “birther” insinuations about Obama. It is why a top House Republican will lie blatantly on television about the Supreme Court’s dozen rebukes of this president’s alleged constitutional overreach – when most of those cases involved George W. Bush.
In temperament and ideology, the Tea Party Republicans who run the House aren’t much different from the Gingrich gang that went after Clinton. They don’t care whether Obama won the election in a near-landslide — or that seeking to remove him would be very dangerous for our country and the world. If their party wins control of the Senate in November, then the reactionary impulse to impeach may well become irresistible.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, August 1, 2014
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