Why is Benghazi different than the US Embassy attack in Yemen or 9/11?

Didn’t you hear Kevin McCarthy say that the Benghazi committee was cooked up in order to reduce Hillary’s poll numbers? He was only confirming what we have all known since it began. There is no reason for this investigation. It’s just partisan politics at its worst.

The legitimate and necessary reasons for investigating Benghazi were eclipsed from the outset by the transparent blatantly partisan attempt to smear Clinton. The appalling lack of any semblance of objectivity on the part of the scandalous exclusively Republican carnival of fools is an embarrassment to both the country and what’s left of its reputation. The episode is merely another symptom on the growing checklist of indicators regarding the reduction of the GOP to the tragic joke that it has become. The most alarming aspect of the party’s devolution to slapstick status isn’t so much that it’s out in the open. It is the fact that things have a reached state that there is no longer any urge to bother with concealing it.

I do not like Hillary Clinton.
I do not think Hillary is being treated fairly regarding the Benghazi ‘investigation’.
I do not think Hillary is being treated fairly regarding releasing her personal emails.

I think it likely that Hillary has it coming: turn about is fair play?

@ibstubro I don’t remember a smear campaign from Hillary demanding hearings. If I’m wrong, remind me.
@JLeslie no its not fair. Bush sent many young men and women to their deaths for weapons of mass destruction that never existed. Where’s the committee being formed for his travesties? Repbublican side doesn’t even mention it. Probably because they all knew it was an excuse to get in there.

@Pandora Don’t you realize the world is a safer place now because of the Iraq Crusade?

Watching Hillary’s testimony right now and I think she is actually doing herself good. She is looking articulate and smart in the face of some arrogant imbeciles.

@Pandora From Hillary? I don’t understand what you are referring to.

The difference is the political affiliation of the President. Face it, things are that bad now.

@dappled_leaves McCarthy isn’t alone there. Others have copped to that as well.

@rojo :) funny.
@jleslie, Didn’t you have a comment posted before I posted mine? Did you go back and edit it and decided to erase it? Maybe I read something else you posted.
@judi Cool. I’m glad to hear she is doing well. I still think this is all over making her back away from the presidential campaign because they know they will lose with what they have. What I don’t get is, do they really want Donald Trump or Bernie as President? Because without Hilary that is where this campaign will end. She is the best alternative both sides have. Trump is going to be running because he is a brand name and stupid people love him, and Bernie is climbing and without Biden, he has a decent chance of being the Democrat vote if Hilary is bumped. Trump will declare himself King and Bernie will kill us with Taxes for all the government funding he wants to do. Don’t believe it’s going to just stop at the rich. Even then the rich will pass on the cost to the rest of us. So one way or another we will pay for all those social programs. Especially, free college.

You seem to forget the 911 commission. Frankly I’m finding the testimony fascinating. I didn’t know about the messages to the Egyption and Libyan presidents saying it was a terrorist attack that night nor the message to her family that it was a terrorist attack. That doesn’t square with the public condemnation of the video. I also didn’t realize there were 600 messages about security in Libya and she never saw or heard of a single one. That seems pretty unreal if not incompetent.

The bottom line is that if it was a Republican president there would be a Special prosecutor to handle this like they did for Scooter Libby.

@Jaxk I seem to remember Woody Allen and a line of his about waiting for a “Non-fiction” version of the Warren Report.

I kinda feel the same way about the 9/11 Commission. The found what they were expected to find and that is as far as it went. Remember the heads of the 9/11 Commission themselves claimed that the commission was hamstrung by the time and budgetary constraints it was under, and that its effectiveness was hampered by misinformation given by organizations like the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration.

I’m watching some of the Q&A on cspan and I’m so glad Hillary mentioned all the other attacks on embassies under Reagan, her husband, etc. First, because we should not forget those people who died. A lot of people seem to have amnesia. Second, because I hope at least some republicans have a little bit of an epiphany regarding the hypocrisy.

@Pandora I didn’t erase anything. I wish I had edited my typo up there. Maybe a mod will fix my NK to no. What were you referring to about Hillary? What did you think you read?

@Jaxk I will agree that Scooter Libby got a raw deal, but it must be remembered that it was the FBI that forced Bush’s hand in appointing a special prosecutor. These present hearings are clearly not about any sort of misconduct, or illegality. They are about trying to pin responsibility for the Benghazi attack on the Secretary of State.

@Pandora:
”@ibstubro I don’t remember a smear campaign from Hillary demanding hearings.”

Didn’t have to be Hillary personally. Nancy Pelosi had a ‘take no prisoners’ attitude toward Republicans, and the Republicans might simply be returning the favor.

@Jaxk “The bottom line is that if it was a Republican president there would be a Special prosecutor to handle this like they did for Scooter Libby.”

If you are saying that reactions differ greatly based on the sort of relationship Congress has with the White House, then I agree.

But regardless of who did what to whom and for how many cookies, the fact remains that Benghazi has already been investigated (at taxpayer expense) far more than many other crises, some of them larger, and now we have to hear about ad nauseum… also at taxpayer expense.

Some may take these hearings as Hillary being outed as the Spawn of Satan, some may say that these hearings are a feeble attempt by the Republicans to smear Hillary’s name and pave the road for a Republican president in 2016 (while, ironically but not uncharacteristically ensuring it won’t happen), but I see it as just a big fucking waste of my tax dollars headed by people who claim to be fiscally responsible.

How many more witch hunts can Republicans go on before the fiscally conservative crowd votes them out in favor of more efficient spenders? Fucking A!

It isn’t different.
Like the other examples, it was organized premeditated murder by Sunni Muslims.

Speaking only for myself, I think the trouble for HC began with blaming it, not on the killers, but on a video and continued with her “what difference does it make” quote.

In my opinion, she has a way of giving the impression that she thinks just about everybody except her is pretty stupid. The president does that too.

It’s sort of human nature that such people always make enemies.

@stanleybmanly – Remember that there is an FBI investigation in progress on Hilary’s Emails. I think the problem is that everybody knows Hilary lied about the video. So now that there is proof that she lied, it is not making a big impact. Yawn, we already knew that. As for responsibility for Benghazi, she is responsible. There was a massive security failure by the State Dept. and she was the head. To make matters worse, Ambassador Stevens was by her own words the most knowledgeable person in her administration about Libya and she never spoke with him. He didn’t have her email address, nor her phone number. Hell he didn’t even have her address so that he could write her a letter. Hilary set up a shield of bureaucracy between her and everyone other than her closest staff. Nothing could get through. Until that wall is dissolved, this will never be over nor will there be any resolution. If all this hurts her chances to be President, it should. She’s a pathological liar and incompetent to boot. IMHO

That’s nonsense. The people responsible for embassy security were legions of pay grades below Clinton. As I said before, it’s like holding her responsible for unmowed lawns or burnt out light bulbs. Republicans are fishing desperately for ANY possible sign that she was personally knowledgeable of lax security measures at Benghazi, and have yet to to demonstrate a single example of culpability. Security, cleaning the restrooms, cafeteria menus, these we NOT part of her duties, and anyone with any sense should understand this. And it’s clear that she didn’t lie. She reported just as everyone else WHAT SHE WAS TOLD. She was mistaken as was everyone else. There is no substance to these knucklehead allegations, and the ritual show trial is just what McCarthy said it is, and the Repubs can go on shooting themselves in the foot st taxpayers’ expense. The clowns responsible for this transparent nonsense are going to put Clinton in the White House. The footage of this stuff is going to be all over her campaign ads. Wait & see.

@josie “In my opinion, she has a way of giving the impression that she thinks just about everybody except her is pretty stupid. The president does that too.”

Yes, that is often the case when you get a Republican and a non-Republican together. I do that all the time on technical issues with people who don’t know the difference between a CPU and a GPU yet act like they have the computer skills to design a microporcessor.

And, the door swings both ways. I know @Jaxk thinks I’m a total idiot sometimes for a variety of reasons that generally boil down to me not agreeing with him. So yes, that aspect of human nature does make enemies.

@Jaxk Yeah, yeah, we get it. All Democrats and Liberals are stupid liars who are stupid, evil and wrong. What you don’t seem to get is the fact that any revelation now is proof that previous investigations were half-assedly incomplete and thus a waste of time and money. But I guess that, despite your financial conservatism, you have no problem wasting my tax money so long as you have a chance to pin something on a Dem.
I’d feel differently had all this been going down earlier, back when this information should have been discovered and hearings held, but as it stands the only thing that’s really happening is that Republicans are proving that they like three-ring circuses on our dime.

@stanleybmanly ” The clowns responsible for this transparent nonsense are going to put Clinton in the White House.”

I’m not sure about that, but I do know that things like this are part of why I cannot even consider voting Republican any more, and I also know others that feel the same. This hearing is proof that the GOP has gone from a party of “viable alternative to Democrats” to a bad joke that you have to laugh at so that you don’t cry and slit your wrists because it’s so fucking depressingly ridiculous.

Things like this make me wonder how long it will be before the GOP alienated even their own base.

@jerv – “I’d feel differently had all this been going down earlier, back when this information should have been discovered”

That really is funny. Hilary is the one that hid this information. Yes it should have been turned over in the beginning when it was first requested but no one knew Hilary was concealing thousands of pertinent emails. Nor that she would delete thousands more. I would agree that 11 hours of testimony is too much but remember that there were only 5.5 hours of questions. Each 10 minutes of questions were followed by 10 minutes of democratic speech making. Delete the speeches and the whole thing could have been done in half the time.

I understand that most of the information makes no difference to Democrats. If she told a different story behind the scenes than she did publicly that’s OK. If she shifted her focus from Libya to other things in 2012 and basically ignored the rising tensions, that’s OK. If she withheld information from an ongoing investigation, that’s OK. But to some of us, that’s not OK.

If you want to believe that “All Democrats and Liberals are stupid liars who are stupid, evil and wrong”, I won’t fight that one.

@Jaxk You missed my point. Again.

Competent investigation by anyone not pro-Hillary should’ve turned up a bit more a lot sooner despite any opposition to the investigation. That would’ve lead to the hearing happening sooner, and after fewer “false starts”; it would’ve been one-and-done, and with far more substance. Then again, I might have taken it more seriously if not for the fact that some Republican Congress-critters admitted that the hearings were just an attempted smear campaign. That right there did a lot of damage to the credibility of both the hearings and the already-hard-to-trust GOP, much to the detriment of Conservative voters who are less extremist than you and the “Freedom Caucus”.

And your last sentence is precisely why I feel that you are utterly incapable of anything remotely resembling objectivity, and thus incapable of comprehending truth. I know that you actually got the sarcasm of that statement and are just taking a dig just like I often take jabs at you. FYI, those little jabs humanize you, and the way in which you do it is what gives me the impression that you are of above-average intellect even if you do say a lot of stupid things. If not for the constant rib-poking, I wouldn’t even try to respect you as an equal.

However, unlike you, I am capable of seeing wrongdoing on both sides of the fence. I don’t go around acting like Democrats are the only ones that ever did anything right and are the embodiment of pure enlightenment and moral perfection the way you do. The reason I rarely poke fun at those more liberal than Joe McCarthy is simply because people as far-right as you tend to be loud enough that y’all don’t need any help; like other fanatics, you each make enough noise for 100 people.

Well, that and the fact that Democrat “mistakes” are considerably less in both magnitude and quantity, making them the lesser evil until such time as the two-party system goes away; that appeals to the meritocratic part of me. Oh, and the fact that I feel that actual history and current events are a better indication of reality than some ideology-driven theory that was disproven by a vast majority of world experts in whatever field (climatology, economics, medical science…).

But enough on that. I’m still of the opinion that much of what makes Benghazi different is the heightened antagonism of our political climate. The 9/11 hearings were seeking truth. The same with the Yemen attacks. However, the Benghazi hearings were not about truth; they were about politics. It was an 11-hour GOP campaign ad that backfired. One made on our dime.