Tag Archives: Benghazi

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Benghazi explodes once again

The Sunday news talk shows were all over the Benghazi story this past weekend.

Big surprise, huh?

I didn’t catch all of them, but I did see what I think was one of the better debates on the subject. It occurred on ABC’s “This Week” segment and featured some fiery partisans on both sides arguing their respective cases over what the Obama administration knew about the September 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/05/04/this_week_roundtable_heated_benghazi_investigation_debate.html

It’s pretty good stuff.

Former GOP U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum and radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham argued for the right wing’s version of the story, which is that the White House and/or the State Department knew in advance that the attack on the compound was a terrorist deed and did little or nothing to protect the people inside. Former Obama campaign guru and senior policy wonk David Plouffe and former Obama administration adviser Van Jones argued the opposite view, which is that the administration erred in issuing its initial talking points, but didn’t conspire to keep the truth from the public.

ABC News correspondent Cokie Roberts also was present and while she tended to favor the Plouffe-Jones view, she sought to bring some balance to the discussion.

The U.S. House of Representatives is going to convene a special committee to determine whether the administration deceived the public on purpose. It’ll be led by a tea party guy, Rep. Trey Gowdy, who no doubt has an agenda of his own. He said something over the weekend about having “evidence” of a cover-up. Congressional Democrats are weighing the possibility of sitting this one out, letting Republicans make fools of themselves.

The debate Sunday was lively and often angry — and it provided an apt metaphor for the tone of debate in Washington regarding the Benghazi attack. Republicans want to keep hammering at an old story. Democrats want to refocus on some other things, such as, oh, the improving economy. Neither side is willing to give the other side any leeway.

The talkers on “This Week” followed that script to the letter.

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Benghazi is back

Benghazi is the story with no end.

It’s back in the news, thanks to some emails uncovered by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group. The emails purport to buttress the idea that the Obama administration lied about what happened at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11, 2012.

They contend the administration engaged in a willful cover-up of the “truth,” whatever it is, about the violence that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/04/benghazi_white_house_emails_did_the_obama_administration_engage_in_a_cover.html

I’ve never believed in a cover-up. I do believe the administration made some big mistakes in trying to report what happened in that chaotic fire fight. They trotted out the U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, to say things about which she wasn’t briefed sufficiently. Rice had a set of talking points that turned out to be incomplete and wrong.

That constitutes a cover-up? Is it a deliberate deception?

No. It was a bungling attempt to get ahead of a still-developing story.

Still, the right-wing mainstream media has sought to keep this story alive and kicking — particularly if the then-secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, decides to run for president in 2016. It’s looking as though she’s going to run and that, all by itself, is reason enough — in the eyes of her critics — to keep hammering away at Benghazi.

Never mind that independent analyses have concluded there was no deliberate lying; they conclude that the U.S. embassy security network failed, but only because officials misjudged the intensity of the fight that was ensuing at the consulate; Clinton herself has taken responsibility for the failure to protect our personnel, but that’s not good enough to satisfy her critics on the far right.

The story will continue to boil and bubble. Were it not for Hillary Clinton’s still-budding presidential candidacy, it would have faded away long ago.

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Hillary not 'formidable'?

George Will said over the weekend that Hillary Rodham Clinton could be a damaged presidential candidate if she runs in 2016.

He said she is “not formidable.”

Interesting, don’t you think?

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/04/27/george_will_hillary_clinton_not_a_formidable_candidate.html

Will took note of what he said was the “last time” a major party had a coronation for its presidential nominee. He mentioned Adlai Stevenson’s nomination in 1956. The Democrat then went on to suffer his second consecutive landslide loss to Republican Dwight Eisenhower, who himself was “crowned” by his own party in 1952.

My own memory provides another example of a political coronation. In 1964, the country was reeling from the death of President Kennedy. The man who succeeded him, Lyndon Johnson, began pushing through much of JFK’s unfinished legislative agenda, including the Civil Rights Act.

Democrats were in no mood to fight over that nomination, so they crowned LBJ as their nominee and he then went on to trample GOP nominee Sen. Barry Goldwater in a historic landslide.

It is highly unlikely that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency in two years in such a fashion. It will be competitive, hard-fought and — I hope — edifying for voters.

However, to say the former first lady, senator and secretary of state is “not formidable” is to suggest George Will has been listening too intently to Republican hacks who keep looking for scandals where none exists.

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HRC sick of the media? Duh!

Sometime around late 1999, I offered a prediction.

Hillary Rodham Clinton would not run for the U.S. Senate in New York, I said then. Why? Well, my notion was that she had grown weary of the constant battering she and her husband, President Bill Clinton, had taken from the right-wing media, not to mention the members of the Senate who voted to convict her husband of “high crimes and misdemeanors” relating to the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

She ran anyway — and won handily — in 2000.

The columnist Roger Simon, one of D.C.’s smarter political analysts, writes that Clinton is sick of the media.

Will that prevent her from running for president of the United States in 2016? Part of me says “yes,” but I now know better than to suggest that HRC doesn’t have the stomach for another campaign.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/hillary-clinton-media-simon-says-104497.html?hp=l18

I cannot quite figure Clinton out. Her husband cheated on her with a White House intern less than half his age. She forgave him — apparently. The House of Representatives impeached the president for lying to a federal grand jury about the affair. The Senate then put the president on trial, but acquitted him on all three counts relating to obstruction of justice and abuse of presidential power.

The then-first lady decided she wanted to serve with those individuals in the Senate after she and her husband vacated the White House. By all accounts, she became a stellar senator from New York and earned the respect of her colleagues. Interestingly, one of her best friends in the Senate happens to be John McCain, R-Ariz., who was among those senators who voted to convict the president. Go figure.

The media beat her up as she ran for president in 2008. Her campaign ended just before the convention that year and then — wouldn’t you know it? — she ended up serving as secretary of state in the Obama administration.

The media kept dogging her. She had at least one major misfire, her handling of the Benghazi consulate tragedy. Again, the media poured it on.

Now, at least one leading Republican, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky — a possible presidential candidate himself in ’16 — is dredging up the Lewinsky matter as a way to besmirch Hillary’s reputation. Give me a break.

Still, the media keep digging into all this stuff.

Why should Hillary Clinton want any part of this?

Beats me. I remain baffled that she ran for the Senate in the first place.

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Cruz upset we haven’t caught Benghazi terrorists

Right-wing politicians and their pals in the right-wing media just won’t let the flames from Benghazi smolder and die.

Benghazi refers to the U.S. consulate in Libya that was attacked on Sept. 11, 2011. Four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya. It was a terrible event. The right wingers keep stirring the pot looking for things to hang on Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was then secretary of state and is a possible candidate for president in 2016.

Then comes Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to weigh in today on the Fox News Channel. I caught a snippet of the interview today on TV while at work. He was offering up the usual stuff about accountability and trying to assess blame on Clinton over her department’s response to the chaos that erupted in the Libyan city.

Then he made the one point that caught my attention: He’s upset that “17 months to the day we haven’t yet brought the terrorists responsible for the attack to justice.”

Seventeen months later and we still haven’t caught the bad guys. Does that really upset you, Sen. Cruz?

Allow me to put this into a little different perspective.

Osama bin Laden plotted the attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, nine months into George W. Bush’s presidency. U.S. forces went to war the following month in Afghanistan. We looked for bin Laden and nearly had him in Tora Bora. He got away.

Then, after President Bush had left the White House, U.S. intelligence analysts located bin Laden in Pakistan. Nearly 10 years after the 9/11 attack, President Barack Obama ordered a team of Navy SEALs, CIA operatives and Army Special Forces pilots into Pakistan to kill the terrorist mastermind.

They did the deed.

It took a long while, nearly a decade.

I’m pretty sure we’ll get the individuals responsible for the Benghazi attack. It’s going to take some time. That’s how meticulous intelligence-gathering works.

Let’s stop the carping, Sen. Cruz.

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Lane-closing story going to get very ugly

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie hoped he could have put down the story about the closure of lanes on the George Washington Bridge.

His marathon press conference this morning didn’t do the job. It only has fanned the flames.

The battle lines are being drawn. Republicans say the kerfuffle is a diversion from the Affordable Care Act debate. Democrats say the growing scandal speaks to a possible extreme abuse of power by the Republican governor.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/01/09/embarrassed_christie_fires_aide_in_bridge_scandal_121179.html

Christie fired a couple of key aides today. One of them, his former deputy chief of staff, reportedly is the author of an email that said it was “time for a traffic” jam on the bridge. The lanes were closed allegedly as payback for the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, N.J.’s refusal to endorse Christie’s re-election. Christie said he knew nothing about the email until just two days ago.

This is a big deal because Christie is considered a probable candidate for president in 2016. He’s sold himself as a hands-on, no-nonsense chief executive. Yet this situation seems to suggest the governor had his hands off the levers of power while his underlings went rogue right under his nose.

Let’s not dismiss this as much ado about nothing. This is the kind of story that gets the media worked up, kind of like it did over the Benghazi disaster in September 2012, the phony controversy over President Obama’s place of birth, and the IRS probe of political action groups’ tax-exempt status … to name just three recent examples.

This is how the game is played. Gov. Christie had better steel himself for a rough ride.

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Fox talk-show hosts need lesson in field reporting

Talking heads, by definition, are personalities who, well, talk.

They opine on matters, regardless of their expertise — or lack thereof — on the subject.

Such appears to be the case when “Fox and Friends” co-hosts decided to criticize a New York Times reporter who was on the ground in Benghazi, Libya, when terrorists attacked the U.S. consulate on Sept. 11, 2012 and ignited a fire fight that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/01/02/war-reporters-fox-criticism-of-times-benghazi-r/197394

The Times published a lengthy report that dissected the events of that terrible day and reported that an anti-Islam video that had been posted on YouTube played a part in triggering the siege. Fox pundits have been claiming for more than a year that the video had nothing to do with the event and have declared that the Obama administration has been covering up the facts of the case.

Now comes the Fox and Friends clowns who say that reporters in the field should have alerted U.S. authorities that Americans might have been in danger.

How would they have done that? Steve Doocy, one of the Fox hosts, said the reporter “probably” had access to a satellite phone he could have used to call for help. Probably?

Therein lies the difficulty in trying to offer opinions and analysis on things of which you have no knowledge.

A reporter’s job is to report events in real time. “When you’re in the middle of a riot or an attack like that, first of all, it is not a reporter’s job to call the authorities and he would have to assume the authorities know about it. It seems so bizarre,” said Josh Meyer, director of education and outreach for the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative and a former Los Angeles Times national security reporter with experience in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

The Fox talking heads should stick to things with which they are comfortable, which is criticizing Obama administration policy. They should steer clear of discussing reporter’s responsibilities covering hostile action in a war zone.

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Obama most admired man in U.S. Who knew?

The Gallup Poll has just released a survey that is going to surprise more than a few folks. It surprised me, for example.

It says President Barack Obama is the most admired man in America — by a comfortable margin at that.

http://www.msnbc.com/hardball/obama-clinton-most-admired-gallup

The most admired woman happens to be former first lady/Sen./Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why is this so surprising? I see a couple of interesting things here.

The first one is obvious. President Obama has had a rough year, particularly as it relates to the unveiling of the Affordable Care Act. The debut of the ACA was a disaster, technically speaking. The rollout came on top of a barrage of criticism of the ACA from Republicans who managed somehow to win the argument.

Despite all the bad press, the president continues to stand fairly tall in the minds of millions of Americans.

Much the same can be said of Hillary Clinton, who left public office at the beginning of the year as a controversy over her office’s handling of an uprising in Libya drew fire. The consulate in Benghazi was attacked, four Americans died in a ferocious fire fight and Clinton took lots of heat over the way her office handled the initial response.

Yet, for the 12th year in a row, she remains America’s most admired woman.

The second factor is interesting as well, in that Gallup isn’t exactly known for favoring so-called “liberals.” The poll long has been viewed by observers as tilting a tad to the right. Still, the poll is deemed reputable.

The lesson here might only be that we need not pay too much attention to the chattering class that so often seems to outshout the rest of the us.

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Memo to Alec: Watch your foul mouth, young man

This has been a tough week for TV news personalities masquerading as broadcast journalists.

First, it was Lara Logan of CBS’s “60 Minutes” being forced to take “administrative leave” for a botched news segment on the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya; four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, died in the firefight. Logan and her producer trotted out a security analyst who told “60 Minutes” he was there when it happened, except that he really didn’t get there until the next day. His credibility came into question after the report that was highly critical of the State Department’s reaction to the tragic event.

See ya, Lara.

Now it’s MSNBC’s turn to wipe the egg off its face. It had hired actor/comedian Alec Baldwin to do an hour-long show every Friday night. Baldwin is known for a lot of things. Yes, he’s a talented actor. He’s also capable of doing some great comedy sketches.

Baldwin also is a loudmouth with a hair-trigger temper.

http://tv.msn.com/tv/article.aspx?news=841043

Seems that that Baldwin got into an altercation with a photographer recently and spit out some highly inflammatory names to the fellow. He let loose with an anti-gay slur, preceded by an extremely vulgar adjective.

Hey Alec. You should know that the world is listening to every word you say. Dude, you’re a star and as such, you are not immune from prying eyes and ears. Two words need mentioning here, man: social media.

MSNBC has pulled Baldwin’s show. He says a leading gay-rights organization, GLAAD, and Andrew Sullivan, a noted columnist and author — who happens to be gay — had a hand in “killing” his show.

So what if they did?

He behaved reprehensibly and, as a symbol of a network devoted to news and commentary, he becomes one of the faces of the network.

Alec Baldwin had to go.

One final word of advice, although it will be ignored: Keep your mouth shut, Alec.

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Logan takes ‘leave’ from ’60 Minutes’

That ticking sound you hear at the start of “60 Minutes” each Sunday has taken on a new symbolic meaning.

I’m guessing it now might symbolize that time is running out on of the formerly premier news show’s correspondents, Lara Logan, who has been ordered to take an undetermined leave of absence.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/lara-logan-60-minutes-leave_n_4344883.html

Logan and her producer have earned this kick in the backside.

“60 Minutes” recently broadcast a segment that depended heavily on reports from someone who told the news agency that he was present at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11, 2012 when it came under attack from terrorists.

Well, it turned out that the source for the story, security officer Dylan Davies, told the FBI something quite different. He told the feds he didn’t arrive until after the shooting stopped.

The report had been highly critical of the State Department and the CIA response to the attack that killed four Americans, including Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya. “60 Minutes,” though, based its reporting on a source who, it turned out, was not credible. He wasn’t there. He didn’t see anything.

Logan went on the air later to offer what she called a “correction.” She apologized for the report.

Now it seems that CBS News has taken the next step in ordering Logan to take a break, along with her producer, Max McClellan.

I wouldn’t bet on Logan’s return to “60 Minutes.” These types of high-profile “leaves of absence” usually result in termination.

The network’s next big task is to repair the damage done to its reputation and to a news program once considered to be the gold standard for broadcast journalism.