Wow, ballsy move! Expect more throwback from the Dems.
I’m surprised they waited this long. I especially like how they prefaced the Pubbies numerous failures to safeguard what they claimed was privileged info yet leaked same to Fox in such an obvious, open way the Dems easily tracked this info back to the committee. Smart they were not and I’ll bet now that this is why Issa lost his committee post: the few Pubbies who knew this would eventually bite them asked for a new chairman to stem said leaks.
Far more damaging releases undercutting the Republicans remain to be disclosed but now that the gloves are off, look out, Katie-bar-the-door!
Love how they will now cry foul! Good luck with that idea. Put a fork in them, they’re done. Bwahahahaha!
I do recall the debate about whether Dems should participate in this farce of a panel. This right here is exactly why it was a wise decision. The public doesn’t get nuance, the media would’ve portrayed it as Dems running scared, and there would have been absolutely no one to hold the GOP accountable or protect witnesses before the panel. Imagine the position we’d be in right now if the GOP could counter Dems rightly pointing to McCarthy’s admission as proof of the panel’s partisanship by saying, “how would they know, they weren’t even there?” In the end, this was a smart move and one that may even wind up giving HRC the upper hand with the public. Well played.
Here comes the GOP ignoring why the Dems did what they did and screaming about how they are politicizing a national security investigation. The Tone Deaf Express Train is never late
Wasserman Shultz. Trained and developed in Florida which surely has the lamest sorry ass State committee known to man . Threw the governorship to Voldemort felon Rick Scott Twice …Twice ! by fielding lame candidates on an easily defeated douche-bag. Inept does not begin to scratch the surface and explore the depth of the dysfunction that is the Florida Democratic Party.
Looking around at what is available among the “media”…which Palin calls “lamestream” but I would include Fox…I came to the conclusion quite a while ago that Journalism died what Walter Cronkite retired. Woodward and Bernstein had their Watergate but that was before Uncle Walter left CBS. Now Woodward and Bernstein are over the hill and resting on their laurels. There’s no Edward R Murrow in the offing. Just different levels of hackery. But I’m thinking TPM is better than most. We complain about click bait here… take a look at what CNN.com has become. Tabloid click bait is being generous. They don’t try to hide it, in fact it looks like they pride themselves on their cleverness.
Democrats can’t win this game. You wrestle a pig in the mud, the pig loves it and you get muddy. They need to leave en masse and tell Gowdy to get the Sergeant at Arms to enforce his silly kangaroo court subpoenas. And they should announce it exactly like that.
Honestly, it’s pretty easy to scroll through the letter and find the indented hearing excerpts and read just those.
Personally though, I’m very happy that TPM includes the entire letter for us to read. If you want someone to tell you what it says (usually from a steadfastly skewed anti-Hillary point of view), may I recommend Politico?
However, reading the letter was rather entertaining in a schadenfreude kind of way.
Unfortunately the PDF was scanned as an image (!) instead of as text, so we can’t just copy-paste quotes from it. So, I, being a lazy individual, will just give very brief summaries.
The letter specifically debunked the impressions Republicans had sought to establish through selective leaking of the transcript (after notifying the committee that the whole transcript will be released to provide context for everything, “classified” designation which the GOP ignored altogether be damned).
Politico’s article had claimed that Ms Mills said she had reviewed and suggested changes to the ARB report on Benghazi. Her review was not news as depicted by the leakers and their press transcriptionists as it had been discussed publicly in 2013 testimony before Issa’s committee. She specifically said she had not suggested changes nor had the ability to effect changes to the document, and the ARB specifically maintained a strong firewall between their conclusions and any comments from the agency being investigated. In short, this had been leaked as a revelation, but the actual testimony is exactly what had already been on the public record.
Politico’s article claimed Ms Mills said that Ms Rice’s comments on this being a terrorist attack were incorrect and known as such. In reality, she said she had no way of knowing what Ms Rice had been told prior to those statements, as she was not involved in Ms Rice’s preparations nor privy to the materials used in that prep. In other words, again, no news from this testimony, but the “leak” said there were bombshell admissions which just weren’t there.
Republicans have since characterized Ms Clinton’s actions during the attacks themselves as overstepping her bounds and micromanaging, again saying that Ms Mills said as much. Instead, the actual testimony describes Clinton as stepping in and being involved in lower-level meetings, but in a very productive way. In other words, Clinton comes across in the actual testimony as a good leader in a time of crisis - concerned, certain of the correct course of action once the facts had been laid out, accountable, which the GOP talking points since have said Ms Mills thought Clinton had been an impediment to the process.
Finally, there is testimony about the emotional impact of the loss of Ambassador Stevens on Ms Clinton, as well as the rest of the interagency group up to and including the President. This runs counter to the narrative the Republicans have said Ms Mills’ testimony gave of a cold and uncaring leader worried about optics rather than lives.
No meeting since January, just what have the staff being paid to do… I know sit on their thumbs while others make selective anonymous comments e.g. Issa… a four letter word if there ever was one that Mamma would use a bar of soap on.
Clinton is scheduled to testify at this mockery of a committee on October 22. My hope is that she will make a statement right out of the box that will disabuse them of the notion that they are doing something that is legitimate and purposeful. But diplomatically, of course, always diplomatically.
The problem here is that rather more than half the story is the Beltway MSM Cocktail Weenie Sucking Asshats, of whom Politico are the embodiment, complicity in repeatedly reporting Republican hearsay accounts of documents said asshats are not shown. They do it over and over, no matter how many times it turns out they were being flatly lied to, and the reason they do it is because they are never held to account and, god forbid, never hold themselves accountable.
This is what drives me crazy. The Republicans absolutely insist with a straight face that the staff at Benghazi could have put out a call for assistance and that assistance could have arrived just in the nick of time. The reality is that US Forces CANNOT respond to calls and be on-site instantly. It just doesn’t work that way. We do not have a Quick Reaction Force that can reach any international destination within hours. It takes time to raise those forces, assess the situation, and get troops on-station. Anybody who thinks otherwise has watched too many movies.
Bush/Cheney/Rummy destroyed countless artifacts, historical site and set up an army base on Babylon, doing irreparable damage to it, and allowing the Iraq National Museum to be completely looted and countless tablets, etc., to end up on the black market…and nobody gave a flying fuck in the MSM or GOP/Teatrolls when it was happening. ISIS is doing nothing the GOP/Teatrolls don’t do on a regular basis: attempting to erase inconvenient history so it can be ignored and/or written over.
I read the letter, because being someone who tries to constantly inform himself, of course I would. There’s no need to be a snarky douche and suggest I go to a false equivalence shitshow like Politico for mindless beltway conventional wisdom and rightward spin. Why have any article at all if the expectation is “just read the letter”? Why not just post a headline “Dems Send Letter About Benghazi” and then just put the embedded PDF under it? Poof, no need for words at all and you’re on to writing the next Trump article all the sooner.
This is the key. The GOP is good at follow through, the Dems aren’t, I hope they don’t toss this out there and then let it flail as they seem to do with so many issues. They need to drive this TO the media for weeks and keep doing it even when it seems the media has moved on.
