I am but a lowly blogger, bereft of my parents’ basement since they traded suburban bliss for the retirement home. My jammies are torn and frayed and I’m running dangerously low on Cheetos. Who am I, then, to take on the laborious task of countering the six trillion hours of media coverage that aired on the “Benghazi Scandal” with an equal and countervailing amount of coverage on the now established fact that it was ALL bullshit from the start? This is clearly not my job.
It won’t be anyone’s job, of course. But it should be. Any media outlet that lent credence to this “debate” ought to spend the next three-plus years publishing articles and airing pieces on the extent to which this was all a cynical and spiteful lie from the beginning. They should keep doing these pieces no matter how much it outrages and annoys their audiences. They should do it long after it has any potential to edify the public. They should beat it like a dead horse until people do parodies of the media for beating dead horses, and then should keep doing it for several years after that.
Every day should be Susan Rice Vindication Day. We should wake every morning to mockery of Darrell Issa and go to sleep each night to ridicule of Mitt Romney. This should go on until all decent people have long ago given up and stopped begging for it to stop.
And, sometime in late 2017, we will have reached Fair & Balanced coverage of the tragedy in Benghazi.
There is some irony in letting the Republicans’ House Select Committee on Intelligence settle this matter, since they have all the sincerity of a seasick crocodile. But there really is a case of “if even they admit that this was all a crock of crap” at play here.
And, given how seriously these charges were taken and the sheer volume of credulous coverage that was dedicated to them, the public will not internalize the actual truth unless and until they are subjected to a similarly ridiculous and seemingly superfluous amount of corrected media coverage and attention.
The media better get started, because I have better things to do.
FYI, it’s the House Intelligence Committee that prepared this report. The Select Committee on Benghazi is still at work.
The Administration should refuse to let anyone testify in front of that farce. Or if compelled, simply repeat the fact that nothing was wrong per 8 other reports, including this one.
Even if you did blast the news from the Frog Pond, you’d be preaching to the choir. We knew it all along. The media fearmongers and political rat terriers who tore into the non-story that was Benghazi should be paraded around like the ridiculous failures that they are.
The AP story was tucked away in our local newspaper this morning on Page 6. The fact that it wasted two more years of taxpayer money should be a key point in telling the story as well. And also that it was a GOP-led Congressional committee.
But ho-hum, just another roadblock thrown up by the Republicans, who couldn’t care less about the facts of the story. They’ll claim the research team was bought off by Left Wing somehow.
Retractions, and apologies are never in the Republican playbook.
It will never, never end. Fox just moves right on to the next incarnation:
Progress — the Lie be believ’d for years and years and the Truth limps along as CT.
Yes, indeed.
But there is always this:
Add to that this little gem from an anonymous contributor on the blog Science-Based Medicine.
Oh yes!!! The PermaGov’s approach to crowd control, perfectly stated.
There is no possibility of any given “truth” surviving unharmed or unaltered after the first counter-lie aimed at it has successfully hit its target, and any purveyor whatsoever of misinformation/disinformation immediately renders himself unfit for human consumption the moment the first lie is told. That makes every national politician now functioning in either party of the PermaGov w/the possible exception of Ron Paul completely unbelievable.
The real truth of the matter? Truly understood by very, very few people?
Or, as another wise man who liked to keep his identity hidden often said,
Both sides of this UniParty are guilty of massive lies. Believe nothing. On this level? Everything is permitted.
Bet on it.
AG
You could also try critical thinking. Have you ever considered that?
And then they can apologize for Ebola, ISIS and Kim Kardashian’s ass?
Here you are again, taking the partisan short view. This time you are praising the death of a so-called conspiracy theory…a supposed death, because no one outside of the highest levels of the PermaGov/Surveillance State has any idea whatsoever about what is really happening on the ground in the vast U.S. war zones…without pointing out that if the U.S. was not deeply involved in said wars the incident never would have happened in the first place. That is like praising a terminal cancer victim when a hangnail has been removed.
WTFU.
AG
There you go again, letting the voices bouncing around in the padded cell of your mind overwhelm your reading comprehension.
Did he praise the death of a CT? No, he lamented that it will live on in the minds of wingnut hordes, thanks to the feckless apathy and shameless disregard for the most meager journalistic ethics of our big media.
And I know you’ve been around this place long enough to remember Booman’s feelings about our involvement in Libya and the rest of our wars.
So yeah, WTFU? Maybe you should start/stop taking whatever medications help/cause your cognitive malfunctions.
No meds, junebug. I leave those to the politicians.
Read it again.
You missed it.
AG
Thinkin that the Rep’s have become so lazy they can’t even get off their media couch to create new outrage. Will they even have the umph to outrage whilst they’re busy not governing is my question. They’ve fought against so many common ground issues now that their own platform outside of ‘just say no’ is non existent.
While most of the world was ignoring the Benghazi scandal debunking and focused on their weekend preparations for Thanksgiving, a story unfolded in the Twitter stream that exposed the disinformation process of the media. And it was about St. Louis.
Some background. There is in St. Louis (unknown whether also in Ferguson) a bunch of people who style themselves as members of the New Black Panther Party. The relationship that they have with the protesters in Ferguson is somewhat ambivalent. For some they are seen as outsiders, but they have proved helpful on some occasions over the past three months. During the brief period in which the state task force allowed them to party in Florissant Avenue, these folks directed traffic to ensure that they did not violate their agreement with the state task force. But they carry the big scary title “New Black Panther Party”, which has a history with the FBI and likely conjures up images of COINTELPRO on both sides. Even though the New Black Panther Party is independent of the alums of the the Black Panther Party of the 1960s and 1970s.
Last night St. Louis Today carried the story of an arraignment of two members of the New Black Panther Party for trying to make “straw purchases” of guns at the local outdoor outfitters Cabela’s. According to a communique on the St. Louis NBPP website, two of their members were arrested for making a gun purchase under a false name. The complicating fact is that these young men have birth names and also Muslim names. For example, Olajuwon Davis is Olajuwon Ali. Signing the wrong name for the form could net you a false signature charge. The second thing to understand is that they were arrested in an FBI sting operation that just happened to arraign them two days prior to the expected date of announcement of the grand jury verdict on whether to charge Darren Wilson with a crime. Those are the clear facts of the case as we know them at this point.
Enter the media.
The St. Louis Today story and a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story source the identification of the people arraigned as members of the New Black Panther Party to a “local law enforcement source”. That typically is the PR flack for either the St. Louis Metropolitan PD (Chief Dotson) or the PR flack for the St. Louis County PD (Chief Belmar). The confirmation of the FBI doing the arrest (and possible confirmation that it was a sting operation) came from a named FBI spokesperson.
Enter CBS News and one of its executive producers Mosheh Oikounou. CBS News tweeted a teaser for two arrested by FBI sting for seeking pipe bombs. Gateway Pundit ran with this and alleged the intent of the NBPP was to blow up the Arch. Mosheh Oikounou pimps the story to other journalists, who retweet it. Which is how I got to watch this little drama. Oikounou then tweets a link to the story which lays out the pipe bomb allegations but not the allegation of attacks on the Arch. And off the pipe bomb allegation goes into the national media space, appearing again (after a CBS New “correction” to the false names charges) this morning. The comment threads go wild on every news site hyping up the danger of the New Black Panther Party and justifying the huge military policing effort already in Ferguson.
Curious as to who this Mosheh Oikounou is, I search for his biography. Nothing on Wikipedia, but he does have a public Linked In entry.
A George Washington University graduate, from 2004 to 2006 he was a Presidential Scholar at GWU’s Homeland Security Institute (search for who and what they are–it’s fascinating how many of the welfare queens of the homeland security equipment and services industry fund partner with them). In 2004, he was a runner for CBS Sports at the Athens Olympics, which hints that he might be a Greek native. He quickly got hired at ABC News and then moved in 1-2 year spurts to FoxNews, Bloomberg, CBS – This Morning, and CBS News in increasing responsibilities in news production.
And here he was planting disinformation into the media stream, changing a charge of providing false information to seeking a pipe bomb. And again using anonymous law enforcement sources and no other sources.
When FoxNews got around to covering the story, the put a black reporter on it and repeated the already corrected pipe bomb story yet again.
Meanwhile the actual violence in Ferguson over the past three nights has been police snatching, body slamming and arresting people they seemingly have identified as “leaders”, letting them post bail, and trying to use arrests and tickets for unlawful assembly as multiple-arrest patterns of criminality to try to increase the severity of the charges and throwing in a spurious “assaulting an officer” charge to try to push the charges over into being a felony that would allow them to charge high bail or not allow bail.
The protesters and the community of Ferguson have been training in disciplined non-violence for three months. There is a determination reflected in the tweet stream that they will not allow their struggle to be used violently for some other person’s or group’s agenda. And a determination to seek justice for Mike Brown.
If the jury indicts and the charge is manslaughter, that will be a huge victory for these folks under Missouri law. A no-bill would be a blatant miscarriage of justice; many many people have been indicted on less evidence.
The police meanwhile will attempt to provoke violence to justify their over-reaction and large expenditures on protecting one police officer. If Darren Wilson is indicted, how will the police respond to white violence? That’s the key question. Because the community is expecting a no-bill and have dealt with that possibility already.
And how will the media spin white violence? The media turned David Koresh into a hero and martyr for gun rights.
Correction: The last name of the executive producer at CBS News is Oinounou.
When you lie, you either lie big, or go home. And after you lie big, you have to keep lying about it, forever.
BenghaziTM was simply an attempted September Surprise for Mitt Rmoney, and not only didn’t it work, but it kept on chugging along.
In fact, because BenghaziTM didn’t help Mitt Rmoney win in 2012, it had to have been a cover up to ensure that the blah man usurping a White House would win…with the help of a few hundred million fraudulent-cast votes, of course.
Here is a picture of Mitt Rmoney walking off the stage after discussing Benghazi for the first time.
Note the huge America-hating smirk this piece of shit is wearing.
Which is why “Please proceed Governor” is my favorite 2012 election moment.
Yes.
I use it all the time.
It’s basically where Obama clubs Rmoney over the head with it. It was, of course, Rmoney who hand-crafted the club before handing it to Obama.
And it’s been pissing of T̶h̶e̶ ̶F̶a̶s̶c̶i̶s̶t̶ ̶P̶a̶r̶t̶y̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶A̶m̶e̶r̶i̶c̶a̶ Republican party for two years now.
This is when the real creative BenghaziTM stuff will happen. I’m almost looking forward to it.
What fair and balanced would look like would have been this.
Everytime a GOPer came on tv talking about this, they would have been asked:
COngressman, did you vote to cut the funding for security for our overseas outposts?
If yes, then ask them don’t they see that their actions have consequences?
If no, ask them don’t they understand that the actions of their colleagues have consequences.
Enough of these confrontations, the GOP would have STFU.
But, that would mean that the MSM would actually have to make a point that GOP votes have consequences.
Actually I think it IS Media Matters’ job.
And I was not entirely sure their was nothing there, the American ambassador died and that is a big fucking deal. But it was pretty clear there was essentially no scandal as the GOP saw it.