One thing is certain after looking through 100 emails of the interagency process to come up with Benghazi talking points for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Susan Rice got screwed. Totally screwed. I think John Kerry was going to get nominated to State anyway, but Rice had her name dragged through the mud for absolutely no reason.
There was a process with the CIA, the White House, the State Department, the FBI and DOJ, the NIA, all trying to come to some agreement on what could be said publicly about the attacks. No one once questioned that there had been a demonstration inspired by the protests in Cairo. No one really knew for certain who was behind the attacks. The State Department was angry that the CIA was making it sound like they’d had a bunch of warning and they were concerned that the talking points were going beyond what they actually knew and could compromise the prosecution of the case. They worked to get the DOJ more in the loop. The White House barely had any edits at all.
They went around and around and around until they finally gave up and decided to resolve it the next morning at the Deputies meeting. And then someone on Susan Rice’s staff noticed that talking points were being prepared for the Hill and wanted a copy because Rice would be appearing on the Sunday morning shows. Coincidentally, this inquiry came right about same time that the talking points were being finalized. So, Ambassador Rice and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence probably got the talking points about the same time.
Anyone who reads these emails cannot honestly believe that everyone involved was part of a conspiracy to concoct a story about a demonstration. At worst, the State Department was doing a little ass-covering, but even that appears to have been at least partially justified.
The truth is that the people responsible for getting the talking points put together did not know what happened or have time to coordinate what information had been gathered into a formal theory of the case.
Ambassador Rice was using talking points developed originally for the co-chairmen of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD). And somehow she got smeared for lying.
What a disgrace.
Here’s what I’ve figured out. There are GOP members of the House who want to divert attention from the Islamaphobic hate video that triggered the Egyptian and Libyan demonstrations. They want Islamaphobia to be safe in America for partisan political reasons.
Yes, it was apparent at the time that if Rice really was the nominee for Secretary of State, she got shafted by the Congress.
And the resurgence of this issue this month is clearly linked to polling showing that Hillary walks away with 2016 if she runs.
So the GOP has had these motives in keeping this alive:
And no doubt if another motive can be tied to Benghazi, the GOP will be back on it. They like the sound “Ben gah zee” and want to make it contentless so they can fill it with their propaganda content at will.
I’ve never seen any evidence that Rice was going to get State. John Kerry already said that he knew he had the job before this thing blew up.
That’s my take too, but not what was being reported.
I actually think a big motivation for bringing this up is that they need red meat to throw to the hell hounds That control their party while they go ahead and pass immigration reform and some kind of sequester deal.
WOW!!
That’s optimistic.
I think they more like a rabid badger in a sack, lashing out at anyone is a desperate attempt to both draw blood and escape demographic doom.
I’m thinking more of the Senate right now. Who knows about the house. But it could force another violation of the Hastert rule. I think your overall analysis of the GOP getting their back broken by Obama is actually true in spite of the gun legislation failing. It’ll just be a longer window over which it occurs.
I’m going for the “let’s make government service so unattractive that only scoundrels like us will aspire to high office” but your theory works too.
I tell you one thing though, I expected nothing less from McShame and Lindsey, et al. But the silence on the side of many Dems on the Hill outside of POTUS really takes the cake.
Our “friends” in the media of course are now all “oh we feel bad for Susan Rice”, but damn near all of em just went along for the “let’s smear Susan Rice” ride, joining in with Dana Milbank and the like on Susan’s “arrogance” and such.
she was screwed most glaringly by “progressives” who stood silently by as she caught hell. especially white feminists who scream for hillary, but somehow couldn’t be bothered to stand up for rice.
It was the progressives who fought for her hardest of all and the pragmatists who were quieter.
That’s not how I remember it.
I remember the progressives slamming her as a stooge of big oil.
That is not at all what happened. The “progressives” started attacking her for keystone pipeline. The whole spectacle was pathetic.
Considering that the Keystone pipeline is almost all negative consequences, totally fair to blast someone for supporting it, but I meant in recent nomination issue where the WH threw her under the bus as fast as it could.
Booman…
You are now officially part of the fix. Congratulations. You are defending Susan Rice…Bush’s ass-cover at the very end of his reign…because she was also Obama’s ass-cover.
Lame like a motherfucker!!!
The Fix.
An equal opportunity user.
Great.
Be proud.
Be very proud.
Keep it up.
You might be the next Kos or Drudge.
Nice.
AG
Missing from this comment is any argument at all that BooMan is wrong about anything.
Missing also is the word ‘Condoleeza,’ which I thought was a memorable name and somewhat distinct from Susan.
Oh no he didn’t.
Did he?
Arthur, did you just confuse Susan Rice and Condoleeza Rice?
Frankly, I think Rice was highly qualified to be Secretary of State from his 1978 stats alone.
Wait, you mean Arthur Gilroy is not a performance artist?
What else could have possibly happened?
I really pay so little attention to these clones that an early morning glitch doesn’t mean shit. Condoleeza/Susan, Obama/Yo’Mama, State Farm/Geico, Citibank/Bank Of Omertica, Republicrat/Demopublican……when you get right down to it there is not a snot’s worth of difference among them.
Y’all are completely fucked up inside of names. It makes no difference. They either work for the PermaGov or they don’t. How can you tell the difference? If the media give them any kind of positive attention, they are part of the scam. Wake the fuck up.
AG
“I really pay so little attention to these clones that an early morning glitch doesn’t mean shit.”
And now you know what I do whenever I see a post made up of single sentences separated by paragraph breaks.
Do as you must.
Form means nothing.
Content is the thing.
You need mainstream form? You have it in every mainstream media system that has…from the JFK assassination right on through whatever contemporary media-promoted foofaraw in which you might be forced to involve yourself by your own hard-wired genetic system…promulgated and thus continued the set of lies that have brought the U.S. to the present state of rot in which it presently suffers.
Wake the fuck up. It”s been a century now. More. Where you been?
E. E. Cummings figured the shit out 90 years ago.
Wake the fuck up. It”s been a century now. More. Joyce. Burroughs. Eliot. Faulkner. More. Where the fuck you been?
Wake the fuck up.
AG
You’re right, Arthur. Form means nothing. Content means everything.
Which is why, in a world populated by billions of unique individuals, when you make sweeping statements that whole classes of people are indistinguishable, I start thinking of all the other people, now and all through the history of the world, that have lumped large classes of people together as indistinguishable because of one common trait. Party affiliation, say, or what they do for a living, or religion, or class or race or gender. They are all the same, right, Arthur? And, inevitably, you’re better than they are, too, amirite?
Content means everything, Arthur. Yours included. Wake the fuck up.
Oh I agree content means everything. But since the content of your posts is always the same, the fact that you have an easily identifiable form makes it easy for me to skip right over them. That was all I was saying.
Glad to be of convenience to you, sir or madam. Since you don’t read my posts…which is evident from your statement that the content of my posts is always the same…then I would not want you to in any way inconvenience yourself with another set of viewpoints.
Have a nice day. Playing videogames or creating/marketing them, I gather from your email address.
Videogames.
And you accuse me of presenting content that is “always the same,” eh?
Deep.
Go play with your mouse.
AG
AH HA HA HA! Did you just try to attack me based on the domain name of the e-mail address I used to sign up for an account here? Oh man, that’s just too good. Nope, I’m not going to rebut or try to explain anything. I’m just going to leave it there for the world to admire.
From “WOOKIPEDIA”
You live in a child’s world. Grow the fuck up.
AG
Okay, this exchange is just funny.
Ain’t it.
AG
You’re not being sufficiently chastised for your stupidity.
You very loudly and condescendingly confused two people with the same name, and, rather than acknowledging that your mistake both invalidates your point and makes you look like an idiot, you called it an “early morning glitch” and then started lecturing us by comparing your posts to experimental poetry.
Any reasonable person would be ashamed of having been revealed as being that dumb.
You write:
Children are chastised, Jordan. I am a grown man, and not nearly stupid. Who are you to “chastise” me for a small human error?
Loudly?
What? Can you hear me yelling?
Condescendingly?
Ain’t no “condecendingly” in a mistake like this. It’s just a mistake. Mistakes happen. So it goes.
“Invalidates [my] point?”
Which point, exactly? That the Permanent Government is an ongoing, media-promoted fix? That Booman is an extremely active…although mostly unwitting…participant in that fix? That this country is eventually going to have to pay and pay dearly for its criminality and that the only possibility it has for long-term survival is to change its criminal ways? I stand by those points of view.
I wrote later:
That is my point, and I will continue to make it. You don’t like it? Prove me wrong. Or…call me names. As you wish. That act doesn’t mean shit to me either.
Then some video game fool wrote:
And I answered that snarky little criticism of my writing style by saying that:
I backed that up…it’s called “content”, backing things up…by posting a poem by E. E. Cummings.
Where’s the beef?
The real beef? It’s not about my early morning glitch and it is not about my ongoing defense of that mistake. It’s about my “content.” If I was just another clomp, clomp, clomping leftiness zombie who agrees that the Obama administration is the second coming of democracy in America and it’s all gonna get better soon…”Any day now; aaaaany day now”…my confusion about the two Rices would have either been laughed off or gently corrected. But I’m not. I actually have a few original thoughts banging around in my head and that scares a lot of people. You included, apparently. So it goes. Deal wid it. I do.
Later…
AG
Please hand me the shovel.
Your inability to plainly and humbly admit error in the face of overwhelming evidence is positively Rumsfeldian and is the perfect reflection of the “PermaGov” that you rail against daily. Bravo, sir.
That would set the bar too high.
Please explain your deranged comment.
Explain my comment? Or explain my mistake. I did explain my mistake. Rice Crispies or Honey Nut Cheerios, they’re both part of the poisoning of America. Ditto Condoleeza Rice and Susan Rice. Brookings Institution or American Enterprise Institute, DemRat “consultants” Intellibridge or some other equally full-of-shit RatPub consulting firm, it’s all part of the same scam. I made a name mistake. Sue me. However, what I am saying here overall is not a mistake. There is a Permanent Government in power in the United States and there is a revolving door system in place for its functionaries. Examine Susan Rice’s career. When Dems are in the catbird seat she works in government. As soon as they are not in power she works in think tanks and consultancies, and when they return to power she’s back in government again. Has Condoleeza Rice’s career been any different? Of course not, and when…not “if” on the evidence of the mounting media attacks on Obama and the Dems…when the Rats return to power she will be back in government again.
Where’s the beef?
It’s in the PermaGov, that’s where.
Not in some name glitch.
Deal with it.
Apologize?
For what?
For considering most of the DemRat and RatPub functionaries to be basically interchangeable?
Are we still in full economic imperialist, blood-for-oil war mode…albeit in a more efficient fashion…well into the second term of Barack Obama?
Bet on it.
Are the Bush II and Obama administrations really that different?
That’s my beef and I’m stickin’ to it.
It’s just two adventure movies with different casts.
Bet on it.
AG
Should I bet on it?
Had to sign-in for the first time in probably years just to give you props for your retort. That was LOL worthy for real…
Different Rice, methinks. Susan Rice, as far as I know, had no involvement in the Bush administration. She did serve in the Clinton administration in various capacities.
Obama fired him, even though he had nothing to do with the Tea Party scandal. Typical Obama: ignore reality, and base your actions on the paranoid, delusional Republican worldview.
He is a former Bush appointee too that is only in the position because GOP obstructionist would likely block any new person and they have to someone keep the lights on.
He should not even be in that position and would have been let go by now anyway in a normal power, like if GOP was President.
Ok, so people say heads should roll and then head do roll and now the same people are mad because the heads that rolled are not “the right heads”. Ok, so then maybe Obama should have re-hired the Bush appointee and bring him live on camera and made him resign all over again. Or not maybe he should have fired the lowly workers in Cincinnati just following orders, but being civil service employees, you can’t just fire `em right?
Oh and Obama needs to do something translates to…???? What exactly. Issue a statement saying the admin doesn’t condone the actions, check, that’s it’s inexcusable, check, that some investigation of the IRS will occur within Congress, check, and what else????
What more could/should he do aside from rendering his garments and dropping to his needs in shame and apology?
Oh, yeah, he should wait a bit more, but then of course the same people who said, Obama “needs to address this soon or now” or “did the White House wait too long”..will be satisfied with that right?
Or maybe he could go on that epic rant or calling out Republicans left and right, that so many seem to want him to do, and have it ONLY be broadcast and represented fairly and correctly…where exactly? We are already inundated with the “press turns against” Obama bias and we expect the media to fairly report anything Obama says???
What would you do in this situation? I’m all ears.
To be honest, I haven’t followed this scandal. I assume that it is just the usual Republican hysteria about nothing, and Booman’s diary on the IG report confirms that impression.
The Republicans are going to scream bloody murder no matter what Obama does. Since top people get fired so rarely in Washington these days when they screw up (the firing of David Petraeus was a notable exception, but he was fired using a pretext), firing the IRS Commissioner amounts to an admission that there was a major problem, whereas I don’t think there was one.
Letting sharks smell blood doesn’t diminish their appetite, so I’m not sure that this firing accomplishes anything.
“To be honest, I haven’t followed this scandal.”
Aaaaand I’m done reading your opinion on anything related to this topic.
Why the fuck should I care what you think?
This is Booman’s blog, and Booman seems to believe that this scandal is a tempest in a teapot, and I was just basing my opinion on his judgement. What good are blogs like this if you can’t trust the blogger’s judgement, instead of having to follow every news story yourself? Jeez.
You can choose to care what I think or not. It doesn’t make any difference. I’m just saying that when you want to offer your opinion on something, leading with, “I don’t really know about this subject” is kind of a bad opener.
And while Booman Tribune is a wonderful blog, it is not a news source or a substitute for a news source. That’s why Booman links to his sources in his posts. So that you can check it out for yourself. I don’t think he’ll be very offended if you do that.
“To be honest, I haven’t followed this scandal.”
But he checked his gut, and it felt right to say that Obama screwed up.
The thing is that at this level of government/politics people understand how the game is played. People withdraw their nominations, people get asked to “step down” all the time for purely nonsensical and political reasons. This is one of the theater aspects of the whole game and anyone who gets to that level understands this.
about it the acting commissioner didn’t disclose. That is a fire-able offense even as the scandal didn’t happen under him.
Only a total rube could find anything amiss in the e-mail exchange to agree on the wording of the Benghazi talking points. Have those in the media lost their minds or do they now work without editors?
What a disappointment it must be for the Congressional Republicans (and their bozo bloggers) to discover that the thing that has flipped them out since day one was always the first talking point with slight and non-material modifications.
(Ignore the fact that none of the participants caught the error in calling the Special Mission Compound a “Consulate.)
Why does this enrage them? What normally enrages people?
It enrages them because Obama is black.
Okay, that’s an oversimplification.
Maybe.
And they didn’t have the same visceral hatred for Bill Clinton who is pasty white?
But that wasn’t my question. What is it about that first talking point that unleashed rage?
IMO, it was about the Islamophobic video that triggered demonstrations across the Arab World. The GOP would prefer to ignore that and focus on a clear-cut pre-planned terrorist attack that the Obama administration failed to interrupt.
The truth likely is that the terrorist attack used a spontaneous demonstration as an opportunity to attack a CIA station and a consulate in retaliation of the drone death in Pakistan of one their buddies, al-Libi.
Casting the story that way would go against the GOP on two points: that the attack was opportunistic not planned and that it was not because they hate our freedoms but because of what US policy did.
And they very much want to bring down the President who got bin Laden. That success is what drives them nuts. That a “Kenyan muslim socialist” got the Islamic terrorist numero uno destroys their preferred narrative in so many ways.
Bingo:
Except, they are normally quite happy to decry the craziness of Muslims “gone wild” over anything from the west that mocks their religion. But the narrative that Obama failed to interrupt the video inspired protests makes the same point and is a simpler narrative.
What seems evident from the Cairo demonstrations is that there were several motivations but they settled on going with the video. See no reason why it wasn’t the same in Benghazi. In both events a few protestors scaled the perimeter security. There just wasn’t the same sort of security inside the compound at the SMC as there was at the Cairo Embassy.
The rubes will go along with anything they’re told is outrageous on the part of the Obama administration, but someone within the GOP operations wants that video buried.
There just wasn’t the same sort of security inside the compound at the SMC as there was at the Cairo Embassy.
Well, that, and there was a hit squad armed with automatic weapons and grenade launchers in Behghazi, but not in Cairo.
I’m as cynical as anyone, and even I was flabbergasted when it came out, five months ago, that Rice was simply followly the jointly agree upon talking points of the intelligence community, and it made no difference. It’s as though they pitched a months-long fit because, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner two years ago, Obama didn’t announce that Special Ops forces were in the air on the way to take bin Laden out. This from the same political party that launched an illegal war that killed a million people based entirely on lying to the public far more explicitly for far longer.
Also, too: since when is something said on a Sunday chat show considered testimony under oath? And now that it is, would somebody please convene a grand jury? I’m looking forward to the 238,387-count indictment against John McCain, incomplete though it would be.
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