Hillary Clinton

[Plane]

"With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or because of guys out for a walk one night and decided to go kill some Americans? At this point, what difference does it make, Senator?" Clinton said, raising her voice at Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). "It is our job to figure out what happened and prevent it from ever happening again, Senator."

"

http://www.c-span.org/Events/Sec-of-State-Clinton-Testifies-to-Senate-on-Benghazi-Attack/10737437475/

I find Secretary Clinton's testimony very unsatisfying and uninformative.

[sirs]

That's an understatement

Rep. Brooks Questions Secretary Clinton on Benghazi Tragedy

[sirs]

[Xavier_Onassis]

She said all she needed to say.

There is no scandal and there is no cover up.

[Plane]

There is a deep shamefull scandal and you are accepting the coverup.

I feel for you , the same thing happened to me in more tender years when Nixon was doing it.

[Xavier_Onassis]

It is 100% clear what happened in Benghazi. There IS NO COVERUP!

Nixon was spying the Democrats to sabotage the election. He and his henchmen engineered the entire opertation. Hillary did not attack the consulate and kill the ambassador. Get real, there is ZERO in common.

The GOP is a failing party, a minority of a minority, incompetent fools pursuing the largesse of a few zillionaires. They are paid to do this sort of crap. There is no reason to believe any of their stupid lies. I hope they become extinct forever.

[sirs]

Feel better?  Did you get it all out?

[sirs]

Hillary lip-synced more than Beyoncé

If I'm following this correctly, according to one spokesperson for the Marine Corps Band, at Monday's Inauguration Beyoncé lip-synced to the national anthem but the band accompanied her live. However, according to a second spokesperson, it was the band who were pretending to play to a tape while Beyoncé sang along live. So one or the other of them was faking it. Or maybe both were. Or neither. I'd ask Chuck Schumer, the master of ceremonies, who was standing right behind her, but he spent the entire performance staring at her butt. If it was her butt, that is. It might just have been the bulge of the Radio Shack cassette player she was miming to. In an America with an ever more tenuous grip on reality, there's so little to be sure of.

Whether Beyoncé was lip-syncing to the band or the band were lip-syncing to Beyoncé is like one of those red pill / blue pill choices from "The Matrix." Was President Obama lip-syncing to the Founders, rooting his inaugural address in the earliest expressions of American identity? ("The patriots of 1776 ... gave to us a Republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.") Or maybe the Founders were lip-syncing to him as he appropriated the vision of the first generation of Americans and yoked it ("preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action") to a statist pitch they would have found utterly repugnant.

The whole event had the air of a simulacrum:  It looked like a presidential inauguration, but the sound was tinny and not quite in sync. Obama mouthed along to a canned vocal track: "We reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future." That's great! It's always reassuring to know the head of state is going to take issue will all those people wedded to the "belief" that America needs either to shove every granny off the cliff or stake its newborns out on the tundra for the wolves to finish off. When it comes to facing the music, Obama is peerless at making a song and dance about tunes nobody's whistling without ever once warbling the real big numbers (16 trillion). But, like Beyoncé, he's totally cool and has a cute butt.

A couple of days later, it fell to the 45th president-in-waiting to encapsulate the ethos of the age in one deft sound bite: What difference does it make? Hillary Clinton's instantly famous riposte at the Benghazi hearings is such a perfect distillation that it surely deserves to be the national motto of the United States. They should put it on Paul Krugman's trillion-dollar coin, and in the presidential oath:

"Do you solemnly swear to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?"

"Sure. What difference, at this point, does it make?"

Well, it's the difference between cool and reality – and, as Hillary's confident reply appeared to suggest, and the delirious media reception of it confirmed, reality comes a poor second in the Obama era. The presumption of conservatives has always been that, one day, cold, dull reality would pierce the klieg-light sheen of Obama's glamour. Indeed, that was the premise of Mitt Romney's reductive presidential campaign. But, just as Beyoncé will always be way cooler than some no-name operatic soprano or a male voice choir, so Obama will always be cooler than a bunch of squaresville yawneroos boring on about jobs and debt and entitlement reform. Hillary's cocksure sneer to Sen. Johnson of Wisconsin made it explicit. At a basic level, the "difference" is the difference between truth and falsity, but the subtext took it a stage further: no matter what actually happened that night in Benghazi, you poor sad loser Republicans will never succeed in imposing that reality and its consequences on this administration.

And so a congressional hearing – one of the famous "checks and balances" of the American system – is reduced to just another piece of Beltway theater. "The form was still the same, but the animating health and vigor were fled," as Gibbon wrote in "The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire." But he's totally uncool, too. So Hillary lip-synced far more than Beyoncé, and was adored for it. "As I have said many times, I take responsibility," she said. In Washington, the bold declarative oft-stated acceptance of responsibility is the classic substitute for responsibility: rhetorically "taking responsibility," preferably "many times," absolves one from the need to take actual responsibility even once.

In the very same self-serving testimony, the Secretary of State denied that she'd ever seen the late Ambassador Stevens' cables about the deteriorating security situation in Libya on the grounds that "1.43 million cables come to my office" – and she can't be expected to see all of them, or any. She is as out of it as President Jefferson, who complained to his Secretary of State James Madison, "We have not heard from our ambassador in Spain for two years. If we have not heard from him this year, let us write him a letter." Today, things are even worse. Hillary has apparently not heard from any of our 1.43 million ambassadors for four years. When a foreign head of state receives the credentials of the senior emissary of the United States, he might carelessly assume that the chap surely has a line of communication back to the government he represents. For six centuries or so, this has been the minimal requirement for functioning interstate relations. But Secretary Clinton has just testified that, in the government of the most powerful nation on Earth, there is no reliable means by which a serving ambassador can report to the Cabinet minister responsible for foreign policy. And nobody cares: What difference does it make?

Nor was the late Christopher Stevens any old ambassador but, rather, Secretary Clinton's close personal friend "Chris." It was all "Chris" this, "Chris" that, when Secretary Clinton and President Obama delivered their maudlin eulogies over the flag-draped coffin of their "friend." Gosh, you'd think if they were on such intimate terms, "Chris" might have had Hillary's email address, but apparently not. He was just one of 1.43 million close personal friends cabling the State Department every hour of the day.

Four Americans are dead, but not a single person involved in the attack and the murders has been held to account. Hey, what difference does it make? Lip-syncing the national anthem beats singing it. Peddling a fictitious narrative over the coffin of your "friend" is more real than being an incompetent boss to your most vulnerable employees. And mouthing warmed-over clichés about vowing to "bring to justice" those responsible is way easier than actually bringing anyone to justice.

And so it goes:

Another six trillion in debt? What difference does it make?

An economic stimulus bill that stimulates nothing remotely connected with the economy? What difference does it make?

The Arab Spring? Aw, whose heart isn't stirred by those exhilarating scenes of joyful students celebrating in Tahrir Square? And who cares, after the cameras depart, that Egypt's in the hands of a Jew-hating 9/11 truther whose goons burn churches and sexually assault uncovered women?
Obama is the ultimate reality show, and real reality can't compete. Stalin famously scoffed, "How many divisions has the Pope?" Secretary Clinton was more audacious: How many divisions has reality?

Not enough

[sirs]

Speaking of still not getting to the truth
--------------------------------------------------

After four months of playing hide and seek with the American people, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton honored the Congress with her presence long enough to duck and deceive the American people regarding the worst incident of terrorism against Americans since 9/11.

Those who are fans of Mrs. Clinton must have been delighted with her tap dancing around questions addressed to her by House and Senate Committee members. Those fans consider all this as just stagecraft created by political hacks that have no right to question “his eminence” --the President -- or his esteemed Secretary of State. Yet there are many questions unanswered and new questions that were created by her testimony.

The moment that received the most coverage was Secretary Clinton’s heated response to a question from Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI). Johnson queried Clinton as to why her office was not immediately able to determine whether the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi were spontaneous or planned by a terrorist group. Clinton responded in an animated and heated manner: “With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or guys out for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?”

It makes a lot of difference. Not because of the great point that Charles Krauthammer made after the hearing where he pointed out that telling the truth to the American people is important. The central question has not been laid to rest as to :
- whether the Administration was covering up the fact that Al Qaeda was resurgent despite Obama’s biggest foreign policy coup – killing Bin Laden.
- Nor is it because of the point others brought out about the fact that Ambassador Stevens had made repeated requests for additional security, but Clinton claims not to be aware of such requests.

It is much simpler than that. That night had started with major protests in Egypt. They had reportedly spread to Libya. It was 9/11, the anniversary of the largest attack on the American homeland in history. It certainly appeared that neither the American Embassy in Egypt nor our consulate in Libya or our Libyan Ambassador properly prepared for the day at hand. The rest of Northern Africa had been a powder keg for over a year. Understanding the nature of the attack in Libya certainly would give guidance to how our State Department staff in a place like Tunisia should prepare themselves in the coming hours. It is that simple, yet our Secretary of State does not think it of significant importance.

Then there is Ms. Clinton’s management of her department. She stated she has concern for all of the 70,000 employees at the State Department. We know we are a big country and we know it is a complicated world, but really -- 70,000 employees? If you take the estimated 195 countries and put 100 staff people in each country that totals 19,500. That would include providing for 100 staff people in countries like Burundi or Macau. If you double that for all the people who might work here in the U.S. and add some vigorish you have 39,000 people. Why in God’s name do we have 70,000 people in that department? No wonder we are broke; and Clinton claims there was not enough security because of insufficient resources and points her finger at Congress?

But more importantly, the question of her management has to be asked. Mrs. Clinton claims that the requests from Ambassador Stevens for more security did not cross her desk. We are big on delegation, but how did she not know? This was Libya, one of the hot button places in the world. A place that was clearly unsettled. This was not additional security requests from Belgium or the Bahamas. Nor was it even security requests from Colombia or Indonesia. This was a request from the Ambassador in Libya. Not only that, there were multiple requests. If the requests did not filter up to Clinton then she is guilty of gross negligence of management. Are you saying your staff does not know what to bring to your attention? Either she has no idea how to train her staff or she wanted institutional ignorance. Either way she is guilty.

Most people think that Clinton’s ducking and obfuscating got her out of any real scrutiny on this issue. With most of the press being in the bag for Obama and Clinton, this issue could go away. It is now in the hands of my friend, Congressman Ed Royce, chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee, to keep the hope alive that some truth will come out of this murderous mess.

Go get then, Congressman. Don’t let Hillary’s lies take the day.

[sirs]

[Xavier_Onassis]

I really does not make even the teensiest bit of importance to 99.9% of the people of this country. Krauthammer is a ratbag rightwing dolt. Al Qaeda is not some unified entity like SMERSH, it is a random assortment of dissident and fanatical groups that are occasionally unified by a desire to finance their projects.

By 2016, no one will even remember this.

I recall that Sarah Palin was some sort of heroic guiding light for you rightwing loons for nearly two years. Now she has sunk far below everyone's radar and not even Fox thinks she is worth the bother.

[sirs]

By 2016, no one will even remember this.

ROFL.....riiiiiiiiiight       

[Plane]

Al Qaeda is not some unified entity like SMERSH, it is a random assortment of dissident and fanatical groups that are occasionally unified by a desire to finance their projects.

Thanks George Bush 43!