Tag Archives: Benghazi

Russians Ordering Contract Killings of U.S. Troops? Hey, It’s No Benghazi.

Posted on by

Let me get this straight. U.S. troops find a boatland of cash in a Taliban hideout. They investigate and learn from captured Taliban that Russia has been offering — and paying — a bounty on U.S. soldiers they kill. This gets reported up and up through the intelligence agencies and the whole megillah of the chain of command, with special inter-agency meetings, until it gets to the White House where in Version #1: Trump was never told about it. Or, in Version #2: his people (meaning who? Jared? Ivanka? Mark Meadows?) decided it wasn’t credible enough for him to do or say anything about it.

Is that the story? Am I missing anything?

With everything else going on, and by that I mean everything else that has turned into an All-Time, #1 on the charts [bleep]show of incompetence and corruption by Mr. MAGA, it may be hard to assign proportionate shock and disgust at this one. But someone’s got to try.

Obviously, no one — and I do mean no one — outside the wire of TrumpNation believes Trump wasn’t told. We can believe he didn’t read his Presidential Daily Briefing, (the one later marked “President Has Seen”), because these briefing things are often longer than a paragraph, don’t refer to him specifically in every other sentence and have too few pictures. But this is … big stuff.

This is Vladimir Putin himself putting out contract killings on American GIs.

Stuff like that, if you’re in the intelligence business, you make 100% certain POTUS is told, face to face, that this is what’s going down. It’s why you simultaneously offer him a menu of options of how to respond.

So yes, he and his “people” are lying and praying to hell that the “fake news” doesn’t come up with any more proof of what they … haven’t bothered to do anything about.

As these things always go, attention turns immediately to TrumpWorld’s royal guard, namely congressional Republicans, including notable hawks like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell and hell, if they can track him down, ex-South Carolina congressman, Trey Gowdy, former chairman of the United States House Select Committee on Benghazi.

We all remember Gowdy. Not just for the worst case of flop sweat since Albert Brooks in “Broadcast News”, but for the way his committee (the sixth “investigation” Republicans whipped up around Benghazi) spent two and a half years (eight months longer than the Mueller investigation) and $8 million to find that, big surprise here, Hillary Clinton didn’t personally feed ammo clips to rebels attacking the U.S. compound.

Certainly now, congressional Republicans will be seen everywhere, scuttling like crabs to get in front of the nearest camera, puffing themselves up and inveighing against the hated Rooskies for such a low down dirty hit job on our universally beloved troops, right?

Right?

Right?

Just kidding. Maybe a couple here and there, in tepid terms. But because of Donald Trump’s (tiny) fingerprints on this atrocity, the hive mind of the Trump-era Republican borg will have nothing impactful to say … again. They’re the bored cops waving gawkers past the flaming 20-car pile-up. “Nothing to see, folks. Keep it moving. But hey, did hear the one about Antifa?”

Assuming that Mitch, Barr and the usual suspects will keep the lid on any serious investigation of why Trump hasn’t so much as publicly scolded Putin … for paying medieval religious fanatics to kill American soldiers, this scandal, BountyGate, will quickly get tossed on the heap of cadavers from his monumentally fcked up preparation and response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the way he’s incited bigots amid the George Floyd/BLM protests.

Which leads to something I think about a lot. Hell, too much.

“What do you with this guy once he’s out of office?” A few days ago the Strib ran a guest opinion piece from a local attorney arguing that Joe Biden, like Barack Obama in the wake of Dick Cheney, has to just let it go and “move on”, in the name, you know, of helping a divided nation heal.

Sorry, but I ain’t there. From the highly-suspect-to-rancid-smelling Russian “investments” in his real estate “developments”, to the racist appeals in his opening “birth certificate” pitch, to soliciting and getting Russian help to win the White House, to kow-towing to Putin at every imaginable turn and now to this, to tacitly acquiescing to the killing of American soldiers, it’s gone too far to simply “move on.”

Way too far.

Hillary Survives Another Nothingburger “Scandal”

Posted on by

NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3It’s a tough day to be Republican. But then most of them are this year, aren’t they? This thing with the FBI letting “crooked Hillary” off on that colossal e-mail scam … well, until someone starts shouting for a special prosecutor to investigate the FBI, that notorious den of lefties, men and women of conscience (and with nothing better to do with their time and our money) are going to have find another dead horse to flog.

Not that “e-mailgate” didn’t succeed almost as well as other ginned-up Clinton scandals. I mean it began with Benghazi and after throwing years and taxpayer millions at that mirage it begat e-mail servers. It was just like how Whitewater begat Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky and impeachment, which as you remember was such a winning strategy for Republicans Bill Clinton left office more popular than St. Ronald the Daft.

The fact is that like Whitewater and Travelgate and Benghazi before it, the Republican attack machine never had a coherent theory of the crime with e-mailgate. Which is why it bored people and never caught on like, well, like hanky panky in the Oval Office. (Now if among Hillary’s e-mails had been some hot mash notes to Anthony Weiner/Carlos Danger we might have had some fun.)

I mean, she used her own servers … to do what, exactly? Send military secrets to Al Qaeda? Sell off Texas to the North Koreans? What? Please tell me. Because I was never grasping the Constitution-tearing gravity of the situation.

“Well,” came the usual response, “we’ll never know. Because she won’t disclose everything. That’s the way the Clintons are. Clearly corrupt. Every time we accuse them of something they refuse to turn over all the evidence we need to make our case! Bastards! It’s like they don’t trust us! We have to Make America Great Again!”

This perpetual cycle of molehill non-scandals that … we the people have paid to prosecute … only to watch “the case” evaporate under the harsh light of actual evidence is of course central to the widespread perception that Hillary and Bill “can’t be trusted”. Never mind that if you ask “why can’t they be trusted?” the most frequent response is something along the lines of, “Well, because I hear they’re always in trouble over something.”

Somehow, maybe by adding a little video to this argument, from Kevin Drum Team Hillary has to turn the guns back on the firing squad.

For the record: Whitewater was a nothingburger. Travelgate was a nothingburger. Troopergate was a nothingburger. Filegate was a nothingburger. The Vince Foster murder conspiracy theories were a nothingburger. Monica Lewinsky was Bill’s problem, not Hillary’s. Benghazi was a tragedy, but entirely nonscandalous. The Goldman Sachs speeches were probably a bad idea, but otherwise a nothingburger. Emailgate revealed some poor judgment, but we’ve now seen all the emails and it’s pretty obviously a nothingburger. Humagate is a nothingburger. Foundationgate is a nothingburger.

Bottom line: Don’t let Donald Trump or the press or anyone else convince you that Hillary Clinton is “dogged by scandal” or “works under a constant cloud of controversy” or whatever the nonsense of the day is. That constant cloud is the very deliberate invention of lowlifes in Arkansas; well-heeled conservative cranks; the Republican Party; and far too often a gullible and compliant press. Like anybody who’s been in politics for 40 years, Hillary has some things she should have handled better, but that’s about it. The plain fact is that there’s no serious scandal on her record. There’s no evidence that she’s ever sold out to Wall Street. There’s no corruption, intrigue, or deceit. And if anything, she’s too honest on a policy level. She could stand to promise people a bit of free stuff now and then.”

I make no apologies. I have no great problem with Hillary. She’s pulling the gears on a huge, sophisticated, well-heeled and well-oiled political machine. Live with it. That’s the game in 2016 USA. It’s how you get elected. You want to change it? Me too. But it ain’t happening this year.

Moreover though, I tell anyone who cares to listen that I believe she’ll be a better president than Bill, who if you remember anything other than the stained blue dress, did a pretty good job of keeping the economy on the rails and US troops out of unwinnable foreign wars.

She arrives in the Oval Office with more experience on every imaginable level than anyone since maybe LBJ (problematic comparison), plus the full support of officers and staff from two successful Democratic presidencies and a whole lot less of Bill’s, shall we say, “impulse control” issues. She has also demonstrated masterful control over the Republican wing nut fringe, an enormous time, energy and money suck in D.C. these days, that must be persistently neutralized.

So there are plenty of rational reasons to trust her to competently manage matters here and abroad.

Not that the usual suspects will be screaming “scandal” and “special prosecutor” before she takes the oath of office.

The Benghazi Question: Democrats At Their Best and Worst

Posted on by

When Univision reporter Jorge Ramos asked former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a challenging question about the tragedy at the Benghazi embassy at last night’s debate, Democrats were at their worst, and best.

Cursor_and_Watch_the_Democratic_debate_audience_react_to_Jorge_Ramos_bringing_up_Benghazi_-_Vox

Democrats were at their worst when they booed the question and questioner for several seconds.  They should be mature enough to know that a healthy democracy needs courageous reporters like Ramos asking candidates tough questions.  It’s their job to ask those questions, and it does us all a great service.

But Democrats were also at their best when Secretary Clinton didn’t attack the reporter, fuel dangerous anti-journalism attitudes or avoid the question.  While she clearly is tired of answering Benghazi questions, she gave a reasonably solid one-minute answer.  I would have liked her to shush the boos non-verbally, but she did pretty well overall.  It’s her job to answer those questions, and it does us all a great service.

Ladies, It’s Time You Got Tough with Hillary

Posted on by

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterAre we having another deep doo-doo deja vu Clinton moment, or what? Suddenly it’s 1998 all over again. If only the economy was nearly as good.

So it seems Hillary Clinton, presumptive next president, played by her own rules and kept her State Department e-mails (more or less) hidden from official prying eyes. That is except for government types who received her e-mails. Those are still on the big server system, accessible to every EOH (Enemy of Hillary) who wants to root around and prove she personally armed the terrorists who killed the ambassador in Benghazi.

Now … obviously … this is a (big) deal because she’s Hillary goddam Clinton, with an empty six-lane freeway in front of her leading to the White House. If she wasn’t we’d still be obsessing over that stupid dress thing. Whether this outrage(!) actually has legs, which is to say if the conservative outrage machine can sustain it for 18 months, remains to be seen. Personally, I doubt it, since Es of H have a bad habit of picking the wrong horse to saddle up their righteous indignation. See: Whitewater, Benghazi.

But this email flap is another reminder that liberals might want to demand a hell of a lot more from Her Regency before the coronation. Personally, I’ve never been comfortable with the acclamation route to big power. I like candidates who have had a scare thrown into them, people who have been forced to explicitly defend and/or adjust their thinking and promises based on aggressive examination from E’s and F’s alike.

The current Hillary-Jeb match-up is so embarrassing. Clinton and Bush. Again. We look like a goddam banana republic, alternating between owners of the two biggest estancias every eight years. It’s bad enough we have to endure a system at both the national and state level where millionaires (of both parties) essentially buy themselves a job, usually guaranteeing that their previous stakeholders have primary access to their souls. It’s so damned unimaginative, if nothing else.

More to the point, as many have written before, the Hillary ascension, with no Plan B, strikes me as recklessly perilous. Even if the jowl-flapping buffoons of modern conservatism fail to make “Email-gate” stick, where are we if something truly grave happens to our one-and-only roadblock to Bush III, or President Scott Walker? Tomorrow is promised to no one. Hillary may not get hit by a bus, but not being the springiest of chickens, her health could fail, or we could discover that she really did plan the Benghazi attack. What then?

Given a choice between female candidates, I’d much prefer Elizabeth Warren. (Hell, I’d prefer Warren over any other Democrat, x or y chromosome, off the top of my head.) But a Warren candidacy would ignite the most godawful firestorm of coordinated, multi-front, big money attacks this back water oligarchy has ever seen. She’s despised and feared that much by Wall Street. And frankly, I doubt she’s prepared yet for that level of intensity of defamation. Hillary on the other hand seems quite cozy and well-triangulated among the Goldman Sachs and Citigroups of the world.

Liberal women in particular seem all but unanimously united in their support of Hillary, which is understandable to a point. After 240 years of alleged democracy, a woman president is waaay overdue and Hillary clearly has more experience and retail savvy than any plausible male on the scene. (Sorry, Joe Biden. Ain’t never going to happen.) That said, it may be that the women rushing to carry Hillary’s sedan chair up the White House steps are precisely the people to be grilling her most intensely on how exactly she intends to transform this country’s financial regulatory system, which is so tightly inter-locked with campaign finance, which is to blame for the obscene, truly Guatemala-like corruption and waste of DC?

There are a half dozen other good questions, but getting Her Highness on record, explicitly and in detail on that point alone would be a damned valuable start.

And if (not when) she answers, don’t put up with any of the usual Clinton-ish legalisms.