Today is Darrell Issa's big day: House GOP will hold Benghazi hearing

Jed Lewison for Daily Kos

Community

Wednesday May 08, 2013 · 7:30 AM PDT

2013/05/08 · 07:30

Clown invites media into Rep. Issa's #Benghazi circus hearing

I don't know about you, but Rep. Darrell Issa sure is excited about today. Yesterday, he was so giddy that he took to Twitter:

Tomorrow's @GOPoversight #benghazi hearing starts at 1130. Streamed live on http://t.co/... @CSPAN 3 and on http://t.co/...
— @DarrellIssa via web

And this morning he thanked everyone for retweeting his hashtag:

Thanks to everyone who's been sharing and ReTweeting leading up to today's #Benghazi hearing.
— @DarrellIssa via TweetDeck

Here's what Issa knows: If you want a scandal to stick, you need a good social media strategy. Here's what he doesn't know: Anything that demonstrates there's a scandal worthy of a hashtag or anything else. Fortunately for Issa, the rarefied air of the right wing freakshow is a fact free zone, but if he wants Mike Huckabee's crack prediction—an Obama resignation—to come true, he's going to need more than innuendo and tweets.

As best I can tell, the right's theory about Benghazi comes down to two broad claims. First, they believe President Obama and his administration, motivated by election year politics, deliberately misled the public about the attack by claiming it was spontaneous and denying terrorist involvement. Second, they believe the president and his administration—including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—failed to make decisions that would have saved the lives of the four Americans killed in Benghazi and then subsequently covered up their failures.

Neither theory pans out, however. The first theory—that the administration deliberately and dishonestly covered up the nature of the attack in order to sway the presidential election—doesn't make any sense at all, even if you ignore the facts and focus purely on motive. If Obama had wanted to exploit the attack politically, he'd have instantly declared it an act of war by al Qaeda and launched military strikes somewhere, even if he didn't know who was actually responsible for the attack. Presidents always get a boost in such times. Remember how the bin Laden video boosted Bush in 2004? If anything, by avoiding a chest-thumping escalation, Obama created a potential political problem for himself.

There's another, more important, reason that the first theory doesn't work: As you'll see below the fold, it ignores the facts.

While it is true that Susan Rice's talking points inaccurately said that there had been a spontaneous protest outside the consulate in Benghazi, both she and the president said at the time that terrorists and extremists were involved. "We believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that," Rice said. She was wrong about the protest—those were in Cairo—but she specifically said extremists were involved. What she didn't know is exactly who those extremists were. "Well, we'll have to find out that out. I mean I think it's clear that there were extremist elements that joined in and escalated the violence. Whether they were al Qaeda affiliates, whether they were Libyan-based extremists or al Qaeda itself I think is one of the things we'll have to determine."

That's worth emphasizing: Rice and the intelligence community's talking points were wrong about there having been a spontaneous protest, but they did not deny that terrorists or extremists were involved in carrying out the attack. That fact severely undermines part one of the GOP's Benghazi theory.

The second general theory is that the administration covered up decisions that led to the deaths of the four Americans in Benghazi. As Meteor Blades wrote yesterday, they seem to have two theories on what was covered up.

First, they believe the military was given orders to not protect the diplomats. Absent those orders, they suggest that the military could have saved the lives. Given that Obama is Commander in Chief, only he could have given those orders: Therefore, he is personally responsible for the deaths, and is now engaged in a coverup.

Second, they believe that Hillary Clinton personally denied requests for additional security in Benghazi and during the attack cut the State Department's antiterrorism unit out of the loop. As with Obama, they believe Clinton then covered up these actions.

These, of course, would be monumental scandals if true. But as Meteor Blades wrote, they don't add up. It's true that a group of four Special Forces officers were told not to fly to Benghazi, but that was after the first wave of the attack had already concluded. Moreover, they were only armed with 9mm weapons at the time and whatever security they could have provided was also needed in Tripoli. Even GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz conceded they could have done little else than provide first aid. One of the witnesses at today's hearing will say that he would have liked for there to have been a military overflight over Benghazi, but assets were poorly positioned to accomplish that task. The bottom-line: There's a lot of innuendo and suggestion, but no real evidence—or even smoke—to support the GOP's theory.

The story is basically the same with Hillary Clinton. Clinton acknowledges requests came for more security, but she did not personally handle those requests—nor did she cover them up. As for whether she cut her counterterrorism unit out of the loop, even Fox News reports the chief of her counterterrorism unit forcefully rebutting those allegations.

What this all boils down to is a political circus. It's no surprise that Republicans are targeting the strongest Democratic candidate for 2016 as well as the sitting Democratic president: Their goals are transparently political. For them, this isn't about the substance of what happened in Benghazi. It's about winning an election three years from now, and it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone: It's just how Republicans roll.

This content was created by a Daily Kos Community member.

Make YOUR voice heard!

Comments are closed on this story.