House Government Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa's mendacity has gotten so out of hand that even Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace is grilling him about it. On Sunday, Wallace pressed Issa to explain two whoppers in particular, both of which earned him a coveted "4 Pinocchio" verdict from
Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, and both of which—surprise, surprise—focused on Hillary Clinton and Benghazi.
And, as you might have already guessed, his defense of his previous whoppers earned Darrell yet another 4 Pinocchio rating. Specifically, he defended his first mistruth by saying he was simply "quoting something that was in somebody else’s report, believing that it was true." If you're a pathological liar, blaming someone else is never a credible defense, but in this case it's even more ridiculous because the report Issa claims was written by "somebody else" was actually issued under—you guessed it—his name. So he was quoting his own report, which was wrong. In short: Liar, liar.
Issa's defense of his second whopper didn't even address the central problem with his claim, which was that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had ordered Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to stand down from sending military assets to save American lives in Benghazi. That's a crazy accusation to make, but Issa never offered any evidence to support it, which—when combined with the breadth of what he was claiming—was the reason Kessler awarded him four Pinocchios in the first place. And his failure once again to offer any evidence for his position won him another four.
All in all, though, I'm sure Issa thinks the four Pinocchio awards are a small price to pay for his true goal: Saying "Benghazi" to the Republican faithful as many times as he possibly can before Hillary Clinton is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States of America.