The Benghazi “show trial”
Eugene Robinson demonstrates his command of the popular Democrat and MSM (but I repeat myself) meme du jour when he calls the upcoming Benghazi Select Committee hearings a “show trial” and a “farce,” and the Republican Congressmen “inquisitors.” He then adds another common accusation:
It’s impossible to take seriously a House select committee investigation designed not to unearth relevant new facts but to achieve nakedly political goals: rousing the GOP base for the fall election and sullying Hillary Clinton’s record in case she runs for president.
It is disgusting that the Sept. 11, 2012, attack, which claimed the life of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, would be used in this manner. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call this a new low, and the fact that the ploy will probably backfire on Republicans is scant consolation.
Robinson seems to lack a sense of irony. But when he asks, “What’s the point…that Republicans are trying to prove?” the answer is that they strongly suspect the Obama administration was trying “to achieve nakedly political goals” through its handling of Benghazi security and in the aftermath of the attack. And yes, “It is disgusting that the Sept. 11, 2012, attack, which claimed the life of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, would be used in this manner.” But there is every reason to believe that it was—by the Obama administration.
http://spectator.org/articles/59070/trey-gowdy-and-real-lesson-watergate
Jeffrey Lord at The American Spectator. Good history.
Robinson opens with:”
“Before asking a question at the coming show trial, each self-righteous congressional inquisitor should be required to correctly locate Benghazi on an unlabeled map.
That would shorten the farce. My guess is that some of the House Republicans screaming loudest in faux outrage would be hard-pressed to find Libya, much less pinpoint the city where four Americans were tragically killed.
No, Congressman, that’s Liberia you’re pointing to. Whole different country.”
He’s so smart. Like Cummings, Clyburn, Jackson, Sharpton, Juan Williams, and….the list goes on. Even knows a little French. He is a Professional Black Man, making a fine living in the White Man’s World. Probably went to, even graduated from, a historically black (and still totally black by choice) college.
Can’t help but wonder what threshold would need be crossed before Robinson became anything less than an apologist and propagandist for the Obama administration?
If Robinson really wanted to understand the purpose of the Benghazi hearings he could watch this Trey Gowdy video and consider whether or not he, as a member of the press, can answer any of Gowdy’s questions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i4tuuy1jsw
Eugene: Ambassador Chris Stevens and THREE OTHER AMERICANS: Glenn Doherty, Sean Smith, and Tyrone Woods. You should remember their names, too–not just Stevens because he was a theoretical “pal” of Hillary.
The disgusting part of all this is how everyone neglects to name the OTHER honored dead.
Professional Black Men only ask questions and bloviate. They don’t need no answers, and it is a mistake to expect any.
As a Beltway insider, Mr. Robinson has probably heard from reliable sources the answers to the following questions:
1) Where was the President during the attack?
2) What did the President and the Secretary of State discuss during the attack?
3) Who decided that there was too little time for US forces to initiate a rescue attempt? At what time was this decision made?
4) Why was the Benghazi staff still on station after other governments and NGOs had evacuated?
5) What requests were submitted by the Benghazi staff to strengthen security following the two previous attacks on the compound? How were those requests processed?
6) What was the ambassador doing in a consulate some 630 miles from the embassy at the time of the attack?
7) What was the CIA doing there?
8) Who concluded that the attack was a spontaneous response to the video? Does that person realize that there is nothing spontaneous about operating a mortar with such skill that its operators can hit the roof of a specific building twice?
Beltway insiders know the answers to these questions and realize that none of the investigations heretofore have had the jurisdiction to assemble a comprehensive picture. Some Beltway insiders want the general public to know the answers and some don’t. Each faction has its own motives for wanting this.
Outside the Beltway, the public can be divided into two corresponding categories: those who care about a lethal attack on a US foreign service compound and those who don’t, each faction having its own motives.
Beltway insiders who don’t want the general public to know the answers are now directing their messaging to outsiders who don’t care. Eleanor Clift, for example, said that Ambassador Stevens died of smoke inhalation, and thus was not the victim of a murder. I think that she can intuit that a person who dies as a result of a fire set deliberately is the victim of murder. The applicable law says as much, even if the arsonist did not intend to cause a person’s death. Ms. Clift and Mr. Robinson seem to hope that the non-caring faction outside the Beltway is big enough to have an effect at the polls.
Bill West,
I would add one question to your list:
Given the significance of the 9/11 date, why weren’t military assets properly positioned, briefed, and on alert to respond to just such an emergency?
“I don’t think I’ve come across a better description of the thought process of one type of person who is often attracted to leftism: the idealist.” neo-neocon
That is perhaps the best that I have yet read as well. It equally applies to Robinson and many others on the left. So much of the criticism of the right by those on the left is psychological projection; the defense mechanism “in which unwanted feelings are displaced onto another person [or group], where they then appear as a threat from the external world” [the right].
The denial and projection is so blatant as to be astonishing, irrationality arguably just short of insanity. No wonder so many conservatives conclude that liberalism indicates a form of mental impairment.
Robinson’s article is concern-trolling. If he actually believed that “…the ploy will probably backfire on Republicans…” then the article never would’ve been written.
One is led to believe that it will be of “scant consolation.” because of lasting damage to the Truth, or national character, or something. As if Democrats cared about any of those things.
Among the Lib-Prog-Soc types irony deficiency is more likely a propagator of the species than mere symptom of it.
Robinson conveniently ignores the fact that there will be Dems on the Select Committee. Will they be “self-righteous”, Mr Robinson, and seekers of the Truth? Dems? Nah.
Robinson is morally retarded.
The language in an email from Obama aide Ben Rhodes used to prep Susan Rice is virtually identical to one issued by the former secretary of state 36 hours before – the first public official to mention the video.
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/051214-700563-hillary-benghazi-language-same-as-rhodes-email.htm
In which Tomasky supports Tomasky.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/13/who-made-benghazi-political.html
Note the link in the above piece which links to another Tomasky piece to prove “These questions are worth exploring. (Even I agree with that–and they have been, eight times by eight separate bodies.)”
The link expanding on the “eight times by eight separate bodies” is this:
Benghazi has been probed many times. Two Senate reports and eight House reports, along with a State Department review led by Thomas Pickering and Mike Mullen.
Tomasky and Robinson: Deuces are wild.
Impeach Holder. Impeach Obama.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2393767/EXCLUSIVE-Explosive-new-book-sets-case-impeaching-Barack-Obama-Benghazi-health-care-reform-immigration-spying-scandals.html
Bill West,
What’s your theory of the case?
Interesting that Robinson calls it a “show trial.” Trials are held when someone is guilty of a crime. The Select Committee has the role of a prosecutor doing pre-trial investigation. If, in fact, there is no there there, there will be no trial.
The interesting thing about all the previous inquiries is that the survivors have not been interviewed, the President’s orders have not been delineated, the lack of response by the military has been waved off under the excuse that the “fog of war” made it too hard to do anything, no line of responsibility was established about who specifically had disapproved the request for more security at Benghazi, and, maybe the biggie, why we had a consulate in Benghazi when all other NATO nations had decamped. Yet the apologists all say the investigations have borne fruit – that we know all we can possibly know. Move along now, nothing to see here. 🙁 Trey Gowdy impresses me as a detective Colombo type – cagey and indefatigable. He’ll have to be to find the real answers.
If anyone has the cojones to peal back the rotten skin of Benghazi, it is Gowdy. Gowdy has shown he relishes confronting the MSM & shows no hesitation to confront BHO & company. (http://tinyurl.com/ml2ma7e) The main obstacle Gowdy faces is the GOP establishment.
After reading Robinson’s piece, all I can say is, “We’re not both living in the same universe”.
There’s obviously a w-i-d-e difference in the way the Left and Right see/ interpret/ understand Reality . . . which leads me to wonder if we’re at the point of regarding each others’ views as so alien that we can no longer communicate — and don’t really see any reason to try.
After nearly 6 years of having the Obama Administration (abetted of course by the MSM) divide us by race, by class, by economics, by politics, by gender, by family structure, by sexual preference … is there really a single, unified idea of “America” left any more? Can our divisions ever be healed at this point? What is our future as a nation?
This troubles me deeply; somebody’s description of “a cold Civil War” keeps bouncing around in my head.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6doVxXfQkk
mmmmm.mmmmm.mmmmmMMMM/1=done
Po’Wittle Gene…Booo-Hooooooooooo…!! I love the sound of little Lefty-Lib Lapdawgs weeping in the morning.
To Eugene’s blubbering please add Chrissy Matthews, completely off his meds, shrilling, “RACISM…!!” for The Infantile Majesty’s victimhood on Benghazi.
LOVE their finger-wagging outrage,’Yo. ((-:
I suspect that Robinson doesn’t consider “sodomy with a broomstick” a significant deterrent.
The following is from an AIM article. The link follows.
The bars on the safe-room window were to be unlocked from the inside, then the ambassador and his people were to exit through the window and get into a car that was always parked outside the window and speed to a nearby CIA annex. The plan failed the night of the attack because there was no parked car outside the window. We need to know who moved the car and on whose orders.
http://www.aim.org/guest-column/unanswered-questions-for-benghazi-special-committee-to-ask/?utm_source=AIM+-+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=3fe7b5d6d6-email051414&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c4ddfc8d9d-3fe7b5d6d6-221591649
A_Nonny:
There is no reason for us to try to understand the Left. Nothing in it for us. They are The Enemy.
Cuts both ways; the Left sure doesn’t want to understand us.
It will end with bloodletting.
Have we reason to wonder what that great reasoner, abolitionist, and advocate of liberty Frederick Douglass — who well knew the blessings an ability to read brings to the reader — would have to say to a man like Gene Robinson today, a man who, though nominally an educated man, chooses to make himself and with himself his followers, shackled in the world before him? Or would we possibly think that Douglass — presented with this situation — would not have spoken at all, and merely wept?
Don Carlos: “There is no reason for us to try to understand the Left. Nothing in it for us. They are The Enemy.”
What’s in it for you is that understanding an enemy is a necessary piece for competing effectively with that enemy. Especially when you’re the underdog in an asymmetric contest.
Rank-and-file leftists may or may not understand you but for sure they know your competitive-social strengths and weaknesses. Their leaders know you because they do their due diligence on intelligence.
Do you want to compete socially with the Left? If so, then you need intelligence – among other competitor/activist things.
As far as “bloodletting”, it won’t be the Left’s blood that’s let if the social competition reaches that stage.
If war is politics by other means, then Marxist-method activism is war by other means. War and activism are just different forms on the same continuum of zero-sum social competition, and the Left has a big head-start on you.
Leftists aren’t self-weakening pacifists. Rather, their competitive intent is to pacify their opponents. If the social cultural/political contest flips from ‘by any non-violent means necessary’ to a completely open ‘by any means necessary’, leftists will transition seamlessly to build on their big head-start with gloves off. Any leftist who might demur at that point because he’s a genuine, principled pacifist will be pacified, and their social movement will be clarified to carry out the “bloodletting” of their opponents.
To hope to win at that theorized stage of the social competition, if it gets that far, requires you to learn to win now the current stage of the activist game.
Remember, the “bloodletting” Islamist terrorist activists in Iraq weren’t defeated by being outgunned; they were defeated by activist COIN. The Founding Fathers defeated the British as Marxist-method activists before there was a Marx. Activists were instrumental in the Civil War.
Different forms on the same continuum. Activism created the American nation. Activism will take it away. Activism is required to keep it.
And as a competitor/activist, you need to understand the Left if you intend to compete against them for America, now and later.
A_nonny_mouse: “There’s obviously a w-i-d-e difference in the way the Left and Right see/ interpret/ understand Reality . . . which leads me to wonder if we’re at the point of regarding each others’ views as so alien that we can no longer communicate”
I’m still astonished and baffled every time I think of this: there were people, one of them a friend of mine and pretty intelligent, who thought Hillary’s “what difference?” response was a brilliant and crushing rejoinder. That was truly a moment of perceiving utterly incompatible versions of reality.
War isn’t about the goals of social political activism.
There are plenty of top down and bottom up organizations. Marxist activism has historically only been one of them. Eric’s attempting to make some kind of analogy, unified field theory, on the matter, but it’s not bulletproof.
Addendum, war prioritizes the end goal, and the methods don’t matter too much. Thus war sometimes may use any kind of method, even the enemy’s methods, to win.
However, Eric’s position here has gotten fixated on Marxist activism as the one thing, and everything else are merely methods used to achieve that goal. Thus while war merely uses what methods are available, Marxist activism is considered the only and best thing that anyone who succeeds must have used.
Strategically, this is suicide, as it prioritizes methods over goals. Or tools over the solution. If victory is the strategic goal, then it doesn’t matter what methods are used, only that the right methods are used. To fixate at the strategic level on using only one type of trick, is to fall into prediction and thus annihilation. At the tactical level, what Eric says may be true, but only at the tactical level.
It’s not only a reasonable conclusion, but an inescapable one.
As internalized cultural relativism, radical nominalism, and values nihilism have percolated down from the professoriate to considerable segments of society at large, it cannot be otherwise.
Your relatives and neighbors have imbibed these waters in school, in church, on PBS, and have found them tasty and satisfying …
A story from about a week and a half ago, story paralleling your “what difference?” experience.
A business associate made, as he often does, some remark about the scientific illiteracy of the general populace, and how that impinges on social progress.
“Do you know there are idiots who believe the world began 7 thousand years ago? How can people like that even be allowed to vote?”
I asked him how that affected their votes.
He said that they figured it was ok to ruin everything because they thought that they were going to heaven anyway.
He then remarked, regarding science popularizers and polemicists: “You know who I really like? That guy I saw on the PBS special about the cosmos and the big bang and who wrote …” and was unable to remember the name.
I made a few suggestions.
“Not Sagan … Yeah, Dawkins and Krauss. They proved that there’s no purpose behind life, and …”
‘Then you reject all forms of intrinsic or built-in teleonomy and teleology and intentionality, even at the genetic level. And would assert that concepts like “coding” and “information” are just metaphors. ‘
“Right”
Metaphors for what, exactly?
” ahhhh”
‘And that Genes are not really selfish, and that that phrase really means nothing scientific.’
“ahhh”
‘You know that Dawkins has just been accused (referring to a post linked to by a Feser commenter ) of saying that genes literally carry information?’
[http://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2014/05/01/information-is-the-new-aristotelianism-and-dawkins-is-a-hylomorphist/]
“I don’t know about that. But Krauss proved the universe could come from …”
‘A vacuum state?’
“What! From nothing … he showed that nothing is unstable and all reality can spring from nothing.
‘You realize don’t you that his concept of “nothing” is not really a concept of nothing, and that he admits it, and in an interview even admits that he kind of hyped the term for book sales appeal.’
“So what?”
‘So basically he admits he lied about what his book really says, and it is endorsed by a guy who argues both for and against the reality of the concepts of inherent purpose and intrinsic meaning.’
“So what?”
‘Doesn’t it bother you that you are being basically lied to?’
“No! Everybody lies all the time!”
‘But they are asking you to modify your behavior on the basis of an argument constructed on bankrupt premisses.’
“I didn’t know you were one of those religious cases”
‘I can’t say I am, but I get pissed off when people try to b.s. me; and I am interested in the geometry, so to speak, of their arguments. If it falls apart then there is no reason to accept that they have any basis for saying what they are saying whether or not it turns out ultimately to be true’
“Man, you have way to much time on your hands” he said.
‘Well, you did bring this issue up …’ I said.
He looked at me and said, “Hey dude, gotta get back to work. Later …”
Afterwards I downloaded both the NYT review of Krauss and the Massimo Pigliucci critique, and forwarded them to him.
He seemed to be mollified by the effort I put into showing that I was not just kicking his dog for no reason, but as of a couple of days ago he had only glanced at one of the articles.
DNW, I would make him prove that he is a human being first, before assuming they have the power of reason or free will. Saves a lot of time.
J.J. Says: “Trials are held when someone is guilty of a crime.”
No, trials are held when someone is charged with a crime. Like, say, Darrell Issa, alleged arsonist, car-thief and insurance fraud.