Shorter Trey- We Got Schooled

Trey Gowdy knew it the minute last week's Benghazi hearing was over- Hillary Clinton took his committee to the woodshed. Since then, he's said things to the effect that there wasn't much new testimony, then that she wasn't really that honest with the committee, and the best one now, that it should have been done in private. That's code for, we got whipped.

Matt Taibbi pretty well took down this committee with his Rolling Stone piece. From that:

The overriding implication of the Benghazi hearing seemed to be that Hillary Clinton was so crass, unfeeling and politically self-involved as to not care if members of her State Department were massacred. Again, Hillary has a lot of flaws, but we're supposed to believe that she doesn't have a problem with dead Americans? Seriously?

This is the same kind of abject stupidity we saw in the 9/11 Truth movement, which believed unquestioningly that a whole bund of Bush administration officials was willing to see Americans murdered en masse in order to further some convoluted world domination scheme.

He had more:

The look on Gowdy's face at this moment was priceless. He was proud, like a 3-year-old who went potty all by himself. But what was he even talking about? That Hillary Clinton cares more about the lives of Libyan strangers than she does her own employees? Was that seriously the idea?

Then you had that Kansas windbag, Mike Pompeo, sarcastically offering to bring breakfast in to help Hillary answer questions more expeditiously. The preposterous implication was that he, Pompeo, was the time-aggrieved party here, suffering delays because Hillary wouldn't give simple "yes" or "no" answers in the middle of his and Gowdy's 11-hour nothingburger of a hearing marathon.

Pompeo went on to sarcastically quote "noted conservative" Diane Feinstein, who said that the "incidents…were likely preventable." Then, pleased with his gotcha question, he asked if Hillary agreed with Feinstein.

And more:

Then there was Alabama Republican Martha Roby, who reminded me of a bowling alley manager worried to death that she didn't have enough size 9s to get through a Friday night. Roby looked terrified, like she just wanted to make it through to the end without mispronouncing all of those foreign locations.

Her shtick at one point devolved into questions about a) the fact that Hillary went home on the night of the attacks, instead of staying in the office, and b) the idea that Hillary waited too long to personally call the survivors of the Benghazi attack.

And he comes to this logical response to these cavemen and women:

These morons in Gowdy's committee were so bent on proving that Hillary is an unfeeling, ambition-crazed schemer bent on riding gleefully to the White House on the corpses of Benghazi victims that they ended up making her look like the one thing she really isn't, at least not very often: a regular person.

Most of us who watched the fiasco imagined what we would do in her position, facing that same ludicrous barrage of circular questions. Most normal people would have done all of the same things she did: sighing, choking back angry retorts, shaking a head in disbelief at times, even laughing at the absurdity of it all.

Actually many people would have lost it early on and grabbed Gowdy by his goofy silver fro-hawk somewhere in hour six or seven, a fact that made Hillary by contrast look patient and presidential, in ways her campaign had been unable to achieve all year.

And here in lies the folly of Gowdy's committee. It's the old, "you had one job" retort after someone screws up. The one job that the Republicans had on this committee was to look like serious people. Try to not be fire breathing morons that try hard to de-humanize a human. Hillary obviously was solid in her own right, but the amazing thing was how bad the Republicans on the committee really did. They chased conspiracy theories, made wild accusations, and were just mean- all in a hearing that was destined to be a waste of time anyway.

All of this brings me back to the main point here, which is Gowdy's response itself, which is fascinating to me. I don't think this man's that terribly stupid, and his responses are some of the most honest, straight-forward "we lost" type of rhetoric you'll ever hear in politics. He's trying to keep a brave face now, a few days later, but he already let the cat out of the box- the hearing didn't go well. You rarely hear this talk. This isn't usually how the defeated react.

Which also gets to my main point- the investigative aspect of Congress is it's most useless, and unsuccessful tactic. Yes, you have the power to drag witnesses in to talk, but when you do it all the time, sometimes over trivial matters (think steroids in baseball), you ruin the effect. This was not the Watergate hearings. This time, the witness won. That's because this tired spectacle is an exercise we'd best stop using as a country. It doesn't serve a purpose.