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. 

What is the Allegation on Benghazi?

I watched parts of the Benghazi Hearings yesterday, and I feel much worse for doing so. What a joke! As I watched though, something hit me- why the hell is this hearing going on?

Normally, you have an investigation either to make recommendations for the future, or to prove or disprove an accusation. The Benghazi Committee is not trying to make recommendations, and even if they were, better experts than a bunch of Congresspeople have already done that. If they were trying to make recommendations for the future, they would have had hearings with more than just the Secretary of State, and they would be moving much faster than they are. There's no sign this is about making recommendations to improve security at foreign outposts in the future. So this has to be an investigation to prove an accusation. What accusation though?

Is the accusation that Hillary Clinton actually was behind the Benghazi attack? Is it that she ordered a "stand down" of security, so that the Americans died? Is it that she lead a cover-up of the attack? Is it that she used a private e-mail? Most of this is absolutely ridiculous and not grounded in any kind of reality. If she was ordering a "cover-up," why would she have put out a statement at all that night, or commissioned the ARB, or testified and cooperated with several other investigations? Clearly the other theories are absolutely insane, so let's not even give them more print.

I left this entire farce of a hearing wondering exactly what they are investigating, if they are investigating anything at all. This committee is sort of looking at a hodge-podge of conspiracy theories from the looney right. They refuse to release transcripts from testimony, and they refuse to really zone in on one issue they want to investigate. The truth of the matter is, Trey Gowdy has no idea what he's investigating. He and the Republicans on this joke of a committee are simply there to keep talking about something bad that happened at the Department of State under Hillary Clinton. It has no point. It has no ending goal. The whole investigation is just an arm of the Republican National Committee.

It's Time for Trey Gowdy's Partisan-Hack Committee to End

Congressman Trey Gowdy is a partisan hack. Don't get me wrong, most of the House of Representatives right now are, but he's a special case. He's the leader of the farce known as the House Select Committee on Benghazi. He's the guy who gets to lead the committee today in their questioning of Hillary Clinton. He's the guy who's spun wild conspiracy theories to justify his existence. He's not someone who should be taken seriously for his governing philosophy.

To hear Gowdy's defenders tell it, we should take him seriously, he used to be a prosecutor. Then we listen to him talk, and we hear him say ridiculous things. He claims the ARB, made up of a bipartisan group of national security professionals, wasn't a legitimate investigation. He claims his committee is though, even as they don't interview the Secretary of Defense in 2012 or most of his relevant staff on Benghazi. They don't interview the CIA Director at that time either. They also don't have a hearing until October during the year 2015. Oh, and there's this:

Gowdy and the republican Benghazi committee have been attacking by using a variety of government documents which have been heavily redacted to the point that it’s never been entirely clear just what context they would be in if not for all of the redactions and blackouts. After democrats asked the CIA to declassify the documents so that the public could see what was really being presented, the CIA responded by stating that it had never asked for anything to be redacted. When questioned under pressure, Gowdy admitted that he himself decided to redact large portions of the documents based on his own personal judgment of what information he did or didn’t want the public to know.

This House Benghazi Committee is not a legitimate investigation. Trey Gowdy is not a legitimate investigator. This is little more than an arm of the Republican National Committee, there to try and weaken Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 election. The public knows it, three in four say it's partisan-hackery.  Of course Republican voters support it anyway, but don't pretend that even they say it's a real investigation. The truth is that a large percentage of the public isn't paying attention, and a large percentage think this is partisan. Gowdy can complain all he wants, the truth is still the truth:

 The last month of drama is a great example of the way the media regularly forget what they already know, and has to learn it again to great fanfare: in this case, that the Benghazi committee was established to tie the tragedy around Clinton’s neck well into the 2016 presidential campaign, and thus damage her politically. There had already been seven investigations into what happened the night Ambassador Chris Stevens died at the less-than-adequately secured Libyan compound, and while they found fault with State Department process, they cleared Clinton, and the Obama administration, of the worst allegations about what happened. Nobody needed this investigation, which has spent at least $4.5 million and still counting, to learn what went wrong.

But the discovery earlier this year that Clinton used a private e-mail server while at the State Department suddenly gave Gowdy’s partisan crusade new life and, for a time, obscured its intent. Since then, Gowdy and his staff have leaked a steady toxic stream of half-truths about Clinton’s alleged mishandling of classified information, more than once inflating interagency security reviews into “criminal” investigations targeting Clinton herself. The New York Timesalone has had to make multiple corrections to stories that relied on misleading committee leaks.

 Maybe reporters were already getting tired of being embarrassed by Gowdy. Whatever the reason, when Republican majority leader Kevin McCarthy simply stated what he thought everyone already knew—that the committee had a partisan intent to damage Clinton—it was as though he broke the spell that had made the media forget the truth. “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” McCarthy told Fox News. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”

You could almost feel sorry for McCarthy when the ensuing backlash helped blow away his speaker candidacy: How could he get in so much trouble for stating the obvious? 

But the hits kept coming. GOP Representative Richard Hanna unhelpfully defended McCarthy for telling the truth: “I think that there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people, and an individual: Hillary Clinton.” An ex-staffer told The New York Times that the committee had become a “partisan” investigation designed to hurt Clinton, not get the truth of the attacks. In the ultimate unraveling, Gowdy got caught tampering with an e-mail to make it look as though a Clinton associate outed an intelligence agent—which the CIA itself said hadn’t happened—and in the process, Gowdy himself outed the intelligence agent. 

There lies the truth- it's all a partisan witch-hunt. It's time for the Benghazi Committee to end. It's time to stop wasting $4.5 million on a partisan investigation. Gowdy has tried to discredit the ARB by saying State Department staff got to edit that report (which of course they did, there's classified data in there), but he did even worse things with no legal standing for his actions.

Just end this waste of a committee already.