Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is setting his sights on his biggest political target yet: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. [The Hill]
THE HILL does us all a favor by unmasking the politics of Rep. Darrell Issa’s hearing today. [Full live coverage of hearing here.] It also reveals the salivating inside the Beltway on targeting Secy. Clinton before a question has been asked.
That is if the title of the hearing, “The Security Failures of Benghazi,” didn’t give the purpose of Issa’s hearing away.
It won’t include that the Republican Congress cut State’s budget, which Secy. Clinton warned at the time would endanger national security. Republicans are always targeting the State Department’s budget, because most on the right think diplomacy is for weenies.
I’ll let Dana Milank make the point, since unlike myself he didn’t write a book on Clinton. Milbank makes the obvious connection to Issa’s hypocrisy.
For fiscal 2013, the GOP-controlled House proposed spending $1.934 billion for the State Department’s Worldwide Security Protection program — well below the $2.15 billion requested by the Obama administration. House Republicans cut the administration’s request for embassy security funding by $128 million in fiscal 2011 and $331 million in fiscal 2012. (Negotiations with the Democrat-controlled Senate restored about $88 million of the administration’s request.) Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that Republicans’ proposed cuts to her department would be “detrimental to America’s national security” — a charge Republicans rejected.
After Rep. Issa blew it on Fast and Furious, making a fool of himself, he’s making sure not to shoot too high and miss. But his target is clear.
The Washington Post picked up the same framing as The Hill.
This is about more than Clinton’s legacy, it’s also a preemptive strike on 2016, even if Clinton has said she’s not going to run.
If Clinton was hampered on what she could do through security, it seems obvious that Ambassador Stevens also had to know of this reality, while choosing to not only move to the Benghazi location but remain as threats mounted, as well as attacks on the consulate escalated. It was a precarious situation at best, as I wrote about this morning. It’s a heroes job what the foreign service does in far away places and it’s dangerous, too. We are reminded of it yet again through the deaths in Benghazi.
Facts are important and there are many questions to ask, including of the State Department. Secretary Clinton may indeed need to testify, but the goal isn’t answers today. The goal is to humiliate President Obama and Secretary Clinton, both of whom are political targets in an election year.
Yes, folks, budget cuts will be our talking point and we’re sticking with it. The $1.9 billion we were left with for the fiscal year clearly wasn’t enough to get anything done at all. That extra $200 million would have made all the difference between people living and people dying.
These budget cuts were also responsible for us not being even able to send any sort of reply cable to the 20 requests received for more security too over the six months prior to the attack.
Those budget cuts also specifically said we could not potentially redeploy a few more security troops from nearby consulates at Rome, Geneva or that perennial hotbed of terrorist activity, our Ambassadorship to the Vatican. Besides, we wouldn’t have been able to afford the airfare.
Remember, we bought two weeks’ worth of deflection time with the trope about the attack being the result of local Muslim boys watching YouTube videos.
And if all else fails and your back is against the wall, do what our Commander in Chief is doing……..keep the Big Bird story alive by saying things like “Elmo was see driving around in a White Suburban!”
Sorry but Hillary got out in front of you on this one. When is the GOP ever going to learn to quit attacking the Clintons? It just makes the GOP look like a bunch of idiots and conspiracy wackos.
What are you talking about? While Taylor Marsh may be trying to paint this as politics against Hillary Clinton, Clinton is not even in these hearings and no one on any side of the aisle is expecting her subordinates to pin anything on her. Clinton is obviously not out in front of anything here, otherwise this thing would not be leaking and living a month later.
It is not at all about budget cuts either……..the State Dept obviously has more than enough cash for all sorts of non-budget items…..”Inaddition to a reported $450 million in emergency cash for the Muslim Brotherhood-led Egyptian government, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Friday announced $45 million in additional aid for Syrian the opposition after nearly $100 million was provided to the Syrian rebels this year.”
What is the goal here…….and what the independent parts of the press are probing is whether the arms that Obama provided to the Libyan “rebels” to overthrow Quadafi are the very same arms and rebels that killed the embassy personnel.
War by proxy is a decidedly Barack Obama strategy on the showcase throughout the Mideast and having it come back and bite him in the ass is what would be quite interesting to show and obviously what the State Dept will do anything to delay and/or dodge.
If you wish to be distracted by irrelevancies, be my guest.
These bozos act like this all some sort of conspiracy theory and not something serious. It’s the same crazed behavior in hearings they held for things like Whitewater. The GOP is incapable especially Issa of running anything remotely serious.
The money that Egypt gets was part of the Egyptian Israeli Peace Accord that was signed over 30 years ago. Now if you want to undo that treaty and have Egypt go to war with Israel go ahead.
When you give someone arms you never know what is going to happen to them and no one should know that more than conservatives who thought training Osama Bin Laden was a great idea.
Really, you must get out of the echo chamber and get some facts under your belt.
Like I said before, if the GOP thinks this is something so serious then they need to yank Issa off of leading it but they won’t because they really are not interested in the truth. They are only interested in some crazed conspiracy theories.
Hillary Clinton will chew him up and spit him out.
I will pay to see it:)
So what else is new? The GOP is afraid of Hillary Of course, since nobody likes what the GOP is selling, all they have is trying to continually make up scandals. .
What’s been playing out on C-SPAN is a partisan circus.
Which part troubles you the most? The fact that the direct testimony of the folks on the ground directly contradicts everything you’ve claimed (especially the Dep. Sec.’s testimony that budgetary issues had nothing at all to do with the decision to draw down security forces and deny requests for more security)…?
Actually, Ms. Lamb did admit today that budget was an issue, after she said it wasn’t and Rohrbacher wouldn’t let her expound. See here.
Lamb’s denial of more security is very troubling.
Unfortunately, the adversarial & highly partisan preening of Issa and Republicans didn’t really encourage open discussion, but put Lamb on the defensive, as if this career professional had the entire Libyan strategy on her shoulders.
It was a preposterous assumption and Issa was foolish, though Chaffetz was far worse. What a show horse.
Issa is smart enough to know better, and Amb. Kennedy didn’t fall for his nonsense. Chaffetz made a fool of himself continually trying to assert classified docs were being revealed, when the FBI signed off on what was being offered in open testimony.
Both Wood and Nordstrum gave important and chilling security testimony that is very bad for the Administration, which hasn’t handled the aftermath well at all. It just got worse for them, which is their own fault.
No. What she said was simply that they had “limited resources”. Well, no kidding. No resources are UNlimited, so by definition they are all limited. The bottom line is that the draw-down in security forces as well as the denials of requests (when those requests were even responded to at all) were never attributed to budgetary constraints, in spite of the Dep. Sec. having been given the opportunity to so attribute them.
The problem went beyond Ms. Lamb, who clearly didn’t have the resources she needed and said so.
The real issue is the policy, which was supported by Democrats and Republicans, with Congress once again deciding to fumble into another foreign misadventure without anyone asking What Comes After Gaddafi?
Chaffetz said today on CNN that money earmarked for security was cut. I don’t think he meant to say it but he did.
start quote:
Yes, folks, budget cuts will be our talking point and we’re sticking with it. The $1.9 billion we were left with for the fiscal year clearly wasn’t enough to get anything done at all. That extra $200 million would have made all the difference between people living and people dying.
end quote
What was that $200 million for? If it was for extra security, then it could have been the difference. I’m always skeptical about justifications for budgets, but if a department is not allocated money for something it feels it needs, it doesn’t have the money, period. Only DoD seems to be able to get away with funneling money into projects it isn’t required to request money for, and that is a practice we should have done away with long ago. Even they, though, have some limits on what they are allowed to do with that money. Or so I’ve heard…
When your foreign ministry is off trying to do difficult and dangerous things in other parts of the world so those problems don’t come home to roost here, then it’s going to need more money than if it just sits back and processes visa requests. That $200M is a pittance in comparison to what the government spent last year. That decision deserves just as much scrutiny over Benghazi as the hierarchy at State does.
See my quote on the post I added above……..do you really think the State Dept lives within a budget provided by each specified line item? If they managed to find $500 million plus to throw out to modern day “contras”, there is absolutely no doubt they could have found $1 million extra to send more security to Benghazi……hell, I bet they could have also found an extra thousand to buy real bullets for the Marines as well.
The marines had bullets. That’s another conservative conspiracy theory though up in the fevered swamps of the GOP. We all should be quite aware by now that conservatives just flat make things up.
Too bad there actually were not any Marines there at the time of the first attack…….only 3 private security company guards and 4 unarmed Libyan hires.
Those are contingency or emergency funds. There’s a certain amount of discretion there, like those things you mention, because they weren’t anticipated and Congress didn’t say they couldn’t use the money for that purpose. That doesn’t include line items that Congress specifically didn’t authorize. It’s for contingencies and emergencies. It’s a quaint concept these days, but U.S. government departments are supposed to follow the law, and the law in regards to spending is what is authorized by Congress.
Please tell me you don’t work on a government contract.
The chickenhawk Issa and the rest of the repugnantklan/teabagger mob are actually doing us all a favor. Just like the repugs screwed the pooch with McCarthy and their pathetic impeachment debacle these buffoons are simply putting their deranged, vitriolic, partisan shenanigans on display for the entire electorate to see. Of course the cadre like a poster here will lap it up like a dog at a pool of vomit….but the American voters see it for what it is.
I watched the entire Issa circus.
We need real accountability, but it has nothing to do with the Kennedy or Lamb, though the latter became the scapegoat. Kennedy was way too strong & knew it was politics.
Dennis Kucinich was the only one who nailed the issue, which begins with Obama’s policy on Libya from the NATO bombing.
See the a live session I did for more, which highlights the most important aspects, I believe.
“The chickenhawk Issa and the rest of the repugnantklan/teabagger mob…”
Is this what passes for intelligent, grown-up dialog where you come from?
WuzYoungOnceToo meet Secularh. Armor required (for readers, too, I’d bet).
Actually it’s what I call accurately describing a person and their cohorts.
Granted when Issa and the repugnantklan/teabaggers spew the nonsense and dishonest, disingenuous santorum(google it if you don’t know what it means)that is their stock and trade “intelligent, grown-up dialog” IS difficult to have I always believe in accurately describing the folks spewing it.
Doesn’t it bother any of you that Hillary lied, Rice lied, Carney lied and Obama lied through their teeth about this whole thing?? They all knew the terrorist attacks were planned and that there was NO demonstration against the movie trailor which sparked this! Yet, they spouted off for weeks that it was spontaneous, it was because of the movie, etc. Obama even spouted off at the UN!! How embarrassing for us.
This whole thing stinks and it’s very pathetic to see you all acting like this is just some kind of smear campaign against Hillary.
We should have answer from these people. How can you even trust the four people listed above anymore?? If they lie about something this big, then, they have no problem lying about Anything.
1.”Doesn’t it bother any of you that Hillary lied, Rice lied, Carney lied and Obama lied through their teeth about this whole thing?? They all knew the terrorist attacks were planned and that there was NO demonstration against the movie trailor which sparked this! Yet, they spouted off for weeks that it was spontaneous, it was because of the movie, etc. Obama even spouted off at the UN!! How embarrassing for us.”
So you have the inside poop on what happened huh? What is embarrassing is folks like yourself, some other Obama hating sycophants and the Issa repugnantklaner/teabagger circus are out in full voice.
2.”This whole thing stinks and it’s very pathetic to see you all acting like this is just some kind of smear campaign against Hillary.”
Well I will grant you the repugnantklan/teabagger performance…from Mitt da Twit to the Issa Circus are pathetic.
3.”We should have answer from these people. How can you even trust the four people listed above anymore?? If they lie about something this big, then, they have no problem lying about Anything.”
You mean they carried on like Mittens at the debate?!!!!!
If the GOP was serious about finding out what happened they would boot Issa out of the hearings as nobody takes that clown seriously. You don’t bring a clown posse to investigate something if you think it’s a serious matter do you? The GOP is such a joke. Everything they do turns into a three ring circus.
Were you this upset that George W. Bush lied and it cost the lives of thousands of Americans or is the Ambassador to Libya more important than thousands of soldiers who mostly come for working class families in this country?
Be honest and just say you really don’t want the facts whatever they may be.
Since Hillary Clinton was involved in both matters, let us refer to her answer about Iraq….
Moderator Tim Russert pointed out that the title of the resolution was the “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002.” Clinton responded saying, “We can have this Jesuitical argument about what exactly was meant.
BRAVO! Nice try at ms-characterizing a partial quote! You have been paying attention to your leaders limpwithnoballs and Mittens!!
This from the twitter account of Sam Stein
Sam Stein @samsteinhp
i predicted this, i think. per Fox biz “BREAKING NEWS: Issa to Hold Hearings on September Employment Numbers”
Issa is desperately trying to make himself relevant like most inferior people with a bit of power.
Issa is a combo self-important dick and rabid, barn yard dog who will always be remembered for nothing except for the figurative white foam oozing from his big mouth.
“The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.” ~William Safire
“Issa is desperately trying to make himself relevant like most inferior people with a bit of power.
Issa is a combo self-important dick and rabid, barn yard dog who will always be remembered for nothing except for the figurative white foam oozing from his big mouth. ”
PERFECTAMUNDO oh newdealem1 !!!!!
But be careful…don’t want to offend the delicate sensibilities of WuzYoungOnceToo!!