Benghazi: Bipartisan House committee said what?

Not a good day  for all of those  conservative Facebookers who stuck "Benghazi" on their names to scandalize the Obama Administration, particularly Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, on the hollow charges that she was at fault (cover-up conspiracy!)  in the bloody 2012 attack on the U. S. diplomatic mission.   Republicans had already filled several silos with fodder to diminish Hilary on the trail to 2016.

But I see in the Plain Dealer  (Benghazi theories debunked) an  Associated Press report  that, well, here is the opening paragraph to tell you where this is going:

A two-year investigation to the Republican controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly{in its response} and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees.

Game, set, match?  Not quite.  Superhawk Sen. Lindsey Graham  still has doubts and is pushing the idea that the Senate ought to investigate, too.  And Fox News  suggests it isn't satisfied that all of the facts were turned up in the long bi-partisan House study.

For these fringies, they will have to delay  their  schemes to blame Obama for  the six-foot snowfall in Buffalo.

P.S. Why wasn't the  Benghazi story in the BJ, too,  for the benefit of those folks who read nothing else?   Hurrrummmppph!

Be happy that the big carved Indian didn't go anywhere..

It's been a busy week of comings and goings around here.  Despite being groomed for the University of Akron  job, Jim Tressel  is headed to Youngstown State University,  and University of Toledo provost Scott Scarborough is coming to UA. Then, in case you strangely missed it, a young man roaringly celebrated  as Johnny Football, a.k.a, Manziel, was grabbed by the Browns to rise to the heights of a franchise quarterback beginning with pre-season ticket and T-shirt sales.

Virtually unnoticed in the area media has been the frenzied uprising by  GOP House members with certificates of excellence from the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts.  That may include at least half of the Republican  reps who want a seat on Speaker John Boehner's Select House (kangaroo) committee to damn well get to the bottom of Benghazi by the next presidential election.  There's probably no  group on Capitol Hill more qualified  to investigate the ad hoc scandal than this fishy gang of bottom feeders.

Also  going away were six more Beacon Journal staffers who accepted buyouts, including Jim Carney, Jewell Cardwell and Dave Scott. That reduced the size of the staff, reported the BJ Retirees blog,  to 30 pct. of what it was in 1991.

 And coming to Akron was Rick Santorum to sell his books and non-existent presidential credentials to an Ohio Christian Alliance lunch crowd.  But I think I already mentioned that earlier, didn't I?

Gone, too, for at least a year is Browns' star wide receiver Josh Gordon, who was suspended for drug violations.  The Browns couldn't even get through 24 hours of Manziel madness without a  cloudburst on their parade.  You have to wonder what they ever did to offend the gods.

That left the big carved Indian on West Market Street as the only  figure of interest in place.


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Boehner may need a Plan B on scandals

I can't imagine the kind of weekend the anti-Obama goon squad must have spent  bouncing around in the afterlife of the Republican Party. For days, the national media -  print and talking heads - have been sounding off about the president's approaching end of days in the wake of a scandalized administration. The only question, House Speaker John Boehner scowled, was who would "got to jail".  I'm not sure which scandal's smoking gun would merit time in the pokey. Still, jail is jail and Boehner has yet to give us a  clue to whether he would dispense with  trials.

Maybe I'm being too harsh with Boehner,  a forever grim-faced guy who claims to be obsessed with Benghazi. But in his search for political gold, he needs to know that 40 pct. of his shrunken Republican base can't even tell you where Benghazi is.  It wouldn't surprise me if that same percentage applied to his unruly House caucus.

More trouble arrived for the speaker in the polls showing that Obama hasn't lost a point in his public approval rating, which is around 53 pct.  That's about 52 points higher than the public's  attitude toward Congress these days.

Assuming there's a Plan B if those scandals fizzle short of satisfying the goons talking impeachment these days, what is left in the arsenal of hate for a black man who has twice denied his opponents the cigar on election night?

I will share with you a leak from a taxi driver on Capitol Hill who overheard a  high-level conversation about Plan B.

Here are some of the replacement scandals - Boehner squawking points, really - being discussed to deny the president a night's sleep:

A revival of the Chicago Black Sox scandal: Chicago.  Get it?

A Christmas card turned up in Obama's private collection from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

An Al Capone mood ring passed down to Obama.  Chicago. Get it?

A Saul Alinsky organzation manual warmly inscribed to Obama.

Finally a report that former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley gave Obama a box seat ticket to a White Sox game.   (Sox lost that one, too.)

Meantime, may I add the mini-scandal of Boehner handing out tobacco company money (bribes) to his colleagues on the House floor just before a key vote affecting the tobacco industry?  It's a start!

Darrell Issa: Catching up with Louie Gohmert

We get a little spooked when we hear a congressman who is  the Republicans' leading investigator  engtangle himself in the the English language. We could have forgiven my immigrant grandmother for imprecise references to little things like verbs and nouns.  But when Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman and Inspector Clouseau of the House Oversight Committee does it, you have to wonder whether America has moved one step closer to Orwell's Newspeak.

Issa,  a forever showboating right-wing nuisance, has yet to produce anything of substance from his feral probes.  Back in February 2012 , you may remember,  he barred Sandra Fluke from appearing on his all-male panel on contraception, supposing she lacked "expertise". That raised the bar to declaring that condoms and such are only a guy thing.

Now, back in the fetid trenches of Benghazi, Issa insisted  that "an act of terror is different from terrorist actions".

Huh?  Right.   For this profound insight into international terrorism and American unpreparedness  (read: Obama/Clinton deriliction) we have  hauled out the cherished Grumpy Abe Linguistic Lunacy  (GALL)  Award for the congressman.

That will put him still a tad behind  on this day to the Louie Gohmert Award.  But with Issa, you can be certain there will  be more opportunities for him to even the score.

Confirmed: Crocodiles are great swimmers

The New York Times reports that 15,000 crocodiles escaped from a South African farm. Having watched some of the  Republican senators swarm  Hillary at the hearing, I can tell the farmer where some of his missing crocs are hanging out.

Bolton prepares to head off Hillary at the pass

Dashing all fear that the world would vanish on Friday,  far-sighted Republicans have locked on to a new  calamitous challenge  to them  that could occur  four years from now:  A presidential candidacy by Hillary Rodham Clinton.

With all of the media chatter that Hillary is da first lady-to-be of Democrats, the GOP's ever-vigilant Hard Right is already gathering its battered  forces to deny her of any hope of leading a parade that she has yet to say she would do anyway.

One of the party's leading gorillas,  John Bolton, has thrown down the gauntlet by accusing her of faking a concussion to avoid an appearance before a senate committee probing the Benghazi attack. (He doesn't really know that to be true,  but you can see how this goes..)

You must understand that with guys like Bolton, the former UN ambassador appointed by Condoleezza Rice,  there's never room for professional  courtesies in sickness and in health.   He's a long-time cold warrior, militaristic poker player, Fox News favorite,  and gadabout in conservative think tanks.  He is obviously now the point man in his assault on Clinton to spare the world of another Mayan assumed catastrophe.

 Frankly, it sounds like the GOP is recycling the immodest words  of Sen. Mitch McConnell on Day One of Barack Obama's first presidency that his first duty was to make Obama a one-term president. (We all know how that worked out!)  May we  now assume that  the GOP's most noble vow will be to make Hillary a no-term non-president?

Graham and McCain: The red, white and blue guys

And so we have another red, white and blue moment in the postbellum world of
Republican politicians - a couple of old white  guys from red states taking out their GOP election blues on UN Ambassador Susan Rice and President Obama.  The woman at the left is Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire (these days Republicans are finding it prudent to have a woman in their photo-ops. It's a start, America. )

So McCain and Graham heigh-hoed  to the TV cameras to angrily revive the McConnell Mambo  in which Sen. Mitch McConnell pledged within nanoseconds of Obama's first election that he would do  everything possible to make damn sure that Obama would be a one-term president.  It was one of the few times that a Republican could be accused of thinking ahead.

Oh, the mambo?  You might recall that in West Side Story there was the wild scene in which the mambo was vigorously expressed with shouts and harsh fingerpointing.

Now we witness McCain, still  in a sulk over his own defeat by Obama in 2008, slamming Susan
 Rice as the potential presidential  nominee for secretary of state.  "She's not qualified!'' growled McCain, growing more erratic by the day.  "I don't trust her!" screeched Graham, McCain's buddy in all of those tours in Iraq when when they were still committed to proving the existence of weapons of mass destruction.  Their tour-group included a hawkish third senator, Zelig Joe Lieberman  who is finally leaving town in January.  One out of three is still better than none out of three.

Susan Rice is being accused of messing up the facts in the ongoing probe of the Benghazi bombing, scripted for her by the CIA since she had no connection to any of it.  The Washington Post's fact-checker gave the McCain-Graham hostility  to Rice two Pinocchios for "mischaracterization" in the case.  The two guys still haven't full explained how they so were charmed by  Condoleezza Rice,  who didn't deliver the goods in the lead-up to 9/ll.  They never will.

But Obama brought his gauntlet this time:  "If Senator McCain and Senator  Graham want to go after somebody, they should go after me," Obama asserted at his own news conference.  It was obvious from his tone that the nice guy was no longer at the podium.

In a hasty moment, Mitt creates his own disaster

Mitt Romney's rush to judgment on the Benghazi slaughter  was an extraordinary dump  for a guy who is fumbling to  be the CEO of America.  In a matter of minutes before the cameras, his attack on  President Obama in a dark moment that called for solemnity and grace  reaffirmed to us that he is the wimpy malfunctioning robot that we had assumed without this damning proof.

 How dare he say that he is qualified to be the leader of the free world when he  is unable to  articulate a simple rational response to the deaths of four Americans?  Didn't even mention them in his assault on the president. Now a desperate man as he slips in the polls (even the Fox News poll)  you find no triumphal tone in his words, only base politics to appeal to the crazies in his base.   Stunned conservative pundits and quaking GOP colleagues could not believe his display of incompetance.  Or as some critics asked, "Is this the fellow that you want to answer the 3 a.m. phone call?"

I suppose we should quote Rush Limbaugh, the great  white whale, who described Mitt as the "only adult in the room." Truth be known, Rush should be quaking in a different way after the Fox poll  destroyed his sinister argument that the major polls are a liberal conspiracy against Mitt.  Does anybody take this screwball seriously?

Or, for that matter,  Mitt Romney?

NOTE:  My column on Josh Mandel's dismissal of questions until he arrives on the Senate floor has been posted on Plunderbund

John Mc Cain: Our man in the streets of Benghazi

AM I MISTAKEN, or was that a stern-faced Sen. John McCain doing his patented presidential strut with rebel leaders in Benghazi? It made all of the TV stations and newspapers. What an opportunity for McCain to (1) show everybody back home that he is a watchful foreign policy expert in troubled lands and (2)blast President Obama for not waging an all-out war on Khadafi. Since his parading around in Libya's rebel-held city could not get him on any ballot as Libya's next president, the message was largely for domestic consumption in the USA and should enable him to extend his vast lead over all others as a Sunday morning talk show guest.

Surely he cannot be thinking that maybe, just maybe, with all of the pallor afflicting the current Republican crop of presidential candidates that he might, just might...no, I cannot bring myself to say it!