May 8, 2013

"What Difference Does It Make!" -- On 2016?

Hatched by Dafydd

PolitiFact Wisconsin has done us a great service by resurrecting Hillary "Hell to Pay" Clinton's January cri de coeur (rather, hysterical, squeaky, falsetto, voice-cracking, calculated screech) anent the Benghazi terrorism:

Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?

The attack (even the White House now admits it was an al-Qaeda terrorist assault) killed four Americans -- Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith, and two embassy security personnel, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods. Ten others were wounded in the attack. But a few days after, then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice rushed onto nearly a thousand Sunday talk shows to pitch the rewritten, reelection-friendly talking points of the Obamunists: That the attack was unplanned, not premeditated, and was in fact an out-of-control movie review.

The PolitiFact piece is part of an "occasional feature" called In Context, a.k.a. the lazy man's journalism; it consists of taking some controversial statement, quoting several of the paragraphs surrounding it, and calling it a news story. But it is useful, providing a longer length of rope by which those afflicted by foot in mouth disease, such as Madame Erstwhile Secretary, can hang themselves all the quicker.

In context, Clinton's "What difference at this point does it make!" ejaculation is even worse than what we thought from the video snippet in January. We thought she had simply lost her temper after being badgered, bear-baited, and hogtied by some sneery senator. But the In Context piece shows a very different story: The shriek heard round the world was a planned evasion of a simple but devastating question, one that Clinton would surely know was coming -- but for which she had no good answer.

The questioner who extracted the Scream was Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI, 100%). And he really had only one simple, substantive question: Wouldn't a simple phone call to the survivors and evacuees, even a couple of days after the fact, have told us that there was no "demonstration" or "protest" prior to the assault? Therefore, that it was indeed a planned and executed terrorist attack.

Johnson asks his question several times:

Did anybody in the State Department talk to those folks very shortly afterwards?...

The point I’m making is, a very simple phone call to these individuals, I think, would’ve ascertained immediately that there was no protest prior to this.... Why wasn’t that known?...

But, Madame Secretary, do you disagree with me that a simple phone call to those evacuees to determine what happened wouldn’t have ascertained immediately that there was no protest? That was a piece of information that could have been easily, easily obtained?

But to each attempt to get Clinton to explain why she couldn't have found out almost immediately what really happened -- terrorism, not a spontaneous protest against a YouTube video -- Clinton evades, sidesteps, and tapdances... because she knows very well that, had she made that phone call, she would lose her plausible deniability; she would have owned the Big Lie of her subordinate, Susan Rice. Here are Clinton's "answers":

[O]nce the assault happened, and once we got our people rescued and out, our most immediate concern was, number one, taking care of their injuries.... We did not think it was appropriate for us to talk to them before the FBI conducted their interviews. And we did not -- I think this is accurate, sir -- I certainly did not know of any reports that contradicted the [Intelligence Community] talking points at the time that Ambassador Rice went on the TV shows.... Was information developing? Was the situation fluid? Would we reach conclusions later that weren’t reached initially?... [W]hen you’re in these positions, the last thing you want to do is interfere with any other process going on, number one.... Number two, I would recommend highly you read both what the ARB said about it and the classified ARB because, even today, there are questions being raised. Now, we have no doubt they were terrorists, they were militants, they attacked us, they killed our people. But what was going on and why they were doing what they were doing is still unknown --

Did I miss an actual answer in that pot of message? I mean, something like, "Yes, I could have called them and found out"... or even, "No, I couldn't call them, any of them, even days later, because my boss put the kibosh on any investigation until after he was safely reelected."

At the end, Johnson draws the only conclusion possible:

No, again, we were misled that there were supposedly protests and that something sprang out of that -- an assault sprang out of that -- and that was easily ascertained that that was not the fact, and the American people could have known that within days and they didn’t know that.

And that was when she unleashed her staged and rehearsed banshee wail, the silencing scream of the outraged woman under sexist assault by a Republican Fascist:

With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?

Of course she didn't dare answer! The simple and honest response to Johnson's question is, Yes, I could have found out immediately; but if I did, how could I safely send Siouxsie out to lie to the American voters just before President B.O.'s reelection?

Her hands were tied; rather, they were wired firmly over her ears. There are some things Man, or in this case a reasonable facsimile thereof, was not meant to know.

And don't think that Madame can just walk away from it. To paraphrase Josef Mengele in the Boys From Brazil: She betrayed her ambassador; she betrayed her oath of office; she betrayed her country!

If she chooses to run for president again in 2016, I expect her primary opponents won't forget to remember her lies, her multiple betrayals, her treasons, stratagems, and spoils. I stand by my prediction that Hillary Rodham Clinton Rodham will never, ever be the Democrat nominee for president.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 8, 2013, at the time of 11:59 PM

Comments

The following hissed in response by: Javert Freeman

Your keen observations of this event notwithstanding, don't underestimate the stupidity of the voting public and the ability to steal elections.

The above hissed in response by: Javert Freeman [TypeKey Profile Page] at May 10, 2013 3:14 PM

The following hissed in response by: GW

This is shades of her "vast rightwing conspiracy" speech made in regards to one or other of Bill's peccadilloes.

If Hillary is to be believed, she was kept in a perfect cone of silence during her tenure. Apparently, she was only the titular head of the Dept. while someone else made all of the decisions.

I would like to see someone follow up on the email from the Benghazi mission forecasting the attack that occurred and noting that it would likely succeed. I would love to know each person who read that e-mail and what they did with it - and why it or its contents never came to the Hildabeast's attention.

As to what difference all of this makes, I hear people talking around the margins, but none really get to the heart. The worst thing our government has done, under Bush and now exponentially more so under Obama, is to obfuscate the dangerous problems with Islam, and in particular, the dogma and tenets of Wahhabi Islam - the most radical, xenophobic, triumphalist and retrograde force in the world today. It is not that al Qaeda or the brothers Tsarnaev and their ilk are following a perversion of Islam, it is that they are true believers in all the dogma of Wahhabi Islam. Obama - and indeed, most on the left, want to pretend that radical Islam is a rare outlier rather than the single most dominant form of Islam today. I've pontificated on this til I am blue in the face, but suffice it to say, until the problem is addressed honestly and openly, it will not go away, far more Americans will die, and Wahhabi Islam will continue to metastasize throughout the world.

Within that rubric, the causes of the attack in Benghazi, as well as the criminal refusal to provide security commensurate to the threat, matter very much indeed. It goes to the heart of the national security issue of our time - the threat to our nation and our lives from radical Islamists. If Benghazi was merely a rogue movie review conducted with violence that could not be predicted, then the administration really cannot be faulted. If, however, Benghazi represents a failure to accurately see and gauge the threat, than the Benghazi attack is the canary in the coal mine - the warning that, over a decade on from 9-11, we are still not on the track. And that is the most important reason Benghazi matters.

The above hissed in response by: GW [TypeKey Profile Page] at May 12, 2013 2:27 PM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

GW:

I've been writing about the problem of Islam and radical Islamism for 21 years. My broadband take is that successful religions have similar lifetracks:

  1. A group of ecstatic followers deify a prophet, living or dead.
  2. They form an insulated community, enforcing strict conformity, generally with deadly force, among the faithful, enacting a large body of commandments and creating a fanciful, ad hoc tradition and "history" designed to segregate them from everybody else.
  3. Eventually, the new faith becomes more popular, as rich and powerful converts make persecution against the faith more difficult; it's beginning to take on the aspect of a religion, not an ecstatic cult.
  4. Kings, emperors, and warlords take note of the by-now established religion and its capacity to augment the power of the leader by linking State policies to commandments from God or the gods; the religion thus becomes the enforcement arm of the State, but there is growing tension with the clergy.
  5. At some point, generally speaking, the government religion becomes less onerous in its religious rituals, laws, and lifestyle demands (leaders tend not to want to follow the diktats of priests/Pharisees/imams); the new religion recedes into the background, no longer the single animating force of believers' lives.

    This is the critical phase, which we can generalize as "the enlightenment": Religious obligations and demands gradually recede, as the supernatural source of State power is quietly assumed, thus needn't be reinforced or emphasized so much.
  6. The religion is ready to enter the modern world; it becomes more forgiving and easygoing, more ecumenical (and less violently sectarian), less intense, and more accommodating to free trade, Capitalism, individual liberty (including nominal heresy), and revision towards a laissez-faire religious understanding.

Islam appears to be stuck at step 5, not yet willing to move, as a mass, away from religious totalitarianism towards a religious gloss upon a secular culture and government.

The enlightenment typically results in a drastic reduction of martyrs and corresponding increase in the desire to get along with neighbors, even those with diametrically opposed religious beliefs.

Given that Islam as a religion probably doesn't predate AD 800 (traditions of earlier Islamic activity are likely "backfill"), Islam is not particularly slow to embrace the enlightenment: 800 years ago, Christianity was still firmly ensconced in stage 4.

Alas, that implies it will be centuries before Islam mellows... that is if Christianity is typical. If Christianity was atypical, it might be only fifty years -- or a thousand! (I would guess we can speed up the conversion by persistently demonstrating our military and economic superiority; at least most Moslems already have the concept of wealth creation for improving lifestyle... unlike, say, Tibetan Buddhists.)

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh [TypeKey Profile Page] at May 13, 2013 12:32 AM

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