Any chance the lying right-wing liars will stop lying about Benghazi?
"Is there any accountability in American politics for being completely wrong? Is there any cost to those who say things that turn out not to be true and then, when their fabrications or false predictions are exposed, calmly move on to concocting new claims as if they had never made the old ones?"
-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washington Post column yesterday,
"The GOP must admit it was wrong on Obamacare"
"The GOP must admit it was wrong on Obamacare"
by Ken
Last night I wrote ("E. J. Dionne Jr. asks if there's accountability for the Rs' wrong-wrong-wrongness about the ACA? (Accountability? Ha!)") about E. J. Dionne Jr.'s column about the spectacular wrongness of the Republicans' war of lies about Obamacare, in which he raised that lovely question: "Is there any accountability in American politics for being completely wrong? Is there any cost to those who say things that turn out not to be true and then, when their fabrications or false predictions are exposed, calmly move on to concocting new claims as if they had never made the old ones?"
Of course E.J. knows the answers to those questions. As I wrote yesterday, sainted soul that he is, he would be thrilled if it turned out that in this "moment of truth, about the facts and about our purposes," there is even the slightest glimmer of accountability for the Obama haters' unrelenting wrongness, if indeed there was mere acknowledgment that their fabrications and false predictions have been exposed. But we all know perfectly well that we're in for the alternate plan, so beautifully described by E.J.: Instead, they wlll "calmly move on to concocting new claims as if they had never made the old ones."
E.J. had more excellent questions:
From now on, will there be more healthy skepticism about conservative claims against the ACA? Given how many times the law's enemies have said the sky was falling when it wasn't, will there be tougher interrogation of their next round of apocalyptic predictions? Will their so-called alternatives be analyzed closely to see how many now-insured people would actually lose coverage under the "replacement" plans?In the case of health care, he argued,
Perhaps more importantly, will we finally be honest about the real argument here?
Too many conservatives would prefer not to say upfront what they really believe: They don't want the federal government to spend the significant sums of money needed to get everyone covered.It was, I thought, a great "health care" column, but even more, it was a stupendous description of the present-day modus operandi of the Republican Party and indeed the modern American Right.
WHICH BRINGS US TO THE BENGHAZI CRUSADE OF LIES
And if I had been of a mind to pile on yesterday, I could have offered in evidence Dana Milbank's Washington Post column yesterday:
Latest Benghazi hearing is another Republican flopWe know beyond question that the Republican Benghazi-liars don't give a flying fig about death and destruction at a U.S. embassy, because they've never uttered a peep about previous such incidents, in particular those that occurred under Republican administrations. What's more, it's the "fiscally prudent" Republicans who have denied the State Department the funds it needs to protect American installations abroad. These pathologically lying scumbags have no idea where Benghazi is, or what might have happened, or what could have been done, or what should be done now. All they care about is the most repellently cynical political opportunism.
By Dana Milbank
House Republicans on Wednesday held Benghazi hearing number 1,372,569, give or take, and this time they were determined to find the proof that had eluded them in the previous 1,372,568: that Obama administration officials had put politics before national security.
Alas for the accusers, this hearing went the way of the others.
Lawmakers had another go at Michael Morell, a former deputy and acting CIA director and the man who revised the infamous “talking points” that said the September 2012 attack on American facilities in Libya had grown out of a protest. The talking points are key to the Republicans’ claims that President Obama tried to hide the true nature of the terrorist attack because the presidential election was just weeks away.
Morell, a now-retired career intelligence official who served under six presidents and was with George W. Bush in Florida on the day of the 2001 terrorist attacks, has the credibility to validate the conspiracy theories Republicans have been floating about Benghazi. But instead, he used the rare public session to rebut the accusations.
“I never allowed politics to influence what I said or did — never,” he testified. “None of our actions were the result of political influence in the intelligence process — none. . . . The White House did not make any substantive changes to the talking points, nor did they ask me to.” He called the talking points — which turned out to be wrong — “the best available information at the time.”
Did he have a conversation with anyone at the White House about the nature of the talking points?
“No, sir.”
His thoughts on the false information Susan Rice gave on TV the Sunday after the attacks?
“What she said about the attacks evolving spontaneously from a protest was exactly what the talking points said.”
How about the claims that somebody in the administration told the military not to assist on the night of the attack?
“I am aware of several requests by CIA for military support that night, and those requests were honored and delivered.”
The former official’s denials of any skullduggery drove the Republicans on the panel into a fury and caused Rep. Lynn Westmoreland to lose command of his vocabulary. The Georgia Republican, trying to find sinister meaning in the CIA’s changing of a phrase from “attacks” to “violent demonstrations,” explained that if there had been a protest, “you would see people malingering around and doing things. . . . They didn’t see anybody malingering around.”
Malingering? Perhaps the congressman expected the terrorists to be complaining about a persistent cough.
Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) let loose a string of insults on the uncooperative witness, saying Morell was either “misleading by omission” or “lying by omission” and violating “your obligation to this committee.” King went on to suggest that there was something suspicious about Morell going into business with former State Department official Philippe Reines (never mind that another partner in the venture is a former Republican staff director of the House Intelligence Committee) and about Morell becoming a commentator for CBS News, where President David Rhodes is brother of Obama adviser Ben Rhodes (never mind that CBS is the network that ran a damning but false account of the Benghazi response).
“When you see the whole totality here, this is why people have questions,” King said.
Questions — such as Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) asking Morell if he “conspired” with the White House.
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) skipped the questions in favor of accusations. “I believe that the totality of the information was obfuscated and that there was an intentional misleading of the public,” she said, charging Morell with changing the talking points “for the White House.”
Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who is retiring to be a talk-radio host, had drawn grumbles from some conservatives for being insufficiently zealous about Benghazi. Wednesday’s three-hour extravaganza should help him with those critics, because it gave Republican lawmakers a chance to vent their rage.
Angriest, or at least loudest, was Rep. Frank LoBiondo (N.J.), who shouted virtually his entire statement: “We get on talking points, and we get about who said this and whether the station chief said that. And the bottom line is that we’ve got people running around who killed Americans, who are sipping mai tais or whatever they’re sipping, and we can’t do anything about it.”
Good point. So maybe Republicans will drop their obsession with 19-month-old talking points and start asking what more can be done to get the bad guys.
My own feeling is that they should all be taken out and shot. But I'd settle for some of them owning up to their lies and delusions, acknowledging a tiny bit of the truth. Come to think of it, though, as against acknowledging even a tiny bit of the truth, they might rather be shot.
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