Benghazi is Not Watergate, Part Whatever
May. 7th, 2014 08:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chris_gerribWhen saying “Benghazi is not Watergate,” it helps to remember what Watergate was. It was commission of felonies (breaking and entering, wiretapping) in an attempt to throw an election done at the behest of the sitting President. Saying that “the cover-up was worse than the crime” is not accurate. However, that cover-up was ordered by the President and designed to protect him.
Benghazi is (at worst) a series of bad judgment calls about the security posture of a remote diplomatic outpost. The “cover-up” is at worst an attempt to spin the attack into a spontaneous demonstration. Since there were several spontaneous demonstrations at the same time in the Arab world, saying “video caused attack” was at least plausible. Actually, if the video didn’t cause the attack, it was one hell of a coincidence.
In no event was the attack ordered by the President, nor was the response delayed by him. Simply put, we did not have any useful military assets at hand to respond faster than they did. Neither Obama nor Hilary Clinton personally managed the consulate’s security, and Ambassador Chris Stevens was apparently unconcerned enough to drive there and spend the night. Nakoula, the video-maker, was sentenced, not by Obama, but a Federal judge, to one year in jail on parole violations. He was released in 2013.
In short, there’s not much there. Most people, other than rabid partisans, understand that.
Benghazi is (at worst) a series of bad judgment calls about the security posture of a remote diplomatic outpost. The “cover-up” is at worst an attempt to spin the attack into a spontaneous demonstration. Since there were several spontaneous demonstrations at the same time in the Arab world, saying “video caused attack” was at least plausible. Actually, if the video didn’t cause the attack, it was one hell of a coincidence.
In no event was the attack ordered by the President, nor was the response delayed by him. Simply put, we did not have any useful military assets at hand to respond faster than they did. Neither Obama nor Hilary Clinton personally managed the consulate’s security, and Ambassador Chris Stevens was apparently unconcerned enough to drive there and spend the night. Nakoula, the video-maker, was sentenced, not by Obama, but a Federal judge, to one year in jail on parole violations. He was released in 2013.
In short, there’s not much there. Most people, other than rabid partisans, understand that.
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no subject
Date: 2014-05-08 05:59 am (UTC)I still believe Hillary's involvement was not trivial. Remember how many years (i e decades) it took for the Tonkin Gulf incident to unravel, to be revealed as a convenient fiction. Knowing what, erm, shall we say callous tendencies Hillary showed towards those she regarded as underlings, and how the US military was viewed during the Clinton Administration, if it should eventually be revealed that this was Hillary's way (her only way, really) to hit back at the man who robbed her of her “entitlement” to the Democratic Presidential nomination, by sabotaging security on the eve of a high-probability attack date so as to create an embarrassing bad-press incident for that incumbent (that it cost American lives being irrelevant; they were just grunts, lumpenproles, probably Republicans anyway, certainly of no account to their betters in the limousine-liberal Georgetown cocktail-party elite)… I would not be at all surprised.
[Note that immediately after his re-election, Comrade Hillary was relieved of her duties - “for reasons of health.” Ah, yes…]
no subject
Date: 2014-05-08 01:36 pm (UTC)If you start from the assumption that Clinton isn't a cartoon villain, this falls apart.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-08 02:30 pm (UTC)“avoid getting stained”? Surely you jest. Do you remember when she put $1,000 into commodities speculation and walked away with one hundred grand? Do you remember the investigation into allegations of 'insider trading' that followed? No - because there wasn't any. *
Great Zot, this woman is connected. She knows everybody who is anybody in Washington. (She and “Landslide Lyndon” Johnson would have got along only too well, as long as they had a common goal!)
Cartoon villain? No. But “We are the President” Hillary is renowned for never forgiving, and never forgetting (http://i58.tinypic.com/33jh1lv.jpg). “Secretary of Kiss-Off,” “Out of (Country), Out of Mind” must have been deeply infuriating. Out of the Beltway orbit, her influence was sharply curtailed, her moves limited - by intent and design, clearly. That it kept her safe and ensured her political survival if some Watergate-style brouhaha did erupt beyond the power of the cheerleading mainstream media cartels to suppress or spin, would have been thin consolation.
It's not something I expect to ever be proven. But I consider it very possible, and indeed disturbingly probable.
* Ditto the mainstream media outcry: The crickets chirped. Now, had a Republican pulled that - !
no subject
Date: 2014-05-08 02:44 pm (UTC)The problem is, it is in fact quite possible to take 1K and make it into 100K. It's also quite possible to end up with a truckload of the commodity in question showing up at your doorstep. (My dad, as a kid, ended up selling oranges out of a toy wagon due to a neighbor's flutter into the commodities market.)
You're accusing a woman of murdering four people under her employ (including a Democratic ambassador from California) to spite a Democratic president. This is an extraordinary claim, for which you have, not extraordinary, but no, evidence. The only world in which this makes sense is found between the pages of a comic book.
Il nous faut de l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace!
Date: 2014-05-08 03:03 pm (UTC)Respectfully, I suggest that Niccolò Machiavelli would smile at your naïveté. “Omelette e uova, amico mio - omelettes and eggs… Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance, sì?”
By the bye, I'm not accusing anyone of anything. I'm just thinking out loud.