Time To Bury…

…for all time the quaint, pollyannaish notion that the “elite” media exist as anything but a Praetorian Guard for the Democrat party.

CBS News has been busted gundecking coverage of Benghazi that afflicts the Administration narrative

The biggest Benghazi-related story that took place outside of the House Oversight Committee’s hearing room today is this item in Politico, regarding CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. She’s the reporter who famously drew White House officials’ profane ire over her unapologetic pursuit of the Fast & Furious scandal story; now she’s apparently facing searing criticism from another source: Her own bosses. Why? Because she’s been covering the Benghazi story too aggressively

Read the whole thing.

If Bohner and Cantor don’t get a select committee on Benghazi going yesterday, then what the hell is the point of even having an opposition party?

33 thoughts on “Time To Bury…

  1. Oh, Lefty! Sharyll Attkisson is being sidelined by your Democrat Dominated Media Culture so that the only job she can get is with Fox. That way when she next Speaks Truth to Power, you can say “Oh, it was Faux News. Doesn’t count. Squirrel!!”
    Can you imagine a Bush era whistleblower being called a “disgruntled employee” by the Left?
    http://minx.cc/?post=339802

  2. The New York Times had Abu Gravb…..how ever you spell the prison….on the front page for 32 consecutive days. Even on days when there was nothing to report. Why is this important in Minnnesota? The NYT is one of the few sources of national and international news the all newspapers use since cutbacks have removed all locally based national reporters.

  3. When you break out the Google Trends data by metro, almost all of the search volume is coming from Washington, DC. This is very much a beltway story.
    The idea that feckless government employees held back life-saving measures is fundamentally absurd.

    Issa gets an A for effort though.

  4. Oh.eM.G. (a little low information lingo for SitD’s low information readers, Avery Liberelle and Emery/Doug Grow) – The only people who care about Benghazi are rich white guys who like Chik-Fil-A (I’m thinking this means you commenter “BH429”) and Wal-Mart (which is pretty much everyone except the Soliah loving, Subaru driving, free-range Alpaca wearing, locavore Utopians).
    As noted at the link…
    OUT: Speak Truth to Power
    IN: Hide Truth for Power
    http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/08/in-40-years-wapo-has-gone-from-all-the-presidents-men-to-this/

  5. OK, wait a second here, Emergrow: Benghazi is a couple hours’ flight from U.S. bases in Sicily, and less than that from personnel and aircraft in Tripoli. And you argue that it’s absurd to claim that there might be a reason that no help arrived during an eight hour assault?

    It might or might not have helped. It’s possible it could have been even worse if we’d tried. That said, the administration owes the country an honest answer about why no help arrived, as they certainly have not given one.

  6. Maybe my epistemology is faulty too. But as I review that state by state graph I get the following –
    Kentucky is a 100 (the highest of all the states). Could it be that Kentucky is home to the Airborne and those are the folks who might have to parachute in on the next Obama f-up?
    Number 2 is Maryland – lots of gov’t employee’s live there. Wonder if it’s gov’t employees wondering who has their back in a pinch (hint: Not Obama or the Clintons) and also how the media/gov’t (ptr) deals with whistleblowers when a Democrat is in the White House?

  7. Sef, you forgot about VA, home to lots of military people. The state that suppressed the absentee ballots of their deployed citizens, because they might have voted against his excellency, Barackus Obamanus, then blaming it on said ballots being submitted too late to count.

  8. Who was held culpable by the U.S. government and the media for the attack that killed Stevens?
    Not the state dept.
    Not al Qaida.
    The creator of a youtube video the attackers had never heard of. The only people who thought the youtube video was the cause of the attack were the U.S. media and political appointees in the U.S. government.
    And Dog Gone, of course, who manages to get the facts wrong on virtually everything.

  9. The idea that feckless government employees held back life-saving measures is fundamentally absurd.

    Doug, are you on drugs? Clearly help was available and ready to go to the rescue. SOMEBODY said, “Stand down” and we should know who and why. I doubt it was a “feckless government employee” (above their paygrade, you know) who made the call. Those career diplomats were calling for help, and no one believed from the beginning that this was a protest gone bad. A series of conscious decisions were made to leave this outpost and its staff to twist in the wind. Was there an overriding matter of national security that required the sacrifice…or pure venality?

  10. Mr. Hicks was sent back to Washington and was, as he terms it, “demoted” due to his own shockingly poor performance. He completely botched the evacuation. As the FSOs at the embassy relied upon his leadership to manage the evacuation the morning after the attack he was absent for long periods of time, dithered, and delayed the evacuation. The conspiracy theorists will argue that he was demoted for political reasons. He is positioning himself to be seen as a victim of institutional revenge against a whistleblower by testifying before Congress. Rather than face the fact that the demotion is a result of his failure to perform amidst a crisis it is far easier for him to suggest that he was demoted for political reasons.

  11. This wasn’t a case where the government (state dept.) said ‘we don’t know’ or ‘we need to investigate further’. Within hours of the attack (Sept. 11, 10PM EDT) Hillary made this statement:

    Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.

    The maker of the video, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, was arrested on Sept. 27, 2012, for probation violations. He is still in prison.

  12. Emery, in order for your thesis about the incompetence of Hicks being the real reason for his demotion, you would have to show that the State Dept. regularly demotes people for similar ‘incompetence’.
    I don’t think that you can do that..

  13. /”Clearly help was available and ready to go to the rescue.”/

    What resources, if any, could we have deployed in time to avert the outcome?
    If there is a “cute” conspiracy theory, I would like to read it. Where are the Qatari, who bankrolled the opposition, now? Oh yeah, they are a bit busy in Syria at the moment…

  14. Terry, it does not negate the fact that he failed on that one day. That day of course was most likely the greatest and most stressful crisis he faced in his career. His reliability came into question when it apparently was not when he was made DCM. As a result he was demoted. It is very difficult to bow out and end one’s career in failure.

  15. Emery, it is common for whistleblowers to have their integrity questioned.
    I think it is as clear as can be that the state department — by which I mean Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton — acted unprofessionally and mendaciously in the hours and days after 9/11/2012, and they did so in a way that was typically leftist, i.e. ideological (blamed an American). Where is their demotion? Why is Hillary still considered a top candidate for the presidency in 2016? Why was Rice nominated to replace her at State?
    The measure and consequences of “Incompetence” with this administration are politically determined.

  16. Emery, it seems that we had resources in Italy. Really not too far from Libya.

  17. “Mr. Hicks was sent back to Washington and was, as he terms it, “demoted” due to his own shockingly poor performance. He completely botched the evacuation. As the FSOs at the embassy relied upon his leadership to manage the evacuation the morning after the attack he was absent for long periods of time, dithered, and delayed the evacuation.”
    “Emery”- Do you have a cite for where you read this information? I’ve spent the last few minutes trying to find where Hicks said this on the record with no success. According to what I have read, Hicks testified that he was in contact with Secretary Clinton. He believes he was demoted for speaking with a Congressman after being told not to (which is insubordination) unless a representative from the Secretary’s office was also present.
    You are attempting to minimize the seriousness of Hicks allegations by throwing around words like ‘cute’ and ‘conspiracy’. It’s certainly okay with me if your reading of Hicks personal regrets in how he handled the situation -after the attack- means you don’t believe his under oath testimony regarding the events leading up to and during the attack, but I’d like to understand the context in which he made those statements.

  18. Terry, you went to the heart of the matter. There are two (political) arguments regarding Benghazi.

    I feel America will be judged on what it does and what is says. It should:

    1. Encourage elections, respect the results if they are honest elections, and at least be polite to whoever wins.
    2. Encourage free press, freedom of religion, protection of minorities.
    3. Encourage the dismantling of the systems of monopolies and controls that benefit an elite at the expense of the general public. Too often when regimes change, one elite is replaced by another.
    4. Try to mediate between factions.
    5. Support Israel only when Israel faces direct existential threats. Criticize Israel for what it does wrong, including settlements and police state actions in the West Bank. Make no promises to take offensive actions to further Israel’s interests.
    6. Treat all democratic governments in the Middle East with the same consistent set of standards, be they made up of Sunnis, Shias, or Jews.
    7. Take better care of our diplomats. It’s going to be a rocky road.

  19. By the way – the State Department is saying that Mr. Hicks was in fact not demoted and continues at the same pay grade and status as he did prior to speaking out. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t effectively been passed over and his career advancement has come to an end. But he wasn’t demoted as a commenter noted above as punishent for his “shockingly poor performance”.

  20. There is compelling evidence (the words of the father of one the attack’s victims) that when Obama and Hillary said they would go after the people responsible for the attack, they meant ONLY Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a US citizen who had nothing at all to do with the Benghazi attack.
    This is not small potatoes.

  21. Well there was a team in Tripoli that was told to stand down @2AM, when the attack started at 9:45 PM. An hour’s flight away. Aviano, Italy could have had fighters overhead in about 2 hours. I don’t know if there was a carrier in the Med. There often is, and it is less than 2 hours from Tel Aviv to Benghazi, so any carrier in the Eastern Med should have been able to put some aircraft overhead in couple hours. Which would have been time to drop a laser guided munition on the mortar team that was shelling the CIA annex, before they killed the last 2 Americans. So even if troops were not on the ground, we could have had air support from somewhere around the med.

    I am getting some riding in, thanks for asking. I wish we would get more warmer days though. I am tired of the cold.

  22. “Support Israel only when Israel faces direct existential threats.”

    You know, like being surrounded on all sides by hostile and belligerent neighbors. But, BESIDES those direct existential threats.

    “protection of minorities”

    Such as tiny democratic nations that are surrounded on all sides by hostile and belligerent neighbors.

  23. “Support Israel only when Israel faces direct existential threats.”
    This is ludicrous, Emery. It puts the onus for Muslim unrest on the Israeli’s. A better wording would be ‘Support unconditionally whomever the Islamic extremists wish to destroy”.
    The poles, Estonians, Latvians, and Georgians were under foreign occupation for decades. I don’t remember them blowing up schoolbuses full of children and pizza parlors.
    The common element isn’t Israel, or foreign occupation, it’s Islam.

  24. Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club wrote a piece explaining that it was always “too late” to save them, at every step. Worth reading.

    Powerline has a series “Fools and Knaves” explaining that Hicks had a 20-year sterling record until he talked, then Hillary Clinton’s hatchet woman (the same one who handled the Monica Lewinski problem) was brought in to shut him up.

    And Emery, you’ve been accused of sock puppeting and/or plagerism, to which you have not responded. It affects your credibility. Care to clear that up for us?

  25. Hicks was a career State department employee. Hicks made it clear early on that Rice (and Hillary) were ignoring the facts in evidence in order to push a Bengazi narrative that fit their political goals. Both Rice and Hillary were political appointees, Hicks was not.
    Yet some people believe that Hicks engaged in politics after he was demoted by the political appointees at the State department.
    For non-political reasons.

  26. Awards in bureaucracy are a dime a dozen. Especially in the foreign service. If you didn’t get one in the last few years and you do your job in a manner that doesn’t disappoint you will get one next year. Even if we assume that receiving awards is indicative of multiple occasions of stellar performance, big assumption, it does not negate the fact that he failed on that one day.

  27. Terry, I do agree that political cannons are being aimed at Clinton in a manner that will soften her up for 2016.

  28. She’s softening up herself, Emery.
    What in the world would make any person think Hillary had political talent? Other than the talent to marry the correct person and stick to him through various humiliations.
    Turning non-political government positions into political political positions is a Clinton specialty. Remember the White House travel office scandal of 1993?

  29. ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.
    White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department. The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.
    That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.
    “Those talking points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened,” Carney told reporters at the White House press briefing on November 28, 2012. “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”

    http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/05/exclusive-benghazi-talking-points-underwent-12-revisions-scrubbed-of-terror-references/

  30. Emery said:

    “The idea that feckless government employees held back life-saving measures is fundamentally absurd.”

    And he will probably believe that regardless of any arguments or facts presented. He’s a little dull, in case you haven’t noticed.

  31. I think, Troy, that Emery has forgotten that the single most important thing to remember about the Clintons is that they lie.

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