I'm not sure how many of you watched the senate hearings on Benghazi yesterday but I have been following the story since the attack occurred 8 months ago.
For those not overly familiar, members of Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. Embassy in Libya (Benghazi) on Sept. 11, 2012. Our ambassador was killed along with others.
The Obama administration did nothing. Every report I've read, and the senate hearings confirmed this yesterday, has stated that assets, i.e. military, special ops, etc., were available and could've saved the lives of Americans who were under terrorist attack.
They did nothing.
Then, when the ambassador was dead, they blamed a completely unknown, conservative film maker for offending Islam.
The Libyan president, who had already been on international TV stating that it was the work of terrorists, was made to look foolish, and thus refused FBI access to the crime scene for 2 weeks, thereby insuring that no valuable evidence would ever be found.
What has been completely stunning to me is how the mainstream media has almost universally ignored the story. It was only last week that Bob Schieffer at CBS asked whether there might be a cover-up by the administration.
This eight months after the attack.
This eight months after the attack.
That's some real crack journalism there, Bob.
Didn't want to ask that question back in November ahead of the elections, didya?
In a world where every time a soldier stubbed his toe on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, it was proof that George Bush was an idiot and only after the oil, the majority of the media has doggedly refused to criticize the Obama administration.
The man has played more God Damned golf than any president in the history of both presidents and golf and spends 3.6% of his time thinking about the economy, and meanwhile the world is going to hell in a bucket and the media continues to spin.
It's charming.
Read and be grumpy:
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Report: CBS News Bosses Irked by Correspondent's Thorough Benghazi Reporting
Guy Benson | May 08, 2013The 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. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you media bias:
"Attkisson, who holds a third-degree black belt in taekwondo, takes a fighting stance when she feels she’s being stonewalled. Which is exactly what she thinks the White House has done to her on Benghazi," Farhi writes. But from where Attkisson is sitting, there are actually two Goliaths, one of which is almost entirely absent from the Post profile. The second Goliath is CBS News, which has grown increasingly frustrated with Attkisson's Benghazi campaign. CBS News executives see Attkisson wading dangerously close to advocacy on the issue, network sources have told POLITICO. Attkisson can't get some of her stories on the air, and is thus left feeling marginalized and underutilized. That, in part, is why Attkisson is in talks to leave CBS ahead of contract, as POLITICO reported in April. Farhi mentions "internal conflicts" in the final paragraph, though he seems to dismiss them. The "internal conflicts" are indeed real -- Attkisson is still eyeing an exit, according to sources -- and provide important context for today's piece. Today, CBS News is celebrating Attkisson's commitment to the Benghazi story. It's good press. But that support is an aberration.
"Dangerously close to advocacy"? That's how CBS News apparently views the work of a reporter who is doggedly seeking truth about an issue of enormous importance that many of her colleagues have scrupulously ignored. Remarkable. And as Ed Morrissey noticed, Attkisson's Twitter feed went curiously silent very early on during today's hearings. What happened? Allahpundit thinks he knowswhat's going on here, and I agree with him:
[The media establishment and liberals] can’t stop conservative media from existing, but they can ghettoize it as illegitimate and “partisan” in a way that their own partisan garbage isn’t....Skepticism about Benghazi is fine for the wingnuts at Fox, but bringing such unhelpful nonsense into an “impartial,” i.e. pro-Obama, outlet like CBS risks lending credence to the GOP’s accusations. The proper line to take on Benghazi is to dismiss the new hearings with a sneer, a la Joe Klein, or, in the case of “impartial” news coverage, to dismiss them more lightly by referencing Hillary’s long-ago whining about a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to discredit the Clintons. “Going where the story leads” is unhelpful to liberalism in this case, ergo it’s advocacy by definition.
Attkisson's reporting makes Benghazi harder to pigeonhole as a right-wing conspiratorial obsession. CBS News owns a(n unjustified) platinum reputation in lefty media circles, rendering one of their correspondent's tireless work on an unhelpful subject doubly unhelpful. Thus, the suits are marginalizing her and questioning her integrity, accusing her of walking dangerously close to the activism line. Shameful. I'll leave you with two other tweets that shed light on how much of the media will cover today's events:
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The Washington Post has a live blog set up to cover the Benghazi hearings. Moments ago they posted an updatetitled "Who’s tweeting about Benghazi? Rich, middle-aged men and Chick-fil-A lovers":
Thanks to Demographics Pro, a Twitter analysis firm, we have some vague idea of who’s tweeting the most...The tweeters are also overwhelmingly white and married, according to Demographics Pro; they also like Chick-fil-A and Walmart — two brands most often associated with conservatives.Not sure why the race, sex and wealth of tweeters matters. As to their political views, you can more easily determine that by looking at who they follow on Twitter (Romney, Palin, Etc.) rather than where they eat or shop.
Not mentioned by the Post is this factoid from the Twitter analysis website "The group has an exceptionally high concentration of members of the military (within the top 10% of overall Twitter distribution in this respect)."
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Here's How the LATimes Covered Today's Explosive Benghazi Hearings
Apparently the two big revelations today were Partisan Politics As Usual and Apricot Salsa.
Allah discusses this here, but even more interesting is his synthesis of two different stories: Left-wingers freaking out that the LATimes might become non-, um, neutral, should the Kochs buy it, and CBS bigs worrying that Sharyl Attkisson'saccurate reporting on Benghazi is coming "dangerously close to advocacy."
At CBS? The once and future home of Dan Rather? Of Mike Wallace? Of Bob Schieffer? Perish the thought!
His notion is that the media's and the Democrats' (but I repeat myself) go-to method of dismissing a true but politically unhelpful story is to sneer "That's only aFox story." Thus, having a troublemaker like Attkisson fouling Their Air with true (but politically unhelpful) reportage undermines their ability to sneer a story into nonexistence.
His theory, then, is that the liberal media wants to keep unhelpful stories"ghettoized" on conservative-only channels. Keep such reporting on outlets the rest of the media considers disreputable, and then no one respectable can say they're burying important stories.
I think he's right, but I'd add in the simple idea that the media considers the airwaves to be Their Air, their property -- and, like any property-owner, they want to exploit their property to their advantage and to their purposes.
These good Gramscians have fought hard to take over these institutions-- they'll be damned if they give any of it up now.
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A source with intimate information about the events that happened on the ground in Benghazi the night the U.S. Consulate and the CIA annex was attacked by terrorists told Breitbart News that, ultimately, only the President of the United States, or someone acting on his authority, could have prevented Special Forces either on the ground or nearby from helping those Americans who were under deadly assault.
According to the source, when the attack on the Consulate occurred, a specific chain of command to gain verbal permission to move special-forces in must have occurred. SOCAFRICA commander Lieutenant Col. Gibson would have contacted a desk officer at the time, asking for that permission.
That desk officer would have called Marine Corps Col. George Bristol, then in command of Joint Special Operations Task Force-Trans Sahara. From there, Bristol would have made contact with Rear Admiral Brian Losey, then Commander of Special Operations Command Africa. Losey would have contacted four-star General Carter Ham, commander of U.S. AFRICOM at the time.
“Ham answers directly to the President of the United States,” said the source. It wasn’t a low-level bureaucrat making the call, the source adamantly added.
That call may have been made early in the engagement. Both Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey testified in January that they had no further communication with President Barack Obama after an initial briefing in the early hours of the Benghazi crisis, which continued through the night.
But what about then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton?
“I have a hard time thinking it was Hillary alone. Hillary may have tried to circumvent the counterterrorism board and deal with this. I think in order for her to tell General Ham, ‘No, you’re not going to get involved,' she would have had to talk to the president. The president would have had to say, ‘No, take your commands from Hillary.’ He would have had said something, because Ham does not work for the Department of State; he works directly for the president,” the source explained.
The lack of clarity surrounding orders given during the Benghazi attacks is a stark contrast to the clarity projected after the successful Osama bin Laden raid in May 2011, when administration officials were keen to attribute responsibility for the orders to the president.
Witnesses with firsthand information about the Benghazi attacks will appear before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday.
State Department employees Mark Thompson, Gregory Hicks, and Eric Nordstrom are expected to be whistleblower witnesses who will reveal information about State’s reaction to the attacks that has not been released previously.
AWR Hawkins contributed to this report.
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From The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
The big political story on Wednesday was the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearings on the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on U.S. diplomats in Benghazi, Libya. The Week's Keith Wagstaff outlined the seven biggest revelations from the testimony from three "whistle-blowers," Harold Maass rounds up speculation on the political motivations of the heavily promoted hearings, and editor-at-large Marc Ambinder adds his own thoughts.
At The Daily Show, Jon Stewart points out that this was in fact the ninth congressional hearing on the Benghazi attacks, in which Ambassador Chris Stevens and three American security personnel were killed. He shows how Fox News has eagerly covered each hearing with over-the-top anticipation — and like the previous eight, Wednesday's testimony provided no smoking gun suggesting an Obama administration conspiracy. (Watch Part 1 above, and Part 2 below.)
If the various Fox News guests and GOP lawmakers are right that the Obama administration let the four Americans die to protect his political aspirations, then the Fox News refrain of "Where's the outrage?" is fully justified, and Americans will break out the pitchforks and torches, Stewart says. But there's a really big "if" in there. "You can't understand why everyone else isn't as outraged as you, when it is because the rest of us aren't sure if what you're saying is true," he tells Fox. "And to be quite frank, you do have somewhat of a history of hysteria.... You may be right, but the denizens of Bullshit Mountain have cried wolf before, and after 18 months of intensive investigations you should be able to better state your case," Stewart adds.
As a sort of rebuttal, watch Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), one of the lawmakers Stewart excoriates, make an emotional plea for more hearings on the Benghazi debacle.
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Comedian, cum political strategist, Jon Stewart is absolutely right.
Why should anyone care that an American ambassador and 3 others were killed while this administration sat on its collective hands and then lied about it?
Jim Carney, the White House spokesman said, "That was a long time ago."
And, as former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton asked, "What difference does it make?"
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