The president didn't know that the Inspector General was investigating his IRS for targeting political enemies. The president didn't know anything about his Justice Department's seizure of Associated Press phone records. The Attorney General didn't know anything about his department's subpoena of AP records. But then again, Holder's the one who didn't know anything about Fast & Furious either.
And of course Hillary didn't know anything about the requests for help in Benghazi. And Joe Biden, well he just doesn't know anything about anything. So who's running the joint? I'm convinced my mom could do a better job.
Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog Lady Macbeth may have been one of literature's most famous villains, but at least she had the guilty conscience to eventually try and wash the blood off her hands. Even if by then it was much too late.
It is doubtful that Hillary Rodham Clinton will start hallucinating bloody spots on her palms during the book tour for her upcoming 14-million-dollar book or compulsively washing her hands during the 2016 campaign.
If she does make it into the White House, it is even more doubtful that she will wander it at night in a nightgown crying out for the blood that can never be washed away.
Lady Macbeth may have cried out, "Here's the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Araby will not sweeten this little hand." But the black perfumes of today's Araby are more than enough to sweeten a multitude of appeasements and cover the blood that flows out from them.
Real life villains are closer to Richard III than Lady Macbeth, offering to trade their stolen kingdom for a horse to the very end, rather than seeking some intangible repentance in a fit of remorse. They are more likely to ask what difference it makes; the solipsistic query of the sociopath to whom the feelings of others are abstract things.
The Benghazi hearings featured more hypocritical and trite eulogies than anything Richard III could have imagined. Congressman Elijah Cummings told witnesses that "death is a part of a life." A fact that they were surely unaware of. His colleague, Eleanor Holmes Norton asked, "What's the big deal here?"
"We had Benghazi I with Susan Rice, now we’re having Benghazi II with Hillary Clinton. Enough Benghazi,” Norton declared. It's not quite "Out, damned spot!" or "What, will these hands ne'er be clean?" and more "What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?"
The latter is a timeless villain's truth, whether in a fictional 11th century Scottish castle or in the all too real 21st century Capitol Hill.
For Lady Macbeth, power was not a sufficient defense against conscience. A thousand years later, in Foggy Bottom, Capitol Hill and at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; there is no conscience, only power. The arrogance of an Obama, a Clinton or a Norton comes from their confidence that none can call their power to account.
Norton and Clinton have more of a point than critics give them credit for. Benghazi isn't a big deal. Not compared to the rivers of blood they shed in Afghanistan. In Benghazi, four Americans were abandoned. In Afghanistan, it was over 1500 soldiers killed and nearly 15,000 wounded many of them denied air support and the ability to fight back under rules of engagement that likely also played a part in the betrayal at Benghazi.
Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, a Shakespearean villain, if there ever was one, who helpfully wrote his own soliloquies, once said that while a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. The four deaths in Benghazi are also a tragedy. Though we must of course, as Congressman Cummings told us, put them into the context of death being a part of life. Afghanistan however is just a statistic.
The day after Benghazi, the parents of Navy SEALS from Seal Team Six, along with military experts and former military officials, appeared at the National Press Club to demand a congressional investigation. The media responded with a collective shrugs and resumed providing non-stop coverage of the Jodi Arias case. Some Lady Macbeths go to prison. Others are meant to go to the White House.
"Why was there no pre-assault fire?" Karen Vaughn, the mother of Navy SEAL Aaron Vaughn, asked. "We were told as families that pre-assault fire damages our efforts to win the hearts and minds of our enemy. So in other words, the hearts and minds of our enemy are more valuable to this government than my son's blood."
"Why didn't they take them out with a drone," Charles Strange, the father of Michael Strange asked. "The Admiral told me, to win the hearts and minds. I says, to win the hearts and minds? How about my heart? How about my mind?" But not all hearts and minds are created equal. And not all blood is valued the same.
If Lady Macbeth had wandered through her Foggy Bottom castle or the Westchester mansion, complete with wine cellar, artist's studio and outdoor fireplace, mourning for a Muslim terrorist killed in a drone strike or a Muslim protester during the September 11 embassy attacks, that would have been a socially acceptable act of regret for a lost mind and heart that could have yet been turned to a moderate appreciation of a country where you can hate it, bomb it and still get an academic posting at Columbia University.
But why bother mourning for one of the expendable human drones who are expected to give their lives to remind Muslims of our respect for their culture and religion?
When a Muslim is killed by a drone, the media gathers its outrage, but when one of our soldiers or diplomats dies in the hopes of softening a Muslim's heart, then the men and women who sent him to die with his hands tied and a target painted on his back cannot see the red spots on their soft palms.
Muslim hearts and minds are the obsession of the policymakers of the dying West, but who cares about the hearts and minds of the men and women who ride Chinooks into danger zones, run marathons in cities where aspiring Chechen boxers feel marginalized and work in skyscrapers that Muslim students fly past on the way from Boston, except on Election Day?
"Under the current Rules of Engagement, if the enemy fires on you then runs behind a rock," Karen Vaughn told a press that was busy pressing its fingers into its ears as deep as they could go, "when he pops his head out from behind the rock, you're not allowed to engage him unless you can verify that he has not laid his gun down... in other words you must be fired on twice."
Today it's twice. Tomorrow it may be three times. And then four. The angrier they get, the more free shots we have to give them to improve their self-esteem and soothe the throbbing emotions in their hearts and minds.
The press release for Hillary Clinton's 14-million-dollar book declares that she "has redefined the meaning of 'trailblazer' in every phase of her career on the world stage." Considering the ambassador she left choking to death on the smoke from a fire set by the militias she helped empower, that might not be the best choice of words. The unnamed book will offer "dramatic moments", "vivid personal anecdotes" and "memories of her collaboration with President Obama and his National Security team."
Again, not the best choice of words. But all too apt.
"Your face, my thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters," Lady Macbeth advised her lord. But it isn't likely that readers who plonk down their thirty bucks will read any strange matters in this sixth or seventh Clinton book. Those who have already endured "Living History" with her and "It Takes a Village", not to mention "Dear Socks: Kids' Letters to the First Pets" are unlikely to learn anything new from Hillary Clinton's version of Decision Points.
The books after all take the next part of Lady Macbeth's murderous advice. "To beguile the time, Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye... But be the serpent under't." The time now is that of the successful career woman whose marriage may be a sham and whose career is littered with more bodies than Lady Macbeth could have aspired to in her most deranged fantasies, but who never lets that get her down or stop her from leaning in to offer some empowering advice for that big meeting.
The serpent is still underneath. And sometimes it comes to the surface, asking what difference it makes it four people died here or fifteen hundred people died there. It's been Benghazi I and Benghazi II and eventually Benghazi III and it's time to MoveOn.org to discussing some offensive thing about the reproductive process that a Republican in Iowa or Idaho said.
There will be no book titled, "Dear Hillary, I'm In a Burning Diplomatic Mission with no Security and Can't Breathe: Dying Ambassador's Letters to Former First Ladies" and no, "It Takes a State Department to Spend Money on Art in Embassies Instead of on Embassy Security" book either. Those books wouldn't look like the time, they actually would be the time. They would be the bloody handprints on the wall and that would distract us from the Jodi Arias 2016 campaign.
The families of Navy SEALS demanding answers will not receive a fraction of the coverage that Cindy Sheehan did for burping in Bush's direction. American hearts and minds only matter when they are being influenced to stop fighting back against all the hate in Muslim hearts and minds. Soldiers will go on fighting and dying with their hands tied behind their backs. Embassies will go on being attacked. And nothing will be done about it because fighting back is insensitive and hurts our chances of winning Muslim hearts and minds.
Lady Macbeth only wanted power, but she lacked an ideology that would allow her to believe that she was doing the right thing. There was no Wellesley College senior thesis about Saul Alinsky on her shelf and she was left unequipped to believe that the ends justified the means and that rivers of blood could be spilled in a good cause.
"If the ideals Alinsky espouses were actualized, the result would be social revolution," Hillary Clinton wrote in her conclusion.
The social revolution of her 1969 thesis is once again here, and like most revolutions, it's a bloody mess. Once again social values are under attack by radicals while soldiers die overseas without being allowed to fight back. And the radicals care for nothing for the blood that they spill for their radical revolution. Not the blood of a single man or of a thousand men.
"What is a traitor?" Lady Macduff's son asks his mother, before being murdered by Macbeth's assassins. "Why, one that swears and lies," his mother replies. "Who must hang them?" her son asks. "Why, the honest men," she answers. "Then the liars and swearers are fools," he says, "for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men and hang up them."
The liars and swearers have hung up the honest men from Benghazi to Kabul to Capitol Hill. And the traitors walk through the night with blood on their hands and do not even see.
Hillary better thank her god, The Father of Lies, that she’s not a conservative like Sarah Palin, because if she were a conservative, after last week’s blistering testimony against her by the Benghazi whistle blowers, all news outlets, far and wide, would be yelling “off with conservative Hillary’s head”.
But not The Original, Leftist, Hillary.
Original Hillary gets a pass.
Yep, the numb-nuts that make up the ubiquitous fake news organizations gave scant to zero coverage of the testimonies that completely contradicted Mrs. Clinton’s account of the Benghazi Massacre. For instance, MSNBC gave no live coverage for the Benghazi hearings last week but gave Hillary a stonking five hours-plus for her scat-laden report back in January. How sweet.
By the way, didn’t a 1974 Hillary Clinton demand to know what Nixon knew and when he knew it regarding the Watergate break in? Yes, I believe she did. Google it for me, will you?
Oddly enough, Hillary has moved from that inquisitive footing to the 2013 posture of a “what difference does it make?” maiden when it comes to the compost in which her tall-tale is ensconced.
Madame Secretary, the difference that it makes is great, primarily to grieving friends and relatives of the abandoned American ambassador, Chris Stevens, the information officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. It also makes a difference to America, especially if you lied your backside off to us in a sick and twisted cover up. That’s what difference it makes, you calloused woman. Vive la difference.
So, what did the rest of the world learn that the likes of MSNBC and CNN see as a non-story? PJMedia’s Bryan Preston summed it up succinctly with these seven salient points. Please forward this to the dill weeds working the lame stream media’s important stuff section.
There were multiple stand-down orders, not just one. Oh, do tell these daft propagandists that military personnel were furious when they were given the orders to “stand down” and not protect our consulate. Thank you.
Ambassador Stevens’ reason for going to Benghazi has been cleared up.
Clinton was briefed at 2 am on the night of the attack, was never told that a movie had anything to do with the attack by those on the ground in Libya, yet she blamed the movie anyway.
Whistle-blowers were intimidated into silence.
“The YouTube movie was a non-event in Libya.”
Democrats were uninterested in getting at most of the facts, but were very interested in destroying Mark Thompson.
House hearings are a poor way to determine who did what and why during and after the attack.
Also, please let them know that the White House’s Benghazi talking points underwent twelve revisions and were scrubbed of any terror references. They might wanna note that.
Even with all the above, I still fear that Miss Hillary will skate away unscathed. However, there is a vestige of hope, albeit it is a small one, that people on both sides of the political aisle are finally getting pig sick of any and all prostitutes, I mean politicians, who will lie to our face.
Just days after the attacks, United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice appeared on five Sunday news shows with the now discredited tale of demonstrations prompted by a YouTube video. Yet Greg Hicks, who stepped in when Ambassador Chris Stevens was murdered in Benghazi, now claims that "from the get-go," he, along with the rest of the Obama administration, knew immediately that this was an act of terror. So when Ambassador Rice was peddling a story at odds with the truth, even contradicting the new president of Libya sitting next to her making the claim that what happened at Benghazi was "preplanned, predetermined," Hicks was beside himself.
"I've never been as embarrassed in my life, in my career, as on that day," Hicks said. "My jaw hit the floor as I watched this."
In the aftermath of the Benghazi Embassy attack, investigators identified more than a dozen violent events in Benghazi during the previous six months. On October 2, 2012, three weeks after the attacks, Darrell Issa (R-CA, chairman of the Committee) and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT, chairman of the subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense, and Foreign Operations) sent a letter to Secretary of State Clinton which listed a number of these events—including car jackings, kidnappings, assassination attempts, and gun battles.
The letter stated, "Put together, these events indicated a clear pattern of security threats that could only be reasonably interpreted to justify increased security for U.S. personnel and facilities in Benghazi."
In April 2012, two former security guards for the consulate threw a homemade "fish bomb" IED over the consulate fence; the incident did not cause any casualties.
Just 4 days later, a similar bomb was thrown at a four vehicle convoy carrying the United Nations Special Envoy to Libya, exploding just 12 feet from the UN envoy’s vehicle without injuring anyone.
In May 2012 an Al-Qaida affiliate calling itself the Imprisoned Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades claimed responsibility for an attack on the International Red Cross (ICRC) office in Benghazi.
On August 6 the ICRC suspended operations in Benghazi. The head of the ICRC's delegation in Libya said the aid group was "appalled" by the attack and "extremely concerned" about escalating violence in Libya.
The Imprisoned Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades released a video of what it said was its detonation of an explosive device outside the gates of the U.S. consulate on June 5, which caused no casualties but damaged the consulate's perimeter wall, described by one individual as "big enough for forty men to go through." The Brigades claimed that the attack was in response to the killing of Abu Yahya al Libi, a Libyan al-Qaeda leader who had just died in an American drone attack, and was also timed to coincide with the imminent arrival of a U.S. diplomat. There were no injuries, but the group left behind leaflets promising more attacks against the U.S.
British ambassador to Libya Dominic Asquith survived an assassination attempt in Benghazi on June 10. Two British protection officers were injured in the attack when their convoy was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade 300 yards from their consulate office. The British Foreign Office withdrew all consular staff from Benghazi in late June.
On June 18, 2012, the Tunisian consulate in Benghazi was stormed by individuals affiliated with Ansar Al-Sharia Libya, allegedly because of "attacks by Tunisian artists against Islam."
On the day of the attack:
Al Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri declared that al Libi's death still needed to be avenged.
In Egypt, 2000 Salafist activists protested against the film "Innocence of Muslims" at 5pm EET (11am EDT) at the US embassy in Cairo.
President Obama was attending a 9/11 ceremony in the morning, and in the afternoon he visited with wounded veterans at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for two-and-a-half hours about the time the Benghazi attack began.
Two consulate security guards spotted a man in a Libyan police uniform taking pictures of the consulate with his cell phone from a nearby building that was under construction. The security guards briefly detained the man before releasing him. He drove away in a police car and a complaint was made to the Libyan police station. Sean Smith noticed this surveillance, posting on the internet "assuming we don't die tonight. We saw one of our 'police' that guard the compound taking pictures.
Published on Apr 10, 2013 - Nearly seven months after the Benghazi attacks there are still more questions than answers about the Obama Administration's response. Time is running out to find the truth. Absent a special investigation, the American people will never discover the truth about why Americans were simply left to die in Benghazi.
More than 70 House Republicans have cosponsored H. Res. 36 to create a Select Committee on the Terrorist Attack in Benghazi - but more than 160 still haven't signed on.
We need your immediate help to contact Members of Congress
and urge them to join OPSEC's effort today at www.opsecteam.org.
During the Benghazi trials, instead of praising Hillary Clinton Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson caused her to say the infamous words, "What difference does it make?" PolitiChick Ann-Marie Murrell talks to Sen. Johnson from the West Coast David Horowitz Freedom Center event.
A mysterious Libyan ship -- reportedly carrying weapons and bound for Syrian rebels -- may have some link to the Sept. 11 terror attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Fox News has learned.
Through shipping records, Fox News has confirmed that the Libyan-flagged vessel Al Entisar, which means "The Victory," was received in the Turkish port of Iskenderun -- 35 miles from the Syrian border -- on Sept. 6, just five days before Ambassador Chris Stevens, information management officer Sean Smith and former Navy Seals Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed during an extended assault by more than 100 Islamist militants.
On the night of Sept. 11, in what would become his last known public meeting, Stevens met with the Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin, and escorted him out of the consulate front gate one hour before the assault began at approximately 9:35 p.m. local time.
Although what was discussed at the meeting is not public, a source told Fox News that Stevens was in Benghazi to negotiate a weapons transfer, an effort to get SA-7 missiles out of the hands of Libya-based extremists. And although the negotiation said to have taken place may have had nothing to do with the attack on the consulate later that night or the Libyan mystery ship, it could explain why Stevens was travelling in such a volatile region on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
When asked to comment, a State Department spokeswoman dismissed the idea, saying Stevens was there for diplomatic meetings, and to attend the opening of a cultural center.
The president didn't know that the Inspector General was investigating his IRS for targeting political enemies. The president didn't know anything about his Justice Department's seizure of Associated Press phone records. The Attorney General didn't know anything about his department's subpoena of AP records. But then again, Holder's the one who didn't know anything about Fast & Furious either.
