A Teahadist’s Wet Dream

Since the latest Republican lies about Obamacare have blown up in their faces in the last couple of weeks, the Republicans are scrambling to find something to run on for the November elections. They could have gone with a positive message about what the e Republicans will do for the American people, but in order to do you that you need to have a positive message. Telling prospective voters the truth about how you are going to restrict their freedoms and make sure poor people receive less pay and less health care doesn’t win elections. So what’s a Republican going to do? I know…BENGHAZI!

In a last ditch effort to save his Speaker job, John Boehner has caved to the Teahadist wing of his party and will create a select committee to investigate BENGHAZI! This announcement comes on the heels of a “smoking gun” email that was released and testimony from a retired Brigadier General before Darrel Issa’s witchunt committee. Boehner is seeing an assault coming from his right flank, led by Eric Cantor, and he is doing what he can to strengthen his defenses. This special committee is pointless and will go absolutely nowhere, but the truth isn’t Boehner’s concern. This will allow him to say he gave the Teahadists what they demanded and allow the grandstanders to be named to the committee so they have a platform to continue spreading lies and disinformation. Go below the fold for the rest of the story.

The path toward the next Republican failure began this week when Judicial Watch released an email it received through a FOIA request. In the email, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes provided a list of goals for Susan Rice two days before she was to appear on multiple Sunday news shows. These goals are:

• To convey that the United States is doing everything that we can to protect our people and facilities abroad;
• To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy;
• To show that we will be resolute in bringing people who harm Americans to justice, and standing steadfast through these protests;
• To reinforce the President and Administration’s strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges.

It was the second bullet that threw the right wing into a frenzy this past week. The conservative pundits and websites read this as “smoking gun” proof that the White House had concocted the story that the video caused a protest in BENGHAZI! that got out of hand. They wrote their stories about how this was the proof they had been looking for and their readers lapped it up like the lazy lemmings they are. The right wing noise machine relies on the fact that most of their customers will take what they’ve said or written as the gospel without looking any deeper at the actual facts. Here are the facts behind the memo that prove it is no “smoking gun.”

The first clue that the second bullet was not exclusively about BENGHAZI! is the word “protests.” Most Americans above the age of 3 years old know that the “s” at the end makes the word plural. For those still aren’t understanding, plural means more than one. At the time that this memo was written and Rice was preparing for the Sunday shows, there were multiple protests taking place in more than a half dozen countries. In Egypt on the same day as the BENGHAZI incident, thousands of demonstrators breached the US Embassy and tore down the US flag. In Sudan, the German mission was torched and the UK Embassy was also attacked. Demonstrations were also taking place in Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and Tunisia. The demonstrations in these other countries were absolutely about the video.

BENGHAZI! was not the only thing happening, as evidenced by the promos for the Sunday shows Rice was to appear on. Rhodes email was written in response to an email that provided a time to prepare Rice for the shows and provided the promotional blurbs each show was using for their upcoming broadcast:

Even the Holy Grail of wingnut punditry, Fox News, planned to talk about multiple protests, not just BENGHAZI!, so it only makes sense that Rhodes’ talking points address all of the protests. Jay Carney made that point when he was being grilled by Jonathan Karl of ABC News, but was widely derided by the right wing as bald-faced liar. National Journal‘s Ron Fourier went so far as to call Carney “Baghdad Bob.” This is a typical response for the Teahadists. When someone points out that the facts show they are wrong, they will just mock you and deride you as a bootlicker for Obama and the administration. The will not argue the facts because they have non besides what their handlers feed them. They are either too lazy to read the source material and form their own opinions, too ignorant to understand it unless it is explained to them, or so blinded by their hatred for Obama that they will believe anything but the worst, no matter how outlandish and implausible it is.

The next incident that gave Boehner the cover he needed to create the select committee was the testimony of Retired Brigadier General Robert Lovell before Issa’s committee. Lovell, who was the USAFRICOM Deputy Intelligence Director at the time of the BENGHAZI! attack, said that the military “should have at least tried” to respond to the attack. The right wing noise machine jumped all over that statement, along with Lovell’s opinion that the military never believed a video had anything to do with BENGHAZI! The Teahadists have used Lovell’s testimony as proof for their conspiracy theory that the military could have responded, but intentionally left people to die on orders from Washington. Again, the Teahadist true believers will soak this up without looking at the rest of Lovell’s testimony:

CONNOLLY: I want to read to you the conclusion of the chairman of the [Armed Services] Committee, the Republican chairman Buck McKeon, who conducted formal briefings and oversaw that report. He said, quote, “I’m pretty well satisfied that given where the troops were, how quickly the thing all happened, and how quickly it dissipated we probably couldn’t have done much more than we did.” Do you take issue with the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee? In that conclusion?

LOVELL: His conclusion that he couldn’t have done much more than they did with the capability and the way they executed it?

CONNOLLY: Given the timeframe.

LOVELL: That’s a fact.

CONNOLLY: OK.

LOVELL: The way it is right now. The way he stated it.

CONNOLLY: All right, because I’m sure you can appreciate, general, there might be some who, for various and sundry reasons would like to distort your testimony and suggest that you’re testifying that we could have, should have done a lot more than we did because we had capabilities we simply didn’t utilize. That is not your testimony?

LOVELL: That is not my testimony.

CONNOLLY: I thank you very much.

Lovell’s opinions provide nothing new in the way of facts. Even Rep. Buck McKeon, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee recognized this, but he made the mistake of actually saying it:

“BG Lovell did not serve in a capacity that gave him reliable insight into operational options available to commanders during the attack, nor did he offer specific courses of action not taken,” McKeon said in a statement. “The Armed Services Committee has interviewed more than a dozen witnesses in the operational chain of command that night, yielding thousands of pages of transcripts, emails and other documents. We have no evidence that Department of State officials delayed the decision to deploy what few resources (Department of Defense) had available to respond.”

This was the last straw for the Teahadists in the House. They were incensed that a fellow Republican would shoot down their latest talking point, so they went to Boehner and demanded the select committee be formed. The rumor is that Rep. Trey Gowdy will be chosen as the Chairman. Gowdy, rather than being an impartial investigator trying to find the truth, is a true believer. He claims the Administration has been relocating witnesses and changing their names to keep them from Congress, even though they have already testified before Congressional committees. He also claims to have “proof” that the Administration has intentionally hid evidence from Congress and the American people. Gowdy provides no evidence to support either of these claims.

So now the Teahadists’ wet dream has come true, but it is going to turn into a nightmare. They will get their select committee geared up to begin hearings a couple of months before the mid-term elections. They will call witnesses and ask questions that have already been asked by four separate Congressional committees, but they will spin the answers into sound bites that can be used in campaign commercials. In the short term, they may be successful in getting their false message across, but those messages will be debunked as every other BENGHAZI! lie has been. Ultimately, people will see this committee for what it is and tune it out. They will begin to question why we are spending even more millions of dollars to run a Republican campaign operation out Congress. Ultimately, when the committee comes up with nothing new and nothing they can prove, the Teahadists will have nothing left to support their conspiracy theories. This could be the last nail in the Teahadists’ coffin.

There will be those Teahadists that read this and dismiss it as just being an Obama sycophant refusing to see the truth. My response is, “Show me.” Refute the evidence. Explain how the Rhodes email wasn’t in response to multiple protests throughout the Middle East. Show me the proof that the military was given “stand down” orders when everyone has testified to the exact opposite. Make sure you use the source documents rather than just someone else’s opinion. Do some original thinking for once and get past your irrational hatred of the Muslim, Marxist Usurper. I won’t hold my breath on that.

UPDATE: Balloon Juice and Stonekettle Station are thinking along the same lines today.