The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Ace on @Milbank: ‘Biased and Giddily Ignorant … Proud to Know Nothing’

Posted on | June 18, 2014 | 13 Comments

Last night, I hit Dana Milbank’s cheap smear of a Heritage Foundation panel about the Benghazi cover-up and thought I’d done a good job. This morning, I woke up and saw Ace’s treatment of the same story and was awed by the work of the master:

Milbank’s original deception is reporting this woman’s charge — a vague claim that the panel was Muslim-bashing — without first stating if the charge was accurate or not.
He reports her charge as if the charge is, itself, a fair one.
But is it? He doesn’t say. He implies it is, without saying so.
Note, however, what this panel was about. It was not about terrorism. It was not about Islam.
It was about the American government’s response to Benghazi, including lying to the public and retaliating against internal whistleblowers.
How would Islam have even have come up, except as a brief tangent? It seems unlikely that it did — and I imagine when the full video gets released, it will demonstrate, as one panelist told this woman, that this questioner was the only person talking about Islam, while all the panelists were focused on the Obama administration.
That is, she hijacked the panel to make her own point and toss out a vague charge of Serious You Guys Racism while doing so. . . .
Milbank’s original column shows him as biased and giddily ignorant. He’s actually proud to know nothing at all about the subject he’s allegedly covering.

Read the whole thing. In one of Milbanks’ “Look at These Crazy Wingnuts” gestures, he includes this:

The accusers’ allegations grow wilder by the day. . . .
[Brigitte] Gabriel floated the notion that Stevens had been working on a weapons-swap program between Libya and Syria just before he was killed.

Does Dana Milbank really think Brigitte Gabriel just made that up? Has he not paid attention? October 25, 2012:

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.

Stevens’ meeting with the Turkish consul in Benghazi is significant because it is believed — not confirmed, because the administration has been stonewalling congressional investigators — that what happened was this: The CIA and State Department were trying to negotiate a “buyback” of weapons they had (secretly) supplied to anti-Qaddafi forces in Libya, weapons which were then being (secretly) shipped via Turkey to anti-Assad forces in Syria. Of course, Milbank might dismiss this as a Fox News conspiracy theory, except that CNN reported the same thing in August 2013:

CNN has uncovered exclusive new information about what is allegedly happening at the CIA, in the wake of the deadly Benghazi terror attack. . . .
Sources now tell CNN dozens of people working for the CIA were on the ground that night, and that the agency is going to great lengths to make sure whatever it was doing, remains a secret.
CNN has learned the CIA is involved in what one source calls an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency’s Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out. . . .
Among the many secrets still yet to be told about the Benghazi mission, is just how many Americans were there the night of the attack.
A source now tells CNN that number was 35, with as many as seven wounded, some seriously.
While it is still not known how many of them were CIA, a source tells CNN that 21 Americans were working in the building known as the annex, believed to be run by the agency. . . .
Speculation on Capitol Hill has included the possibility the U.S. agencies operating in Benghazi were secretly helping to move surface-to-air missiles out of Libya, through Turkey, and into the hands of Syrian rebels.
It is clear that two U.S. agencies were operating in Benghazi, one was the State Department, and the other was the CIA.

The CIA was reportedly forcing employees with knowledge of the Benghazi operation to take polygraphs, asking if they had talked to journalists or congressional investigators. And this is significant . . . why? Because, if true, it shows that the administration had a covert policy which was neither authorized by Congress nor disclosed to the American people, that four Americans were killed because of this policy, and that the whole farcical charade of claiming that the Benghazi attack was a “spontaneous” protest against a YouTube video was part of a clumsy attempt to conceal the truth, a cover-up that continues to this day.

Dana Milbank is (or pretends to be) “giddily ignorant” of this. Why? Because the Washington Post is actively involved in the cover-up?

“The accusers’ allegations grow wilder by the day . . .”

 

Comments

13 Responses to “Ace on @Milbank: ‘Biased and Giddily Ignorant … Proud to Know Nothing’”

  1. smitty
    June 18th, 2014 @ 8:24 am

    It’s as though the Left operates with a “Dirac Delta Dogma*” function, the premise of which is to lie early and lie big, then ignore the blowback, figuring that the conversation can be tainted by getting the licks in quick.

    Somebody please tell Milbank about the boy who cried ‘wolf’.

    * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_delta_function

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  3. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    June 18th, 2014 @ 9:26 am

    It is not a boy who cried wolf (he exaggerated the threat until no one believed him when the threat became real), this was an out and out lie by Milbanks intended to do harm. It should be a firing and career ending offense.

  4. JeffS
    June 18th, 2014 @ 9:41 am

    With a tar and feathering party as a send off.

  5. Pinkerton
    June 18th, 2014 @ 9:53 am

    “Because, if true, it shows that the administration had a covert policy
    which was neither authorized by Congress nor disclosed to the American
    people”

    Shock! Say it isn’t so!

    The CIA routinely does nothing that congress, and the American people know nothing about, and are doing those things this very minute. Fast and Furious falls under the same umbrella. It’s tough to believe anyone could be this naive.

  6. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    June 18th, 2014 @ 10:07 am

    Dirac Delta Dogma? Derka Derka Derka Mohammed Jihad!

  7. Escher's House
    June 18th, 2014 @ 10:45 am

    Because the Washington Post is actively involved in the cover up. Period. Full Stop. FIFY

  8. Kilo6
    June 18th, 2014 @ 11:06 am

    He’s not naive he’s a moral relativist / solipsist. I doubt Milbank believes in the existence of any objective truth aside from the numbers on his paycheck and the balance of his bank account (funny how solipsism never extends to personal finance with this type of ideologue).

  9. texlovera
    June 18th, 2014 @ 1:23 pm

    Dana Milbank is a professional douche, because he does get paid to be one. Although you could argue that he would be a douche anyway, thus preserving his amateur status….

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  11. Federale
    June 18th, 2014 @ 6:08 pm

    Considering that the women in the hijab, shawl, and other Muslim garb was implying that the discussion itself was Islamophobic, I wish they would have attacked her for her stupidity. However, the responders knew she was trying to provoke them, but instead used a little verbal jui-jitsu to make it appear as if she wanted to differentiate herself and other Muslims from the jihadis. However, the truth is that she obviously is a supporter of Al Queda and Muslim terrorism. I wish they would have been more aggressive with her and exposed her for her not-so secret sympathies. She was clearly a fellow-traveller and provocateur. I would have countered that most Muslims support terrorism by either financially supporting it or refusing to condemn it and stated that the Muslims who oppose terrorism are in the minority.

  12. K-Bob
    June 19th, 2014 @ 5:13 am

    This is one reason why I still marginally support Glenn Beck’s attempts to rebuild the lost media culture from before the left decided that big, overt lies work better than a cascade of small ones (usually cast as “spin”).

    Lies, having no mass, may exceed the maximum velocity under which all real objects are governed.

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