Category: Hillary Clinton

‘It’s for the Children!’

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Next time you hear a Democrat make that kind of argument, please keep in mind this headline from Ace of Spades HQ:

Ambassador Who Ran off to Have Sex
With Minor Children ID’d as Major Obama Bundler
& Political Appointee; Hillary’s Lawyer Cheryl Mills
Once Again Stepped In to “Fix” Matters

Or how about this for a book title?

“It Takes a Village to Rape a Child.”

Because, after all, it was Hillary Clinton’s State Department — indeed, her personal fixer — that tried to cover this up:

A [diplomatic security] agent was called off a case against US Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman over claims that he solicited prostitutes, including minors.
“The agent began his investigation and had determined that the ambassador routinely ditched his protective security detail in order to solicit sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children,” says the memo.
“The ambassador’s protective detail and the embassy’s surveillance detection team . . . were well aware of the behavior.”

For the record, Gutman denies it:

“I am angered and saddened by the baseless allegations that have appeared in the press . . . at no point have I ever engaged in any improper activity.”

Translation: “You can’t prove it, hahaha!”

Exit Question: What Obama administration scandal is this Obama administration scandal supposed to distract our attention from?

 

Ruh-Roh: Ambassador Killed by Secret State Department Weapons Program?

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Ex-Diplomats Report New Benghazi Whistleblowers
with Info Devastating to Clinton and Obama
— Roger L. Simon, PJ Media

Benghazi witness points finger at Clinton
on lapses in consulate security
— Julian Pecquet, The Hill

New whistleblowers coming forward on Benghazi?
— Ed Morrissey, Hot Air

Lawmakers dig into life-and-death issues of Benghazi
— Byron York, Washington Examiner

Breaking: New Crop of Benghazi Whistle-Blowers
Will Testify on Obama’s Missiles to Al-Qaeda Program
— Jim Hoft, Gateway Pundit

Pretty serious stuff here, eh? If the latest reports are true, this is much more serious than who edited the talking points:

Ambassador Chris Stevens, killed along with three other Americans in the September terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, was reportedly attempting to buy back arms sold to Libyan rebels. Roger L. Simon of PJ Media reports that whistleblowers are prepared to testify that a State Department program of arming insurgents who overthrew Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi was the secret the Obama administration sought to conceal . . .
Such testimony, if verified, might help explain why Obama administration officials spent several days after the deadly Libyan attack — which occurred on the 11th anniversary of the 2001 9/11 attacks — promoting the falsehood that the four Americans killed in Benghazi died as a result of “demonstrations” inspired by a YouTube video.

You can read the rest at Viral Read and while, of course, I cannot vouch for information from Roger Simon’s sources, common sense actually argues on behalf of the story they’re telling, because this has been the Benghazi mystery all along: Why all the lies?

Was the State Department’s blame-the-video story just about protecting President Obama’s re-election chances? Maybe, but the intensity of the pushback seems a bit too much to be so easily explained by “politics as usual.” And this may be the Big Secret:

Stevens’ mission in Benghazi, [new whistleblower witnesses] will say, was to buy back Stinger missiles from al-Qaeda groups issued to them by the State Department, not by the CIA. Such a mission would usually be a CIA effort, but the intelligence agency had opposed the idea because of the high risk involved in arming “insurgents” with powerful weapons that endanger civilian aircraft.
Hillary Clinton still wanted to proceed because, in part, as one of the diplomats said, she wanted “to overthrow Gaddafi on the cheap.”
This left Stevens in the position of having to clean up the scandalous enterprise when it became clear that the “insurgents” actually were al-Qaeda – indeed, in the view of one of the diplomats, the same group that attacked the consulate and ended up killing Stevens.
The former diplomat who spoke with PJ Media regarded the whole enterprise as totally amateurish and likened it to the Mike Nichols film Charlie Wilson’s War about a clueless congressman who supplies Stingers to the Afghan guerrillas. “It’s as if Hillary and the others just watched that movie and said ‘Hey, let’s do that!’” the diplomat said.
He added that he and his colleagues think the leaking of General David Petraeus’ affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell was timed to silence the former CIA chief on these matters.

Oooh! Hillary and her staff ignored the CIA’s advice and decided — with presidential authorization, of course — to provide arms to these shadowy “insurgents” anyway? And also, maybe, the takedown on Petraeus was part of an elaborate effort to cover their tracks?

Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Nobody’s verified this stuff yet, but exactly what has Joe Curl been hinting at lately?

Care to guess where this stuff is leaking from? I could, but I won’t.

 

Enemies List: Holder’s DOJ and Hillary’s State Department Targeted Fox Reporter

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Everybody’s buzzing today about the Washington Post report that Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen was targeted in a Justice Department investigation of a leak by a State Department official — at least two years before the similar probe of Associated Press that raised cries of outrage from the D.C. media last week.

That probe began after Rosen reported in June 2009 that “that U.S. intelligence officials were warning that North Korea was likely to respond to United Nations sanctions with more nuclear tests,” according to the Post‘s Anne E. Marimow. Rosen’s article at FoxNews.com was filed the same day that a top-secret report on North Korea’s nuclear program “was made available to a small circle within the intelligence community — including Kim.” According to documents in the Kim case obtained by the Washington Post, federal agents obtained phone and e-mail records for Rosen, as well as records of the Fox reporter’s use of a State Department security-badge swipe card . . .

Let’s ask an obvious question here: Of all the leaks from this administration, how many were the subject of this kind of investigation?

Because it seems rather . . . coincidental, we might say, that this 2009 item by a Fox News reporter should have been the focus of such an elaborate inquiry. If you were of a suspicious disposition, you might wonder if the Secretary of State and the Attorney General were determined that, in particular, Fox News should have no sources inside the Obama administration.

C’mon: How many leakers has Eric Holder’s DOJ prosecuted the way they prosecuted Stephen Jin-Woo Kim? Was this intended as a message to administration officials — “Don’t talk to Fox News” — and was it also an attempt to treat Fox News as a criminal enterprise?


Benghazi and Other ‘Concocted’ Scandals

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U.S. consulate, Benghazi, Libya, Sept. 11, 2012

“Fraud flows from the top down, not the mid-level up. Mid-level officials in the White House and the State Department do not call the shots — they carry out orders.”
— Andrew McCarthy

Well, that’s just “common sense,” but what does common sense count for nowadays? In an interview with Piers Morgan on CNN Thursday, Jay Carney dismissed the Benghazi scandal as a Republican “concoction.”

Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom caught JournoLister Ezra Klein offering a similar argument that these aren’t really scandals, which sounds a bit like Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” talk:

“We lied about a terrorist attack that killed four Americans, the Justice Department secretly seized phone records for the Associated Press, and the IRS used ‘inappropriate criteria’ to punish the president’s Enemies List, but these aren’t really scandals. Besides, those bitches deserved it. Shut up, Republicans.”

Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard pointed out the pervasiveness of the media’s “Not Really Scandals” meme.

As is usual when this kind of elite “consensus” groupthink agenda gets rolling, the consensus is itself cited as tautological proof that skeptics are irrational, biased and therefore untrustworthy. You’re a Flat Earther or a Tinfoil Hatter if you think there was a deliberate effort by the White House to suppress the ugly truth, or if you believe that such a cover-up would actually amount to a scandal.

“Polls show that nobody cares! Shut up, Republicans!”

But no matter what the polls say — low-information voters care more about celebrity mastectomies than about politics — it’s obvious the administration is lying about pretty much everything. For example, IRS officials tried to blame the problems on an alleged “surge” in non-profit applications that didn’t actually happen, and this bogus rationale was offered via a dishonest ruse that they lied about.

OK, so if the first public excuse was a lie,  and we then learn that this was revealed via a phony set-up question, and if every new fact we discover — “Tell us about your prayer meetings” — tends to make the situation seem worse . . . Well, what would we know if we knew everything?

We don’t know, and thus we must be cautious in asserting that we’ve found the “smoking gun” that will result in federal indictments, the resignation of a half-dozen Cabinet secretaries, perp walks for White House staffers and the Impeachment of the President.

On the other hand, when the best excuse Obamaphiles like Ashley Banfield can come up with is that the President of the United States doesn’t know anything about anything and his administration is plagued by rampant stupidity, we should probably keep asking questions.

“In the Obama era, the question isn’t whether you’re paranoid. It’s whether you’re paranoid enough.”
— Professor Glenn Reynolds

 

 


The Fate of Basseley Nakoula

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“Hillary’s promise of vengeance to the father of a fallen SEAL wasn’t that we’d get the jihadis who killed him but that we’d punish the filmmaker. That’s perverse, but in keeping with the fact that she decided to run ads on Pakistani TV apologizing for the film while Islamist cretins menaced American diplomats across the region.”
— Allahpundit, Oct. 25, 2012

The wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time: Nakoula was out on “supervised release” for a federal bank fraud conviction. He was $700,000 behind on restitution payments and operating under an alias when he made “The Innocence of Muslims,” a crappy movie that got turned into a YouTube video clip that in turn became the pretext of riots in Egypt and then — it is now generally acknowledged — was utilized as a flimsy excuse by the State Department in an attempt to distract from its embarrassing failures in the September attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Having become unintentionally famous, the con man Nakoula was arrested and hustled into federal court amid unusually high security two weeks after the Benghazi attacks. We need not wonder why Eric Holder’s Justice Department made this a top priority:

“We will make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”
— Hillary Clinton, Sept. 14, 2012

There was a sort of argument last week between Ken White at Popehat and some conservatives who insist on calling Nakoula a “political prisoner.” Alternately, Rich Lowry calls Nakoula a “patsy,” but this really isn’t the argument we need to be having.

The Nakoula case isn’t about anyone’s free speech rights. The First Amendment doesn’t protect the right of convicted criminals to operate under aliases in potentially lucrative business while owing restitution to the victims of their earlier crimes. While I wholly endorse the right to speak truth about Islam — and to hell with any mob of violent savages who object — Ken White is correct that Nakoula is neither a “political prisoner” nor a heroic martyr for free speech.

But this isn’t really about Nakoula at all, is it?

What the case of Nakoula actually demonstrates is the strangely misplaced priorities of the Obama administration: Eight months later, they still haven’t caught any of the terrorists who killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, but they needed only two weeks to apprehend Nakoula.

Genuinely dangerous people seem to have no problem eluding federal investigators. Ariel Castro kidnapped women and kept them in his Cleveland basement for more than a decade, while the FBI never even considered the wife-beating school-bus driver a suspect. Nor was Castro the only menace to evade the FBI.

The good news? The feds are finally cracking down on those dangerous high-capacity pressure cookers. About damned time, too . . .

 

The ‘How Dare You’ Defense on Benghazi

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“This has been a difficult week for the State Department and for our country. We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing do to with. It’s hard for the American people to make sense of that, because it is senseless, and it is totally unacceptable.”
— Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sept. 14, 2012, while standing over the caskets of the four Americans killed at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya

Jeff Goldstein cites the important testimony that “a State Department official emailed the Libyan government on September 12 that the consulate attack was in fact a terrorist operation — specifically identifying Ansar al-Sharia in the email.” But why bother with facts? What difference, at this point, does it make?

Quite obviously, it makes a very important difference to Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) in their tireless efforts to convince Americans that Obama’s foreign policy is working, and especially to persuade us that the fine public servants at the top levels of the State Department did nothing wrong in the Benghazi affair.

When you point out the obvious facts — that the “Arab Spring” was a bad idea, that everybody in the administration lied through their teeth about Benghazi, and that the major media are enthusiastic volunteers in a partisan P.R. effort to assist in the cover-up — liberals go into fake indignation mode: How dare you?

If you’ve watched Democrats do this for years, you know how the tactic works: They’re trying to do the Jedi mind trick — “This is not the scandal you were looking for. Move along.” — and if you refuse to cooperate, they act as if your non-cooperation is proof of your bad motives. They have decided that none of the evidence or testimony means what you think it means, and that your interpretation of facts is therefore illegitimate, so you must be shunned as a bad person.

Our Moral Superiors™ get away with this trick often enough that they’re genuinely shocked when they don’t get away with it.

There are multiple layers to the Benghazi scandal, from the policy failures that left the consulate vulnerable to the mysterious “stand-down” order to the Special Ops rescue team — and with my son training as an 18X recruit, I can easily imagine how “furious” the troops were about that — and on to the “Internet video rage” talking points. As has been said, the administration failed before, during and after the Benghazi attack, and are now attempting to avoid accountability.

Damn, I need me some Chick-Fil-A.

 


Obama Administration’s Benghazi Lies Exposed as State Department Cover-Up

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Flaming skull alert at Ace of Spades for the release of e-mails confirming that (a) officials knew from the outset that the attack on the consulate in Libya was the work of terrorists, but (b) this information was suppressed for political purposes:

State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland, worried that members of Congress would use the talking points to criticize the State Department for “not paying attention to [CIA] warnings.”

So, it was CIA vs. C.Y.A. at the State Department which, quite frankly, has been infiltrated by Edward Said-influenced Arab specialists to such an extent that it was practically a Muslim Brotherhood outpost even before the Obama administration took over.

Seriously, you can ask Bush administration people about this: Middle Eastern scholarship within academia is so dominated by anti-Western views that, insofar as anyone has the credentials to qualify as a specialist in the field — i.e., to get hired into and promoted within the bureaucracy — they’re certain to have been saturated in ideas about “Western imperialism” and the legitimacy of Arab/Islamic grievances. And while this has also been a problem at the CIA and the Pentagon, the State Department is absolutely chock-full of such people in staff positions, so that even with hawkish neocons in the political appointee roles during the Bush years, the pro-Arab/pro-Muslim culture at Foggy Bottom never really changed.

I feel the need to point this out now because some of my well-meaning conservative friends, who (quite correctly) complain about the dubious influences within the Obama administration, often neglect to discuss the larger problem, which pre-dates Obama. However, there is good reason to think it is more of a problem now:

In 1998 Obama attended a speech by [Edward] Said, in which the scholar called for a nonviolent campaign “against settlements, against Israeli apartheid.” In a well-publicized photo, Obama and Said can be seen talking over dinner at this pro-Arab event.
According to the Los Angeles Times, in the early 1980s Obama had been one of Said’s students in an undergraduate English class at Columbia University.

None of this is necessarily related to the Benghazi cover-up — I don’t mean to feed anyone’s conspiratorial paranoia — but it does highlight the nature of the larger problem, what Jeanne Kirkpatrick rightly called the “Blame America First” mentality.

There is a sort of  perverse narcissism involved in this worldview: Encountering people who hate us, liberals think, “It’s about us.”

This error was what crippled liberalism during the Cold War. If the Soviet Union wanted to destroy America, liberals imagined, this must be because of something wrong with America, rather than something wrong with the Soviet Union. So liberals wanted to change American foreign policy — détente! — in a more pro-Soviet direction, accepting the Leninist critique of “Western imperialism” as essentially accurate, so that you had Jimmy Carter claiming (and evidently believing) that a U.S. commitment to “human rights” would somehow repair the damage to American international prestige.

Except it wasn’t about us. It was about them. Continue reading Obama Administration’s Benghazi Lies Exposed as State Department Cover-Up →