Category: Hillary Clinton

TINFOIL HAT: Sec State Injured, SEAL Killed During Iran Incident?

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by Smitty

Supposedly the Russian GRU is circulating a report that the recently Navy SEAL Commander demise and non-availability of the Secretary of State are related:

This GRU report, however, states that US military flight logs recorded by Russian air and space forces confirm that Commander Price, and other members of US Navy Seal Team 4, left their base in Urozgan Province, Afghanistan on a flight to US Naval Support Activity Bahrain where they met up with Secretary Clinton and all of them transferred to the C-12 Huron that began a flight path to Baghdad, Iraq.

The whole thing reads like a drunken encounter between John Le Carre and The Onion. I can picture a roomful of GRU guys and some Stoli having a right jolly time putting this one together.

Lord, rest Commander Job Price (whatever the details of his unexpected departure), and

via Joan of Argghh

Hillary Dives On Benghazi Grenade? HillBuzz Hardest Hit

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by Smitty

CNN, via Drudge:

“I take responsibility” for what happened on September 11, Clinton said in an interview with CNN’s Elise Labott soon after arriving in Lima, Peru, for a visit. The interview, one of a series given to U.S. television networks Monday night, was the first she has given about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
Clinton insisted President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are not involved in security decisions.
“I want to avoid some kind of political gotcha,” she added, noting that it is close to the election.

Stunned. Still nothing at HillBuzz. Wow. I mean, Hillary permitted herself to be set on a shelf in 2008, and now this? One can only speculate on the nature of the dirt #OccupyResoluteDesk has on her, to twist out that kind of mea culpa from Hillary.

Why am I not a Presidential candidate? Because if I was Mitt, I’d be all: “I’d like to congratulate the President on his choice of Secretary of State. After the better part of four years, somebody in the Administration finally took responsibility the way leaders do, on one of those hopefully rare occasions when it involves confessing a shortcoming. In this case, one that involved the butchery of four Americans. Hopefully this President isn’t too old to learn something from all this. Better leaders plan so as to minimize these sorts of tragedies. Lesser men play the Casablanca card and locate a usual suspects for a round-up. How is Nakoula doing these days, Mr. President?”

The bad news here is that a post I had in mind “Workin’ Hard, Tryin’ To Help The Administration Come Up With New Benghazi Lies” is going to have to become a footnote. I had in mind:

  1. High-Order SWATting: Blame Karl Rove for spoofing the White House and having Nakoula arrested.
  2. Tehran Redux: Unnamed Administration officials imply the Romney campaign somehow paid for a smaller strike in Benghazi, to embarrass the President in time for the election.

That was all I had. You need some more material, but this is kind of a hard topic to be light and silly about, in the face of four corpses. Sail a vee.

Update: via Melody:

“[Clinton] seemed to push back against claims of a cover-up, blaming the “fog of war” for the Obama administration’s shifting explanations for the attack.”

When they say there is no cover-up, that, too, is part of the cover-up. They are akin to a scorpion getting a lift on a frog, cover-ups.
More at The Pirate’s Cove

Libya Cover-Up: Hillary Clinton Throws Obama Under His Own Benghazi Bus

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The Benghazi blame game has been going on for more than a month since the Sept. 11 attack in Libya that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Last week there were signals that Team Obama was trying to make Hillary Clinton’s State Department the scapegoat, but anybody who knows the Clintons could have predicted she wasn’t going to take the fall. Today, Hillary struck back:

A confusing array of contradictions concerning the murders of four Americans, one of which was a U.S. ambassador, was made worse by Vice President Joe Biden’s remarks during the debate with Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan Thursday evening.
Today the confusion only worsened yet again when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters that her agency was not the source of misinformation concerning the attacks, charging instead that the White House was the source of the false mantra that the murders were spurred by an anti-Muslim film made in the  United States.
Clinton told reporters that when Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, made her rounds on every Sunday morning news show to claim the film motivated the attacks, the information had been fed to her by the White House and not the intelligence community in the State Department or the CIA.
Not only does Clinton’s statement contradict early White House accounts but directly contradicts statements made by Vice President Biden during the debate.

If Obama thinks he’s gonna throw Hillary Clinton under his bus, he’s going to find out the hard way his bus ain’t big enough. He’s not looking too good in the polls lately — even PPP has him trailing Romney in Florida now — and rather than playing the Good Soldier in his doomed re-election campaign, why shouldn’t Hillary kick off her 2016 campaign by helping expose Obama’s bungling? And here’s a good laugh for you:

Axelrod defends White House on Libya,
says Romney seeking to ‘exploit’ issue

Oh, sure, like David Axelrod never exploited an issue . . .

 

 

The Obama-Clinton “Prisoner’s Dilemma”

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by Smitty

While they have a senior-subordinate relationship, at that altitude, Obama and Clinton are more like peers, especially in the broader scope of the Democrat Party, where Barack is hoping Bill will loan enough luster to Obama to somehow win re-election. Thus, Benghazi-quiddick (we should limit the -gate suffix on scandals lacking a death toll) resembles the classic game theory example The Prisoner’s Dilemma:

Two men are arrested, but the police do not have enough information for a conviction. The police separate the two men, and offer both the same deal: if one testifies against his partner (defects/betrays), and the other remains silent (cooperates with/assists his partner), the betrayer goes free and the one that remains silent gets a one-year sentence. If both remain silent, both are sentenced to only one month in jail on a minor charge. If each ‘rats out’ the other, each receives a three-month sentence. Each prisoner must choose either to betray or remain silent; the decision of each is kept secret from his partner. What should they do? If it is assumed that each player is only concerned with lessening his own time in jail, the game becomes a non-zero sum game where the two players may either assist or betray the other. The sole concern of the prisoners seems to be increasing his own reward. The interesting symmetry of this problem is that the optimal decision for each is to betray the other, even though they would be better off if they both cooperated.

Here, we have two public figures who both look negligent over a tragedy. And they hold grudges against each other going back. They can both get hammered together, or can try to minimize their damage by pinning blame on the other.

Clinton absorbs Obama accuses
Clinton accuses In this variant, Clinton steps up and takes responsibility for failures as Secretary of State, scuttling her 2016 hopes, with the idea of saving Obama’s re-election.
I’ll point you to Kevin DuJan at HillBuzz for that analysis.		 If they both escalates the accusatory posturing, then the bleeding may not stop until both are completely ruined.
Yet, accusations are their stock in trade. They just have to do it subtly.
Obama absorbs They both stand there and take the hit. Re-election now, and possible election in 2016 for Hillary only happens if the electorate enjoys some truly raging outburst of amnesia.
Unlikely in Internet Age, thank you, Al Gore.
Taking responsibility is something you make your opposition do. Never apologize, never explain. Which outs both of them as lousy leaders.		 Obama steps up and admits how badly he tubed Benghazi-quiddick, in order to save Hillary’s 2016 presidential hopes.

The bad news about this ‘game’ is that the price of admission is four human sacrifices. Those deaths were tragic for the four, and their families. The shame for the United States, and the increased boldness of our enemies, is far worse. Then there is the damage done to the validity, the basic confidence the people have in our government, brought on by the shameless deceits of the Obama Administration.

No good can come of the Obama-Clinton game. Beyond the entertainment value, the best we can hope for is minimal collateral damage.

More at Granite Grok, and Roger Simon analyzes the electoral impact and the general pulse of the Left.

via Breitbart

Update: thank you for linking, Instapundit, Hogewash, Victory Girls, and Dinocrat.

Update II: linked at God’s Own Crunk. Also, for those who dislike the labeling in the table, please feel free to offer an improved version somewhere on this vast internet. Otherwise, my guess is you’re firing for effect. In the wrong direction.

Update III: more at Daily Pundit:

Some people think Barack Obama is cold and calculating. I don’t. I think he’s a tangled ball of twisted emotions, primary among which are fear and hatred. Some part of him might understand that he’ll damage himself by trying to damage the Clintons, but I just don’t think he’ll be able to help himself.

Getting inside that noggin isn’t the least bit interesting to me. I just want to see BHO distanced from levers of power.

The Libya Question: What Did Obama Know and When Did He Know It?

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We seem to be looking at a classic Washington cover-up scandal:

The State Department is now telling a new story about the attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya on September 11. It’s completely different than what we heard from President Obama and other officials in the days after the terrorist attack.

It’s amazing the things you can learn when you start issuing subpoenas and requiring people to testify under oath under penalty of perjury.

UPDATE: Hard-hitting new ad on the Libyan scandal:

UPDATE II: If you’ve seen a few cover-up scandals like this over the years, you know that the next thing that happens — once it becomes obvious that the liars won’t get away with it — is that the administration finds a Designated Scapegoat to take the fall.

Whose résumé will get updated with the unfortunate “resigned in disgrace” entry? I nominate the odious disgrace that is Susan Rice.

Trust me: Hillary is waaayy too powerful to take the fall for this.

UPDATE III: The pattern of such scandals makes the course of events fairly predictable. First of all, the people who did the right thing — the honest, competent professionals — have an inherent interest in establishing the fact that they weren’t the ones who screwed up. Take, for example, former State Department security officer Eric Nordstrom:

[N]ot only did Nordstrom repeatedly request more security for the diplomatic mission, the State Department didn’t even bother to respond to his last two requests

UPDATE IV: Joel Engel at Legal Insurrection:

In yet another story that you won’t find in the New York Times, Charlie Spiering in the Washington Examiner reported that Hillary Clinton was scheduled to meet President Obama at the White House today “as more damaging details about the terrorist attack against a United States consulate in Libya emerge.” . . .
Their story is unraveling, and only the acquiescence of the mainstream press has kept it from becoming a full-blown scandal.  So what did the president and his secretary of state discuss today?  Foreign affairs?  Or better lies?  My guess is better lies.
Clinton’s State Department, and therefore in all probability the White House, had forewarning of at least a growing danger when“foreign fighters” began flooding over the Egyptian border prior to the attacks.  And, worse than doing nothing, they actually prevented security from being beefed up, though they had been warned that the level was “inappropriately low.”

Don’t expect this story to go away. There is a limit to the media’s ability to ignore such a scandal, when people like CNN’s Anderson Cooper and ABC’s Jake Tapper are so clearly fed-up with the administration’s routine incompetence and brazen dishonesty.

UPDATE V: Despite months of constant practice, Jay Carney still isn’t very effective in his capacity as Official White House Liar:

 

PREVIOUSLY:

 


The Corpse Of Trayvon Martin Has Lost Propaganda Value; Fortunately, Sandra Fluke Still Has A Pulse

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by Smitty

One nearly can empathize with the poor Lefties, seeing that the Trayvon Martin tragedy is moving from simple tragedy to propaganda farce. In the (gang)green spirit of recycling, then, we have Hillary telling Andrea Mitchell;

Today, Hillary Clinton told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell in a pre-taped interview that Rush Limbaugh’s comments about Sandra Fluke constituted a “verbal assault.” She continued:

We, as a nation, have every right — and in fact I welcome it — to engage in the kind of debate and dialogue that is at the root of who we are as Americans. But lets not turn it into personal attacks and insults. We’re beyond that. We’re better than that and people in the public eye have a particular responsibility to avoid it.

I can agree with SECSTATE’s opinion, in general. Back in 2008, I was prefixing her name with ‘Ct-‘, as a Lovecraft reference, to show my affection for the lady. It occurred to me that derogatory ‘games with names’ are childish. Repenting, I have since sought higher forms of snark.

But, really, Hillary? Has anyone on the Left, e.g. Maher, ever been taken to task for potty mouth? I guess Don Imus got a wrist slap for some hairstyle remark a couple of years back. But let’s not kid ourselves here. This is:

  • An attempt to control the media cycle in general, deflect attention from the ObamaCare disaster.
  • A retreat from the disaster the Trayvon Martin tragedy is becoming.

One is nearly, but not quite, tempted to record the actual interview and see if the good SECSTATE actually mentions anything work-related. I Reckon Anything National is more fun to discuss than that one important thing over there on the right side of the map thing on the office wall.

November cannot arrive quickly enough, so we can usher these jokers out of power. OK, for the Brietbart trifecta, Hillary is aware of Iran. Reset button.

Hillary Offers TMI On Internals

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by Smitty

Paraphrasing, Hillary was on record the other day saying to a Tunisian audience: “Pay the GOP no mind, they’re off their meds.”

Today, via The Blaze, she doubled down:

“Probably my enthusiasm for the president got a little out of hand,” Clinton said, adding that she only wants what’s best for the country.
Despite her post, Clinton said it’s sometimes hard to stop her political juices from flowing.
“I tried to dampen them down, get them taken out in a blood transfusion, but they occasionally rear their ugly heads,” she said.

We presume in a scene not unlike this one from back in her Oxford days with Billy Jeff: