US Ambassador to Libya and 3 others killed in Benghazi riots over video disrespecting Muhammad

Make no mistake: I agree. I just think it's a bit ironic that the people who cut the State Dept's budget for security are now bitching about lax security.

That being said, there is a related but important point to be made here: government spending by and large isn't pissed away. The government buys stuff, and that stuff is important to some people. We can talk about the merits of that stuff and whether or not its worth it, but if you pull back on government spending the upshot is the government will buy less stuff, and some people are going to get left out in the cold.

I can't agree with this. When you have an incident you'd rather not see repeated, you identify what, if anything, you could have done to prevent the incident and then determine whether changing standard procedure to encompass those preventative measures is feasible, desirable, and cost-effective.

Which is not the sort of thinking that birthed the Patriot Act, the TSA, or the invasion of Iraq.

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN

Congressional Republicans all but point out the CIA safehouse in Benghazi. For God's sake, man, do you think saying "I WAS INSTRUCTED NOT TO TALK ABOUT THE SECRET THINGS IN THIS PHOTO" is anything other than Mr. Bean-level secret-keeping?

No evidence of Al Qaeda involvement (whatever that means nowadays), and the attack was not a product of long-term planning. As always, unnamed sources in the midst of a narrative-measuring contest so

Not even the White House is pushing this theory anymore. Crazy.

Here we have Paula Broadwell telling us that "they think" the attack at Benghazi may have been to free prisoners held by the CIA. 35:50

This link from Eric suggests that the "they" is much more terrible than we could have imagined.

Worse than being a leaker of classified information for personal self-aggrandizement, she's potentially a person who repeats Fox reports uncritically.

Worse than that, this means Petraeus slept with someone who likes Fox News.

He embedded himself in the bubble!

McCain was on the CBS morning show today, pushing for a 'select Senate committee' on the Benghazi incident and refusing to even consider Susan Rice as a nominee for the Secretary of State position.

He was comparing his proposed committee to both Watergate and the Iran-Contra investigation committees, so I guess there's that to consider.

Bububububut John McCain is the scion of an earlier, more principled era of the GOP who doesn't go in for wingnut conspiracy theories!!

Good for him. I think it's wonderful that the American people are willing to demonstrate we care about people who suffer from dementia by putting him on tv and everything. The GOP is basically an object lesson in "yes, you can!" for the mad.

*considers*

I think it's a lot more like the Keating Five, in that McCain's obscene level of corruption and the arrogance that accompanies it are placed in sharp relief.

To be fair, John McCain is something of an expert when it comes to nominating wholly unqualified women for important positions.

I can't decide if McCain has gone insane over the past 12 years, or if he left his sanity back in Hanoi and I just didn't notice until this past decade. If he had his way, in addition to Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan we would have been involved in fights in Iran, Syria, and with Russia in Georgia.

McCain has been so unlikeable in recent years that a fair number of people have subscribed to the "he was never actually a decent guy, that was just a media love affair that, up until 2008, never had to bear the kind of scrutiny that could debunk it" line of argument.

That's possible, but I have a sort of occam's razor sense that it works better as an edgy liberal blog opinion than an explanation of the past view of McCain. He's not that great an actor, that many reporters/public figures/pundits aren't all colluding in the act, etc.

And I'm a firm believer in the ability of campaigns to ruin people, especially a monstrous shit-vortex like a modern GOP primary + election campaign. A year or two of repeating evil crap with the most sincerity and auto-hypnosis you can dig up in yourself is not healthy behavior, especially if you're an angry eccentric hard case to start with. Look at the dumb blind alley Hillary Clinton's campaign (including Bill) managed to pain themselves into during the 2008 primary race. In the case of McCain I don't think he's been in a healthy social/intellectual milieu to un-fuck his head since and may never be.

McCain was a likeable fellow because he would occasionally be the voice of reason. Like being the token Republican against Torture for a while. Liberals fall in love with Republicans who occasionally break ranks (see our love affair with Snowe for example, even if she screwed us frequently by just talking a good game and voting the opposite)

McCain's day to day opinions on shit are pretty partisan bullshit, and he seems to deeply hate Obama after running against him. He still shows up randomly with a sane opinion, but for the most part our love of him just wore off the more we paid attention to him.

Palin was considered pretty solid and sane as a female GOP Governor before the spotlight actually pointed her direction and we looked a bit closer than "is the state burning down?" as far as sanity and qualifications went. Some love affairs simply don't withstand scrutiny.

Let's not forget: As you edge closer to the withering precipice that is death, why should you give a shit what anybody thinks about you? You're free to indulge in as much paranoid crankery as your overheating and broken-down brain can shovel out.

Can someone explain to me why the right is convinced there's something about Benghazi? Is there a reason other than they just don't like the President?

He's black.

The belief is that with the right spin, anything can become an Iranian Hostage Crisis-level narrative of presidential incompetence. What they are doing is hoping they can keep this alive long enough that something else hits the fan, so they can keep being dramatic about dead Americans instead of talking about how they want to drive the country back into a recession in order to protect the inviolable right of the wealthy to not pay slightly more taxes. They don't know what to do about the Petraeus thing, so that's making them sound more off-message than they would normally be.

It's a big deal when an Ambassador dies, and they really REALLY want one of these scandals to actually turn out to be a scandal. They've been convinced there's something about absolutely everything for his entire administration.

Part of me thinks it's because they don't like Obama. Part of me thinks it's a massive case of projection, and they all know that when they're in power they have scandals and unethical behavior all over the place, so the other guys must do it too, right?

Attention Eric Cantor: This is what happens when you open your mouth before you know what the shot is.

The older edge of the current GOP leadership and elites still take Reagan riding to victory on the wave of the Iranian hostage crisis as their foundation for all foreign policy. Kind of like who Munich was the go-to analogy for US foreign policy until 1980 or so.

I'm thinking the conservative version of Munich will probably still be popular in 2080, assuming they haven't killed us all by then.

A big part of it was also having X number of proxies who were special forces people or their survivors willing to go along with the line of attack - this doubtlessly made the prospect of "swiftboating" more plausible, at least to those in the post-truth community.

Yeah I recall various wingers on my facebook posting something about some SEAL's dad calling Obama a communist or something.

On the bright side, McCain has convinced me that Susan Rice is a good candidate for State. Just a reminder:
This is the "big lie" that he's obsessed with.

Such confident, assertive spin with nary a caveat is sight. I think they've got her bang to rights on this coverup, we all know that it was really Barack & Michelle firing those RPGs into the US embassy to boost their re-election chances! How else can you possibly explain the terrorist fist bump?

Kevin Drum pointed out something that I was kind of getting at with my own thinking on this subject: what the hell is the motivation for the supposed cover up? Why would the President and administration lie about this (and do such a bad job of it?)

His theory is what I'm coming down on: this is about the GOP wanting to collect a scalp, and any scalp will do.

This is pretty great: apparently John McCain - who's been bitching nonstop about Benghazi - missed yesterday's hearing on.... Benghazi.

WaPo has a pretty good timeline of the HerpaDerp in the form of a Fact Checker

It does a nice job McCain's previous okayness with Condi Rice's much worse, much more harmfull and direct prevarications.

Aside from blaming the administration for poor security - while pointedly ignoring the Republicans' cutting State's security budget - the main thing is the argument that the administration should have ordered in and supported special forces that were (secretly) in the area, and having not ordered them in, they sat in the White House eating bon-bons like lefty villains in a Tom Clancy novel while some of those special forces intervened on their own and were killed. The initial allegation, since dropped by mainstream Republicans, was that the White House had, presumably out of sheer nefariousness, been intervening in the command decisions involved.

And since the White House wasn't immediately providing a list of all secret doings and assets and announcing to the world that the insurgents had taken over a CIA outstation - because what would be wrong with that? - that clearly proves that it's all a huge coverup and conspiracy and muslims birth certificate anticolonialism.

If you believe the White House did the various cartoon villain things above, the cover-up motive would be "not looking like a cartoon villain."

He proceeded to get into it with a CNN reporter that tried to get him to answer why he wasn't there. It appears only 3 of 8 Republican senators on the committee went to the hearing. So I guess they don't care about it nearly as much they care to make noise about it.

I was going to suggest someone ask the Senator if he would have the same objections to Condi Rice that he does for Susan, but he doesn't seem to be able to handle even straightforward questions, a loaded one might make him go all Bakersfield Chimp on the reporter.

Dana Milbank attempts to bury Rice.

Milbank appears to be carrying water for someone (Kerry? Clinton?) here as his case against her is pretty thin gruel. Rice may be a hothead and unsuited for the job (a charge I've yet to see actually, y'know, proven), but her opponents should come up with something more substantive. As noted by a commenter on Milbank's article -

Washington DC, where being prematurely right is a deadly resume sin.

I didn't have a strong opinion on her before this smear campaign began, but both McCain and Milbank have done a lot to convince me she's worth another look.

It's sad how quickly McCain went from "hey, maybe he has a point and should discuss this further" to "well if he said something, you can probably assume the polar opposite is true"