Benghazi, Fish and Rocks

I would think that eventually one would run out of topics that specifically relate to Hillary Clinton, especially when I'm doing a new column every workday.  I suppose that she is the gift that keeps on giving columns whether she tries or not.  Sort of like Rachel Dolezal in that way.

The House committee investigating the events surrounding the Obama administration's response to the attacks on the USA facility in Benghazi, Libya, just released its report.  The left and the press (but I repeat myself) were falling all over each other to parrot back the Clinton campaign's talking points in regard to the committee's report.

That, of course was something of the form "No new information regarding Mrs. Clinton's activities in response to the events in Benghazi."  You could hear it from all the reliable sources -- the New York Times (italicized to accentuate their pomposity) pumped out that response literally before they even read the report, and it is to be asked if anyone in their employ actually has read it, even as this is written.

The broadcast "journalists" quickly followed suit."No new information", they trumpeted, "so we can get back to our normal job of doing whatever we can, and as corruptly as we can, to get her elected."

Now, I have used a simile over the years, and in these pages, to describe people complaining about X by calling it Y and then describing why "Y" is so bad.  I have said that it is like calling a mountain an ocean, and then complaining because the fish look so much like rocks.

I keep going back to that analogy, because it applies on almost a daily basis to the left.  Conservative solutions actually work, so the left lies about the results and then complains about the results they're misrepresenting and lying about.

For example, the Reagan tax cuts of the early 1980s not only stimulated the economy and pulled us out of the recession of the Jimmy Carter years, but they resulted in a huge increase in tax revenues from the private-sector stimulation and job growth -- tax revenues were 50% higher over the five years after enactment.  Now, the national debt still went up, but that was because the Democrat Congress spent a buck and a half for every buck the tax cuts increased revenue by.  So to make it sound "bad", the left keeps spouting that the tax cuts "didn't work."  They worked just fine, thanks, but the left uses an irrelevant metric to make their case.

The left is doing the same thing here.  The Benghazi committee was chartered to investigate why four Americans, including our Ambassador to Libya, died without the USA doing anything to help them.  It was not, Kevin McCarthy notwithstanding, chartered to investigate Hillary Clinton's participation or non-participation that night.  So to assess the report first by saying nothing new was turned up on Hillary is to assume that's why the committee was formed.  Fish, meet rocks.

In fact, there was new information.  The committee discovered that the White House had responded within three hours of the start of the attack, and while the ambassador was still missing and unaccounted for, by meeting to assess the political outcome and to concoct the cover story needed to avoid making it sound like a planned attack by Islamist terrorists.  We were, after all, late in a presidential campaign where Obama had already claimed that he had won against terror.  To call it a planned attack would be politically a problem.

And that was more important to Obama -- and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, wherever she was that night -- than the lives of the ambassador and any others.

So sure enough, they put together the meeting, not a military-response meeting in the Situation Room of the White House, mind you, where the Osama bin Laden take-out was given approval, but a political-cover meeting.  Susan Rice was then prepped to go out and blather the quickly-developed talking points on the Sunday talking-points shows (by the way, the committee discovered that she hadn't even done a good job parroting the talking points on the shows, which would be funny if four people hadn't died).

Now maybe you don't think that is "new information" that casts Hillary in a bad light, but I sure do.  Maybe you don't think that it's "new" to discover that the military, or in this case Leon Panetta, the Secretary of Defense, left the meeting believing that the White House was going to deploy military assets to rescue our people in Benghazi, whereupon the Hillary Memorial State Department stopped the effort.  I sure didn't know about it.

So the press goes with a pre-planned response, given to them by the campaign, "no new information" even though it is (A) irrelevant because it wasn't the job of the committee, and (B) wrong, as there was new information unflattering to Hillary, had they actually read the report.

It is the job of the left -- deflect at all costs, and work their fish and rocks by lying about the fish.  Or the rocks, I forget which one applies.

It's sort of the same approach the press took to Donald Trump's trip to his golf course in Turnberry, Scotland, that happened to coincide with the Brexit vote.  He went there to support his son, who had completed overseeing a renovation of the facility there -- as he said multiple times, the trip, long-planned, was "to support my son."  He had planned to do a press conference about the renovation and did -- he started with a lengthy statement about what had been done at Turnberry because that's why he was there.

So when the press's questions naturally turned to Brexit, he answered them.  One question was about the results for the UK economy, and he noted that the devalued pound would make prices there cheaper for Americans, and increase sales.  Since he was at Turnberry, for a Turnberry press conference after a statement about Turnberry, he used Turnberry as his example of a business that would benefit, as would every other business in the UK that serves or supplies foreigners.

Naturally Hillary, her acolytes and sycophants, and the press decided that he was "for" Brexit because it would "help his golf course."  Naturally, he hadn't said that about why he hoped for Brexit; in fact, while he hoped Brexit would pass, it was for other reasons (belief that the EU had turned into a political beast).  Unlike Barack Obama and Hillary, Trump had openly said he was not going to advocate for one side in an election in another country.

I'm pretty fed up with the whole fish and rocks thing.  If the left wants to defeat Trump, the least they could do is compete using ideas that have a rationale for working, and arguing rationally against Trump's actual plans from his website.  It is contemptible to argue against an incorrect statement of his -- or anyone's -- statements, positions or actions.  It is politically bankrupt to do that.

But that's not "new" information, is it, Rocky?

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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