Trey Gowdy

Congress Allocates More Money To Phony Benghazi Investigations Than To Veterans

Posted by on July 8, 2014 at 10:34 am. 2 Comments :

Two months ago GOP House Speaker John Boehner announced that he would concede to pressure from Fox News and the Tea Party by creating the House Select Committee On Politicizing Benghazi. He then packed the committee on the Republican side with rabidly partisan attack dogs, led by alpha dog Trey Gowdy of South Carolina.

Gowdy Doody

Shameless self-promotion…
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Since that announcement there has been nothing of note to report. There are no scheduled hearings and no estimated timeline for the investigation. Count on it to drag out long enough for Republicans to exploit it during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The one bit of news that has just emerged is that the Speakers office has allocated $3.3 million to the committee for the current year. So after spending untold millions by four other partisan committees who, despite making wild predictions about White House malfeasance and cover ups, never found anything to support their manufactured accusations, they are now proposing to up the ante with no indication that the result will be any different.

To put the budgeting in perspective, the House Veterans Affairs Committee will only be receiving $3 million this year, even though they have more than twice as many members and a legitimate scandal to investigate with legitimate victims who continue to suffer. The Benghazi Circus will spend more in its first year than the Intelligence Committee which deals with numerous international matters that have far-reaching impact on national security.

The financial priority that is demonstrated by these budget choices is evidence that the Republican House is more obsessed with phony scandals and political sabotage than with actually solving real problems for the American people. The tragic events in Benghazi have always been merely a crude weapon for the rightist politicians and pundits who are fixated on destroying all things Obama. And the new committee is just another means of achieving political goals that they couldn’t achieve at the ballot box. This was illustrated with certainty when back in May of 2013, Fox News aired a tribute to their chief, CEO Roger Ailes, for his efforts as “The Driving Force” in “Keeping Benghazi Alive.”

Fox News Ailes Benghazi

This was one of the most brazen admissions of the abandonment of journalistic ethics ever broadcast. The arrogance they display with on-air graphics confessing that they “made terror attack a story” in response to a “push” by their CEO, is unprecedented. Credible news organizations do not permit executives to interfere with editorial decisions. But the operative word there is “credible,” which has never applied to Fox News.

Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Painfully Desperate And Stupid Attack On Elizabeth Warren

Posted by on May 11, 2014 at 12:05 pm. 8 Comments :

By now everyone with a pulse knows that Fox News is an unabashed mouthpiece for the Republican Party and their Tea-sotted radicalism. So it is not much of a surprise when they brazenly twist, mutilate, and ignore facts to advance their conservative agenda. However, every now and then the unparalleled idiocy of the Fox Nation editors still manages to boggle the mind.

When GOP Speaker John Boehner announced the formation of the House Select Committee to Shamelessly Politicize Benghazi, his GOP comrades immediately set out to profit from the affair by cravenly soliciting donations based on their starkly partisan scandal mongering. It was a nauseating display of disrespect for the seriousness of the subject and the tragic loss of American lives. Numerous media reports properly criticized Republicans for this act of political opportunism and greed. So what does Fox News do about it?

Fox Nation

For more examples of documented LIES from Fox…
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That’s right. Fox attempts to turn the tables on their critics and accuse Democrats of similarly callous fundraising. But instead, this wild swing at Sen. Elizabeth Warren demonstrates the desperation and stupidity of the right, more than any malfeasance by Warren.

The example of alleged fundraising by Warren offered by Fox News, on their hopelessly lie-riddled Fox Nation website, consisted solely of an image taken from Warren’s website where she wrote a blog post about the new GOP Benghazi committee. Fox’s article was sourced to the ultra-rightist Washington Free Beacon, a Republican run and Koch brothers affiliated organization. On her blog Warren noted that she had previous experience with committee chair Trey Gowdy’s aggressive ignorance when he was a member of the committee that interviewed her with regard to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. On the formation of the Benghazi panel she said…

“The House GOP is on a waste-of-time-and-resources witch hunt and fundraising sideshow, shamefully grasping for any straw to make President Obama, former Secretary Clinton, or Secretary Kerry look bad.”

The supposed proof that Warren was using Benghazi to raise money was the presence of links on her website to a donations page. However, those links had nothing to do with the article she wrote on Benghazi. They are a part of her website’s standard template and appear on every page on the site. Any sixth-grader knows this about the Internet, but that’s apparently too high a bar for Fox News.

Now compare that to the manner in which Republicans explicitly tied their fundraising to Benghazi. The images below were taken from the official pages of the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. And they were not some standard template page, but the actual donations page for each site.

GOP Benghazi Fundraising

Note that these pages directly refer to Benghazi in making their plea for cash. For instance, the RNC page says “Thanks for standing with us and demanding the truth about Benghazi.” The NRCC page says of their donors that “You’re now a Benghazi Watchdog” (whatever that is). And the NRSC says to “donate today” because “You’re being lied to about Benghazi.” In each case the connection between Benghazi and the donation was flagrantly obvious. As opposed to the references on Warren’s site which were incidental and unrelated to her commentary.

Trying to assert that there is something in common with Warren’s page and those of the GOP says more about the desperation of the Republican Party to counter the criticisms that they so richly deserve. It also affirms the low esteem with which they regard their followers if they believe that such an ignorant argument can be persuasive. And if the leading Republican institutions think that their party members are this stupid, then what should the rest of us think?

Benghazi-Palooza: The New York Times Nails The Republican Circus

Posted by on May 10, 2014 at 11:50 am. 9 Comments :

Gowdy DoodySomething has gotten into the water at the New York Times. This week they published an editorial that is not only rich in facts and substance, it is entertaining and persuasive. The headline announced an excursion into the “Center Ring at the Republican Circus.” And the opening paragraph may be the best introduction to a Times editorial ever:

“The hottest competition in Washington this week is among House Republicans vying for a seat on the Benghazi kangaroo court, also known as the Select House Committee to Inflate a Tragedy Into a Scandal. Half the House has asked to ‘serve’ on the committee, which is understandable since it’s the perfect opportunity to avoid any real work while waving frantically to right-wing voters stomping their feet in the grandstand.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. The Times’ editorial board appears to have hired some writers with both insight and humor. They correctly note that the committee is an unambiguous fraud whose members are only concerned with promoting a manufactured scandal and, of course, themselves. The article goes on to say that the GOP Congress…

“…won’t pass a serious jobs bill, or raise the minimum wage, or reform immigration, but House Republicans think they can earn their pay for the rest of the year by exposing nonexistent malfeasance on the part of the Obama administration.”

The newly appointed chair of the committee, Trey Gowdy, recently proved that he is unfit to lead a fair hearing when he admitted that his party runs the House in a brazenly biased manner. Discussing whether another committee should call expert witnesses to determine whether Lois Lerner waived her 5th Amendment rights, Gowdy said “Let me take out all of the drama. We would pick three that said she waived, and they would pick one that said she didn’t. I hate to do a spoiler, but that’s the way that hearing would go.”

Shameless self-promotion…
Get Fox Nation vs. Reality. Available now at Amazon.

In other words, he is admitting that the GOP-run House would stack the deck in their own favor. So why bother discussing it with experts. That’s a preview of how he can be expected to run the Benghazi committee. And with regard to that IRS pseudo-scandal, the Times continued to needle the scandal mongering of the GOP, saying that Lerner is the person that…

“…they would love to blame for the administration’s crackdown on conservative groups, if only they could prove there was a crackdown, which they can’t, because there wasn’t.”

In addition, the Times couldn’t let the right-wing’s previous obsession with ObamaCare go unmentioned just because it didn’t happen to mark the commencement of Armageddon like they predicted/hoped. So the article noted the GOP’s…

“…need to rouse the most fervent anti-Obama wing of the party and keep it angry enough to deliver its donations and votes to Republicans in the November elections. For a while it seemed as if the Affordable Care Act would perform that role, but Republicans ran into a problem when the country began to realize that it was not destroying American civilization but in fact helping millions of people.”

Finally, the editorial concluded with the correct advice for wavering Democrats:

“Democrats who are now debating whether to participate in the committee shouldn’t hesitate to skip it. Their presence would only lend legitimacy to a farce.”

I can’t remember the last time I read an editorial in the Times that was so spot on in its analysis and delivered with such punch. I hope this wasn’t an aberration or the work of a ghost editor who has since faded back into the ether. We need more of this kind of commentary. And we need it from more than just the New York Times.

Benghazi Committee Commences As Phony Fox News Scandal Falls Apart

Posted by on May 5, 2014 at 3:59 pm. 11 Comments :

The Republican House Speaker, John Boehner, announced today that he has chosen the rabidly partisan South Carolina Tea Party congressman, Trey Gowdy, to chair a special committee to waste more time and money investigating their trumped up Benghazi scandal. In naming Gowdy, Boehner praised his determination and desire for truth saying that…

“Trey Gowdy is as dogged, focused, and serious-minded as they come. I know he shares my commitment to get to the bottom of this tragedy.”

Gowdy Doody

Of course the truth is that neither Boehner nor Gowdy have any interest in getting to the bottom of anything. Their statements and actions for the past year and a half show that they are only interested in politicizing a tragic loss of American lives. Having failed to uncover even a sliver of evidence of any wrongdoing, Boehner is, in effect, insulting his own colleagues in Congress (i.e. Darrell Issa) who have been conducting pseudo-investigations without producing the hoped for “smoking guns” with which they could continue their campaign of political slander.

With the appointment of Gowdy, Republicans will have an attack dog in charge of the panel who has demonstrated his bitterly prejudiced views on this subject. Here are just a few of his past comments regarding the issue he is now pretending to seek the truth about:

  • 4/28/2013: There are more Benghazi hearings coming; I think they’re going to be explosive. [That never came to pass]
  • 5/7/2013: I think I can prove tomorrow that it was an intentional misrepresentation by Susan Rice and others. [That was a year ago, and still no proof]
  • 8/2/2013: What creates the appearance and perhaps the reality of a cover-up? Not letting us talk with people who have the most amount of information, dispersing them around the country and changing their names. [Here he is descending into a delusional conspiracy theory for which he provided no evidence]
  • 12/31/2013: What in the world explains the violence in Benghazi prior to the video being translated and released? Our consulate was attacked way before the video was released. [And this is just patently false]

This background on the man who will be chairing the committee shows that Boehner and his party are not really taking this matter seriously. It is a desperate attempt to dig up some political mud to throw, to tarnish the prospective presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton in 2016, and to salvage Boehner’s sinking reputation with the far-right fringe of his party whom he needs if he wants to be Speaker in the next session of congress.

Adding to the absurdity of convening a special committee on Benghazi is that the foundation of the GOP’s case keeps collapsing. Just as Gowdy’s predictions from a year ago never materialized, the most recent allegations are likewise illusory. The email that has become the object of their obsession reveals nothing new and doesn’t even refer to Benghazi in the portion they have latched onto. So now some Republicans are swerving to claim that the real outrage is the whereabouts of President Obama when the attack in Libya was taking place, and whether or not he was in the Situation Room at the White House. The only problem with that line of attack is that it is utterly irrelevant to anything. Even when Gretchen Carlson of Fox News tried to light that sparkler, she was doused by Andy Card, George W. Bush’s Chief of Staff:

Carlson: Did you find it unusual that the National Security Adviser, the former one, a few days ago with Bret Baier said that President Obama was not in the Situation Room on the night of the Benghazi attacks? Is that odd or is that normal?

Card: I don’t think that says a lot. The President does not have to be in the Situation Room at every time with every crisis. […] I don’t think that it’s credible that we would expect, as the the pubic, that the President would be sitting in the Situation Room all the time.

This is the environment in which the Republican’s new committee will meet. They have nothing of substance to contribute. Democrats are considering boycotting the committee. That would be a wise move that would leave the GOP to stink in their juices.

Shameless self-promotion…
Get Fox Nation vs. Reality. Available now at Amazon.

The result will be that the GOP will be seen by the American people to have no case, no integrity, and no interest in solving the problems that the people really care about. And if Benghazi is the issue they hope to run with in 2014 – or 2016 – they are going to be sorely disappointed when the returns come in. And they will be able to thank Fox News for their losses. After all, it was Fox, and their CEO Roger Ailes, who masterminded the Benghazi myth and worked tirelessly to prop it up.

foxnews-ailes-benghazi