Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Once again, "If it's Sunday, it's John McCain" on the Sunday morning bobble-head shows. The Beltway media are his political base, and nothing is more irresponsible.
In his 30 years in Washington, never has one man been so wrong about so many subjects as John McCain. In fact, John McCain is the perfect cipher. If you want to know what you should do, just ask John McCain what he thinks and then do exactly the opposite. You can't go wrong.
So this past Sunday, the leader of the new Three Stooges (McCain stars with his puppet boy Little Lindsey Graham and, replacing Joe Lieberman, Kelly Ayotte as "Shemp") who has been pushing the "Benghazi! Benghazi!! Benghazi!!!" faux scandal for months, went on ABC's "This Week" for an interview with Martha Raddatz, and accused the White House of a "cover-up." "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." John McCain Goes Wacko Bird and Accuses Hillary Clinton of Benghazi Cover Up:
Transcript from ABC News:
RADDATZ: Would you call this a cover-up?
MCCAIN: I’d call it a cover-up. I — I would call it a cover-up in the
extent that there was willful removal of information, which was
obvious. It was obvious. Mr. Hicks said in his testimony, his jaw
dropped when he saw Susan Rice do that — I was on — I was on another
Sunday morning show after Susan Rice, my jaw dropped. I said, look
people don’t bring rocket-propelled grenades and mortars to spontaneous
demonstrations.
RADDATZ: Do you blame Hillary Clinton?
MCCAIN: …I think that the secretary of State has played a role in this, and I…
RADDATZ: Do you think she had a role in those emails?
MCCAIN: …I — she had to have been in the loop some way. But, we don’t
know for sure. But I do know that her response before the Foreign
Relations Committee, who cares? Remember when she said, well who cares
how this happened, in a rather emotional way? A lot of people care, I
say with respect to the secretary of State. And she…
Remember, this tool has been in Washington for 30 years. He claims to be a foreign policy expert, although no one has ever seen any evidence of this during his 30 years in Washington. So this tool — who has his own green room at every Sunday morning bobble-head show — knows that the government talking points given to government officials and members of Congress for the Sunday morning bobble-head shows are reviewed and revised by numerous government agencies several times before they go on the air. This is standard operating procedure (SOP).
In no way does this constitute a "cover-up" in the common definition of that term: "a concerted effort to keep an illegal or unethical act or situation from being made public." John McCain wants to stretch that definition to cover the review and revision process, which is standard operating procedure.
McCain himself would be guilty of a "cover-up" for the numerous times this war monger appeared on the Sunday morning bobble-head shows to advocate for the Iraq war and his precious "surge" based upon Bush administration talking points. (In this same interview with Martha Raddatz, war monger McCain argued for intervention in Syria. McCain Downplays Dangers of U.S. Involvement in Syria).
McCain's claim that Secretary Clinton "had to have been in the loop" but "we don't know for sure" is a flat-out lie. Maybe McCain should, you know, actually read the State Department's Accountability Review Board investigation report by Ambassador Thomas Pickering. Pickering's board findings are available online here (.pdf). Pickering Calls Out Issa For Lying About Willingness to Testify:
In it, the board found systemic failures throughout the State Department
and inadequate allowances for security. But what they did not find is
any evidence of a conspiracy to cover up or politically spin the attack,
or of an overt attempt to make or let the attack happen nor did they
find then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally culpable for
failures in the State Department. The fault lay, according to the
report, with bureaucratic levels far below the Secretary level.
“I think the notion of a quote, cover up, has all the elements of Pulitzer Prize fiction attached to it,” Pickering said last week.
More bad news for the cipher John McCain: Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a Republican who was appointed
to the position by George W. Bush, told CBS' Face The Nation that he
would have handled the situation in Benghazi the same way that the Obama
administration did last September. Bush’s Secretary of Defense Mocks GOP Attacks On Obama’s Handling Of Benghazi:
During an interview
that aired on CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday morning, Gates defended
the administration’s reaction to the attacks in Libya and dismissed many
of the criticisms leveled by his fellow Republicans as “cartoonish”:
“Frankly, had I been in the job at the time, I think my decisions would have been just as theirs were,” said Gates, now the chancellor of the College of William and Mary.
“We don’t have a ready force standing by in the Middle East, and so
getting somebody there in a timely way would have been very difficult,
if not impossible.” he explained.Suggestions that we could have flown a fighter jet over the attackers
to “scare them with the noise or something,” Gates said, ignored the
“number of surface to air missiles that have disappeared from [former
Libyan leader] Qaddafi’s arsenals.”
[…]
Another suggestion posed by some critics of the administration, to, as
Gates said, “send some small number of special forces or other troops in
without knowing what the environment is, without knowing what the
threat is, without having any intelligence in terms of what is actually
going on on the ground, would have been very dangerous.”“It’s sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces,” he said.
“The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and
preparation before we send people in harm’s way, and there just wasn’t
time to do that.”Gates also defended former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has
increasingly become the subject of Republican criticism. Gates responded
with a simple and emphatic “no” when asked if he believed Clinton could
possibly be involved in any sort of a cover up, as some Republicans
have baselessly suggested.
"Cartoonish" describes John McCain and his new Three Stooges act with Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte over the "Benghazi! Benghazi!! Benghazi!!!" faux scandal perfectly. The real reason for the lack of adequate security at the mission in Benghazi is Cogress and its austerity budget cuts to the State Department's budget. Let's talk about that, shall we Johnny?
President Obama at his news conference on Monday joined the mockery of the GOP obsession with the "Benghazi! Benghazi!! Benghazi!!!" faux scandal. Obama Mocks GOP Charges Of A Benghazi ‘Cover-Up’:
President Obama in a press conference on Monday shot back at Republicans
trying to create a scandal out of his administration’s handling of the
Benghazi terror attacks last September.
* * *
Obama was asked about it today, and appeared agitated, saying the
issue has already been investigated and Benghazi has turned in to a
“political circus.” The President also noted what a terrible job his
administration is doing if it was trying to cover anything up on
Benghazi:
OBAMA: If this was some effort on our part to try to
downplay what had happened or tamp it down — that would be a pretty odd
thing that three days later, we end up putting out all the information
that in fact has now served as the basis for everybody recognizing that
this was a terrorist attack and that it may have included elements that
were planned by extremists inside of Libya.Who executes some sort of cover-up or effort to tamp things down, for three days?
So the whole thing defies logic and the fact that this keeps on getting
churned out, frankly has a lot to do with political motivations. We’ve
had folks who have challenged Hillary Clinton’s integrity, Susan Rice’s
integrity, Mike Mullen and Tom Pickering’s integrity. It’s a given that
mine gets challenged by these same folks. they’ve used it for
fundraising and frankly, you know, if anybody out there wants to
actually focus on how we make sure something like this does not happen
again? I am happy to get their advice and information and council.
Watch the entire response in the clip below:
UPDATE: Steve Benen noted today that "There have only been 19 Sundays so far this year, and Sen. John McCain
(R-Ariz.) has appeared on one of the major-network Sunday shows 11
times, more than anyone else in the country. Why a network hasn't just
given him his own Sunday show is not yet clear." Ouch!