Foreign Policy

The Tea-Publicans appointed to the House Select Committee on #Benghazi! are reportedly all lawyers, including its chair, Trey Gowdy (R-SC). Apparently they are not very good lawyers, as Steve Benen explains. Asked and answered:

In U.S. courtrooms, there’s an objection called “asked and answered.” Roughly speaking, if an attorney has a witness on the stand for an examination, asks a question, and gets an answer, counsel can’t keep asking the same question. Opposing counsel will object.

I’m wondering if Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) is familiar with the objection.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said on Sunday morning that, as chair of the newly created select committee on Benghazi, one of the biggest questions he would like to ask former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is why the United States was still there.

“Why were we still in Benghazi? The British ambassador was almost assassinated. Our facility was attacked twice. There were multiple episodes of violence. We were the last flag flying in Benghazi, and I would like to know why,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”

The problem is not with the question itself, which is clearly a legitimate point of inquiry when coming to terms with what transpired in Libya 20 months ago. Rather, the problem is that plenty of other lawmakers have thought of this before and the question has already been answered clearly, though Gowdy, for some reason, doesn’t know that.

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Arizona’s angry old man, Senator John McCain, the armchair Neocon war monger who advocates for wars from his perch on the set of the Sunday morning bobblehead shows, and is a critic of anyone who disagrees with his alleged “genius” in matters of war and foreign policy — Senator “Surge” has always been wrong, about everything — got his comeuppance on Tuesday. Kerry And McCain Swap Teddy Roosevelt-Themed Insults:

Things got heated between Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Secretary of State John Kerry at a Senate hearing on Tuesday that featured dueling Teddy Roosevelt quotes.

First, McCain blasted Kerry for taking what he considers tepid measures against Russia.

“My hero Teddy Roosevelt used to say talk softly and carry a big stick,” McCain said. “What you’re doing is talking strongly and carrying a very small sick. In fact, a twig.”

When it was his turn to speak, Kerry took issue with the Arizona senator’s pessimistic outlook on negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.

“We’re talking! The option is, you go to war,” Kerry said. “A lot of people are ready to drop bombs all the time. We can do that. We have the ability.”

A nice dig at Senator “Surge” and his constant war mongering. “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran…”

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“Don’t call yourself Reagan Republicans,” McCain said on the Senate floor. “Ronald Reagan would never – would never let this kind of aggression go unresponded to by the American people.”

John McCain was commenting on the Russian occupation and likely annexation of Crimea from the Ukraine. His Reagan triumphalism is not supported by the facts or history.

The Ronald Reagan mythologized by the conservative media entertainment complex is nothing at all like the real man or his times. Let’s run through just a few of the major foreign policy events during the Reagan presidency.

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The Least Popular Senator in the Country, Arizona’s angry old man John McCain (“Fuck you! I know I’m popular. The media loves me!“), who never met a war that he did not like, is going insane over Ukraine.

Arizona’s angry old man has an opinion in The New York Times today subtitled “John McCain on Restoring America’s Credibility.” I’ll wait for you to clean up the coffee you just spit out.

John McCain was a principal patron of Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress exile group responsible for the falsified intelligence that the Bush-Cheney regime used to lie this country into an unnecessary and unlawful war with Iraq. There was no bigger cheerleader for the Iraq war than “Surge” McCain. if he had been elected president, American troops would still be dying every day in Iraq.

The man who did so much  to destroy America’s credibility in the world with his Neocon wet dream of a Pax Americana empire in Iraq is in no position to preach to others how to “restore America’s credibility” (it would start by holding those responsible for the Iraq war, like John McCain, accountable for their crimes, and banishing them from the media — and Congress).

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