Profiling is not ok...Follow

It goes a bit deeper than that though. All of these things are examples of what happens when you put a bunch of people with an "ends justifies the means" ideology in key high level positions in the government, while simultaneously keeping a distance between the leaders and those implementing policy as a means of CYA. You get a ton of folks doing stuff they think their bosses want them to do ideologically, with no oversight from those bosses (cause they don't want to know). So the normal processes which might prevent say liberal IRS investigators from unfairly targeting conservative groups for auditing and investigation aren't in place. Ditto with those who might stop and ask if it really is a good idea to collect information on AP, or who might ask "should someone really make the changes to this intelligence report to make it say what they think we want to hear?".

I've never in my life seen an administration pass the buck downward to some unnamed bureaucrats as much as this one does. It's always "intelligence experts" or "security experts" or some kind of "expert". Um... How about we put those people in charge then, if they're the ones making all the decisions? That way someone's also responsible. Cause right now, it seems like the whole administration is structured to avoid responsibility for any decision that's made.

Because running on the failings of the previous administration is never a winning move. It's not just Benghazi though. It's that and Fast and Furious. And an out of control IRS. And an out of control DoJ. It's rampant corruption and favoritism from top to bottom in this administration. Ironically, it's this administration actually doing all the things they blamed the Bush administration for doing when running in 2008.

But beyond election politics, it's also trying to get America to wake up and set aside their own partisan assumptions and see what's really going on. Regardless of why or who, I think it should be clear that there are some really really questionable things going on in our government right now. And I think a lot of people have given the Obama administration a pass, or allowed themselves to believe that it's just conservatives making hay out of nothing, but at some point any rational objective person has to look at the sheer volume of "strange things" going on and conclude that something is wrong. If it were just one or even two such things, you might be able to dismiss it as partisan mudslinging, or honest mistakes, or whatever. But this is like 5 presidencies worth of scandals all under one president. Whether these events are intentional and coming from the top, or the result of the top not engaging and minding the store really shouldn't matter. It's a failure of leadership either way.

You mean cutting money that was meant to go abroad? Yea, that was the Republicans, who conveniently never mention that. Or the fact that more of the same deaths happened under W's watch with much less hearings? If this is the best that the Republicans have, it's already over.



This is ALWAYS true. If anyone believes that the government doesn't try to clean things up prior to releasing information (if at all), then that person is misinformed. It's crowd control.

I was posting from my phone last night and didn't feel like expounding but here I am now. Just making the point that few people not already converted are thinking of Fast & Furious or Benghazi as "scandals". Most people aren't even following Benghazi (44% told Pew they were paying even moderate attention) and Clinton leads the GOP by ten points on who people trust on the issue. The DoJ is hardly "out of control" when they're following procedures and gaining lawful subpoenas from the courts. Had they been illegally getting records without court permission maybe you'd have a point but that doesn't appear to be the case.

The only one approaching "scandal" to anyone who isn't Rep. Issa would be the IRS fiasco.

That said, your fantasy that since Bush's spectacularly failed war and crashed economy doomed the Republicans in 2008, that means an attack on Benghazi dooms Clinton in 2016 is cute. Silly, but cute.

Just to reiterate the point.

Edited, May 15th 2013 9:04am by someproteinguy

Well of course not, they're fair and balanced.

Sorry I thought you were smart enough to glean my meaning: Thinking this is a "scandal" breaks down along partisan lines with only Republicans making up a majority.

Hahahaha... you're adorable.

You don't get your news from anywhere. Noted.

Begging the question

Right. "And yes Hillary. It matters." was just, you know, in case she was sitting at home watching some Caso Cerrado and idly wondering what role Benghazi plays in the world and if her remarks before the Senate were justified

Edited, May 15th 2013 5:03pm by Jophiel

Except that The money had nothing to do with security for our embassy or consulate in Libya. This is so relevant I had to say it twice.



Count as what? An excuse for the Obama administration to blame the deaths of our embassy personnel on a film rather than a planned attack by existing terrorist organizations? No. It doesn't count.



If it was so irrelevant, then why lie about it? Why change the language in the intelligence reports to match one while downplaying the other? Why then send Rice out on the Sunday shows to say directly that it was one and not the other? Clearly someone in the Obama administration thought it mattered a great deal.



The decision to try to claim this was an outgrowth of protests over a film was politically driven as well. Obviously, any response to that will also be politically driven. I'm not sure how that somehow nullifies the accusations present though. So the Obama administration can lie to the American people for political reasons, and we should dismiss any criticism of this on the grounds that the criticism is political? You've just justified our government getting away with anything it wants. You get that any criticism of actions taken by the government can be called political, right?

That's a monumentally stupid reason to dismiss something like this. Argue that it didn't happen. Or that the decisions that were made were not as bad as they seemed. Or that they honestly thought it was what they said. Anything like that is legitimate. Saying "it's politically driven" isn't a good counter argument at all. Show that it's *only* driven by politics, and you might have a point.



Wait? So it's a conspiracy to say that somewhere between the intelligence reports from the field to the official intelligence briefing, key information was removed which resulted in downplaying the planned nature of the attack? It's not. It's a fact. It's also a fact that several drafts were written and rejected until said changes were made. This is not some "what if" scenario here. The intelligence was "fixed" to match the agenda of the Obama administration. They wanted to sell the whole "We killed OBL and Al Queda is on the run" story to the American people for the election. The attack in Libya made that difficult to do. Surely you can see how if they could convince people that it wasn't a planned terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11, but just a protest that got out of hand, then they could protect their foreign policy narrative.

There was a clear and obvious political motivation for lying. What's so strange is how many people are insisting there's nothing to this even with all the facts that are present now. At this point, it's not really a question of whether someone lied, or even why they did. It's a question of who lied, and how far up the chain it goes. Was it just some mid level folks at State acting on their own? Was Clinton involved directly? Was someone on Obama's staff involved? Someone told someone else to downplay the "planned terrorist attack" side of this. Who?



Except that it wasn't that the information was wrong. The information was correct. Someone changed the information which ended out in the official briefing so that it said something different. That was not an accident. It's not like every intelligence report from the field said X, but it turned out to be Y instead. In this case, every intelligence report said Y, the briefing draft said Y, but then it was changed to say X instead. And X just happened to be more beneficial to a president engaged in a re-election campaign at the time than Y.

Is it really so hard to connect those dots?

Edited, May 15th 2013 4:17pm by gbaji

They're not scandals.


No, you don't assume it's true prior to it being investigated.


I know. You're full of shit to pretend presidential aspirations aren't part of this.

Look, I get it. Like so many other things, you're operating off your "It's true because I know it is and if you disagree it's all media brainwashing!" stance. You've already shown a wealth of ignorance about all three events. which is fine, no one says you have to know about stuff before you start yapping about it. Probably be better for your blood pressure if you tried to move the needle either towards "education" or "unconcern" since this middle ground can't be healthy.

Given that the "consulate" was basically a CIA outpost, it is possible that increased diplomatic security funding wouldn't have made it to Benghazi. funding for it may have been handled on a different set of books.