Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi Dodge
PJ Media ^ | May 31, 2014 | Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted on 05/31/2014 10:57:58 AM PDT by jazusamo

Is Hillary Clinton a charlatan or just the crappiest lawyer in Washington? As the Obama Left likes to say, that’s a false choice. There’s no reason she can’t be both.

The question arises thanks to yet another excellent report on the Obama administration’s Benghazi fraud by the Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes. The Benghazi fraud is a prominent subject of my new book, Faithless Execution , which traces the debacle from the president’s unauthorized, unprovoked, and ultimately disastrous instigation of a war against the Qaddafi regime; through his (and Secretary Clinton’s) recklessly irresponsible failure to provide security for the American officials they mysteriously stationed in Benghazi (a jihadist hotbed that is one of the world’s most dangerous places for Americans); through the president’s shocking failure to attempt to rescue Americans under siege on the night of September 11, 2012; and finally through Mr. Obama’s carefully orchestrated deception, in which the administration tried to hoodwink the country into blaming the murders of our ambassador and three other Americans on a video rather than on his calamitous policy of empowering Islamic supremacists.

Steve’s latest report homes in on Mrs. Clinton’s infamous “What difference, at this point, does it make” caterwaul, emitted during tense questioning by Senator Ron Johnson (R., WI) during a hearing on Benghazi.

Apparently, the former secretary of state struggles to rationalize this appalling testimony in her forthcoming memoir, Hard Choices. As notorious for taking no responsibility as for committing blunders over which accountability becomes an issue, Mrs. Clinton complains that her “What difference” yowl has been distorted. It was not, she insists, an exhibition of callous indifference; it was, in Steve’s description, “an attempt to redirect the questioning from its focus on the hours before the attacks to preventing similar attacks in the future.” Or, as Mrs. Clinton reportedly writes:

My point was simple: If someone breaks into your home and takes your family hostage, how much time are you going to spend focused on how the intruder spent his day as opposed to how best to rescue your loved ones and then prevent it from happening again?

As Steve quite rightly observes, this is nonsense. By the time of Mrs. Clinton’s testimony, the Benghazi Massacre—and, indeed, even the Obama administration’s fraudulent “The Video Did It” cover-up of the cause of the Benghazi Massacre—was several months old. We were long, long past the intruder-in-the-home phase. We were in the accountability phase—the phase of: let’s now establish what actually happened and why, so we can then figure out how to prevent a recurrence.

Any competent lawyer knows that during the investigative and trial stages that follow a public debacle—to say nothing of an act of war in which American officials were derelict in responding to a murderous terrorist attack—the obligation of the witnesses is not to redirect the questions. It is to answer the questions. Any competent trial judge would have sustained an objection to the secretary of state’s evasive answer, striking it from the record as non-responsive.

Mrs. Clinton is a crappy lawyer if she does not get that, since a first-year law student would. And she is a charlatan because the transparent two-step objective of her performance was, first, to dodge questions about her conduct and, then, to wail that the questions must cease because she has already answered them.

Would that the Senate had better cross-examiners. One suspects that former prosecutor Trey Gowdy, who will chair the House select committee on the Benghazi Massacre, would have known to ask the right follow-up question that eluded Senator Johnson. To wit, “Secretary Clinton, how many times did you practice that little speech in front of the mirror before you came here today?” Then, after the smoke pours out of her ears, you keep asking the accountability questions until you get real answers—or, as in Mrs. Clinton’s case, until it becomes painfully obvious that the witness has no satisfactory answers.

Did Secretary Clinton really believe her job was to steer the Senate’s questions rather than answer them? Did she seriously believe her appearance as a witness was the occasion for moving on to the matter of preventing a recurrence of—rather than establishing accountability for—the derelictions of duty that resulted in the killings of four Americans? If so, that is the easy part. Clearly, we should make certain that she is never again in a position of responsibility for the formulation of American foreign policy and for the protection of Americans serving our country in perilous places.


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Extended News; Foreign Affairs; Government
KEYWORDS: benghazi; clinton; hillary; scbenghazi; seeyounexttuesday; selectcommittee
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-35 next last

1 posted on 05/31/2014 10:57:58 AM PDT by jazusamo
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: jazusamo
We have to call her what she really is...a failure


2 posted on 05/31/2014 11:07:30 AM PDT by darkwing104 (Forgive but don't forget)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: jazusamo
This woman is so vile.  She has left a trail of bodies in her and her husband's wake.  If she had direct involvement in any of them or not, it does cause concern for who was operating in the shadows on her and her husband's behalf.  She should not be on the public payroll.  She should not have a position of authority, even at the city level, much less national or international level.


Ramirez's latest political cartoon LARGE VERSION
05/30/2014: LINK  LINK to regular sized version of Ramirez's latest, and an archive of his political cartoons.

In this political cartoon, Ramirez presents, "Obama: Foreign Policy"



FOLKS, THOSE OF YOU WHO CAN, PLEASE CLICK HERE AND PENCIL IN YOUR DONATION TO HELP END THIS FREEPATHONTHANK YOU!  We're over 93% now. Cool!
...this is a general all purpose message, and should not be seen as targeting any individual I am responding to...

3 posted on 05/31/2014 11:07:56 AM PDT by DoughtyOne
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: darkwing104

In a way I agree with you. And in another, I think she has parlayed her no talent self into quite the player on the coat-tails of her husband.


4 posted on 05/31/2014 11:08:57 AM PDT by DoughtyOne
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: jazusamo
From today's statement regarding the release of the American POW by the Taliban:

In a statement, President Barack Obama said Bergdahl's recovery "is a reminder of America's unwavering commitment to leave no man or woman in uniform behind on the battlefield."

What Obama failed to mention that there is an exception to that commitment: When the battlefield is in Benghazi, Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State, and it is three a.m. in the morning. (If only they had been in uniform, right?)

At a ratio of 1 to 5, you have to wonder if the real Obama doctrine isn't an unwavering commitment to leaving no enemy combatant in Guantanamo.

5 posted on 05/31/2014 11:11:13 AM PDT by newheart (The greatest trick the Left ever pulled was convincing the world it was not a religion.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: jazusamo

She flunked the bar exam in Washington. Oh, if that had only been the end of her career.


6 posted on 05/31/2014 11:13:21 AM PDT by miss marmelstein (Richard Lives Yet!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: DoughtyOne

Well said...The word vile is a perfect description, her entire purpose is to promote herself by any means and always has been.


7 posted on 05/31/2014 11:14:32 AM PDT by jazusamo (Sometimes I think that this is an era when sanity has become controversial: Thomas Sowell)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: miss marmelstein

In Washington State?


8 posted on 05/31/2014 11:18:58 AM PDT by yldstrk ( My heroes have always been cowboys)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: newheart

From day one in office his goal has been to close Gitmo and I’ve no doubt he’d release them all if he thought he could get away with it, I believe Hillary feels the same.


9 posted on 05/31/2014 11:20:11 AM PDT by jazusamo (Sometimes I think that this is an era when sanity has become controversial: Thomas Sowell)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 5 | View Replies]

To: darkwing104



10 posted on 05/31/2014 11:21:52 AM PDT by MeshugeMikey ( "Never, never, never give up". Winston Churchill)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: jazusamo

Thank you.

I agree. Secondarily, she promotes the Marxist Leftist ideology on a global basis. And she is too stupid to grasp that she is also an accomplice in the Islamification of America, and what the ramifications of that are.

In truth, I may be way to generous on that last point, because she and her ilk operate from the belief that whatever destroys American, furthers the Marxist agenda.

International Socialism is her god, after herself of course.


11 posted on 05/31/2014 11:22:55 AM PDT by DoughtyOne
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 7 | View Replies]

Please bump the Freepathon or click above to donate or become a monthly donor!

12 posted on 05/31/2014 11:24:27 AM PDT by jazusamo (Sometimes I think that this is an era when sanity has become controversial: Thomas Sowell)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: jazusamo

13 posted on 05/31/2014 11:29:03 AM PDT by JPG (Yes We Can morphs into Make It Hurt.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: jazusamo

“We came, we saw, he died cackle cackle.” To the low information crowd: Qaddafi was sodomized with a bayonet and died a hideous, agonizing death at the hands of a bunch of pervert rabble we supported. Source: The Guardian. Makes me cringe she would think something like that is funny.


14 posted on 05/31/2014 11:32:38 AM PDT by Aliska
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: miss marmelstein

More details please!


15 posted on 05/31/2014 11:35:45 AM PDT by hoosiermama (Obama: "Born in Kenya" Lying now or then or now)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: jazusamo

“As the Obama Left likes to say, that’s a false choice.”

Hah. The false choice fallacy is one of the cornerstones of Leftist thought and a feature of every Obama speech. “You don’t want to expand government 5% every year forever? We’ll all die!”


16 posted on 05/31/2014 11:40:27 AM PDT by jiggyboy
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Aliska

I hear you, that’s really sick.


17 posted on 05/31/2014 11:47:43 AM PDT by jazusamo (Sometimes I think that this is an era when sanity has become controversial: Thomas Sowell)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 14 | View Replies]

To: hoosiermama

No, she flunked the Washington, D.C. bar exam back in the early 70s. She fled to Arkansas to pass it.


18 posted on 05/31/2014 11:53:04 AM PDT by miss marmelstein (Richard Lives Yet!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 15 | View Replies]

To: maggief; WildHighlander57; crosslink; LucyT; null and void; Nachum

FYI


19 posted on 05/31/2014 11:56:18 AM PDT by hoosiermama (Obama: "Born in Kenya" Lying now or then or now)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 18 | View Replies]

To: jazusamo

Amen!


20 posted on 05/31/2014 11:59:46 AM PDT by victim soul
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-35 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson