Ooh, that Hillary makes the doody-brainers so-o-o mad!!!

-- Christopher Weyant's New Yorker Daily Cartoon today

by Ken

"Whistleblower's yarn fails to tie Benghazi lapses to politics" is the head on the column the Washington Post's Dana Milbank offered regarding the much-ballyhooed "oversight" hearing promoted by House Republican master criminal Darrell Issa, starring Gregory Hicks, then our no. 2 diplomat in Libya, who who was going to blow the lid off the Obama White House's politicization of the awful night in Benghazi when Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed.

But despite Issa's incautious promise that the hearing's revelations would be "damaging" to Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hicks didn't lay a glove on the former secretary of state Wednesday. Rather, he held lawmakers from both parties rapt as he recounted the events of that terrifying night -- revealing a made-for-Hollywood plot with a slow, theatrical delivery and genuine emotion.

In Dana's retelling, Hicks's emerges as storytelling prowess was exceeded only by his apparently uncontrollable self-promotion.

Hicks, bald and with a white chin beard, said his "jaw dropped" when he heard U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice falsely claim on TV that there had been a protest at the Benghazi consulate, but he declined an invitation to challenge the veracity of the director of national intelligence, who said the statement reflected "our collective best judgment at the time."

Hicks said he thought a flyover by U.S. jets could have deterred the second of the two attacks that night, but he declined to question the judgment of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has said there was no way to get the fighters there in time.

Hicks was of little use to Republicans in their efforts to connect the lapses in the Benghazi response to Clinton or to the Obama White House. He said that he spoke to Clinton by phone at 2 a.m. that night and that she supported his actions. He undermined one of Issa's claims -- that Clinton had rejected an increase in security for the Libya facilities -- when he agreed that the secretary of state's name appears on all cables, even if she doesn't write them.

Hicks did have some damning things to say about the State Department trying to block him from cooperating with Issa's committee. But that wasn't quite the evidence Issa had promised: that politics drove the administration's response to Benghazi.

Never mind that there probably isn't a Republican in the House who could find Libya on a map, or who has any idea who in the country believed in what or whom or what effect any of it had on U.S. interests. And never mind that the Republican chumps intent on proving the Obama administration's dastardly "politicizing" of events in Libya spent eight years as silent as rocks while the Chimpy Bush regime devoted every second of every day to doing precisely this. Never mind anything. Let's just jump ugly on the effing Hillary. Didn't Hillary-hating used to be a crowd-pleasing political platform?

This is what happens when you have a political movement built on ideological hysteria without any actual ideology or real beliefs, just blinding hate informed by Tales Blown Out of Rush Limbaugh's Rectum of Darkness.

Republicans Hold Hearings About Hillary Clinton's Poll Numbers

Posted by Andy Borowitz


WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) -- Republican lawmakers asked increasingly tough questions today as they held another day of hearings to investigate, in the words of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California), "Hillary Clinton's suspiciously high poll numbers and what can be done to make them lower."

"With the help of Fox News, we have brutally attacked Hillary Clinton for months, and yet she remains more popular than ever," Rep. Issa said. "This committee needs to know how that happened, and how we can keep it from happening in the future."

Rep. Issa pointed to recent polls showing the former Secretary of State trouncing every potential G.O.P. Presidential candidate, "even a skinnier version of Chris Christie."

"We demand an answer to one simple question," he said. "What does Secretary Clinton know that none of us knows?"

In his boldest allegation of the day, Rep. Issa accused Secretary Clinton of "cynically using her post as Secretary of State to become wildly popular with the American people."

"I invite her to these hearings to answer those charges," he said.

Wrapping up for the day, Rep. Issa warned the former Secretary of State that he was just getting started: "Once we Republicans decide to investigate someone, we don't stop. If Secretary Clinton doesn't believe me, she should ask her husband."

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