Senate Republicans getting schooled

Sitting here listening to the Senate hearing on the  Benghazi attack.

Sec State Clinton is man-handling the Republican senators. Occassionally, she lets them talk before patiently explaining to them that who attacked and why isn't important right now - preventing it from happening again is what's important.

Seems like a reasonable person might conclude that understanding the who, what, where, when and why of an event might inform efforts to prevent it from happening again.

The fact that Benghazi participants were present at the Algeria attack using Libyan weapons and led by an AQIM subsidiary who was reacting to AQIM engagements in Mali might be of some interest to the U.S. Secretary of State.

Meanwhile the Democrat Senators are helping her to run out the clock and change the subject.

My BS Meter is off the Scales

Washington Times Headline:  "White House says it didn’t edit Benghazi talking points"

"On Friday, Mr. Petraeus told a congressional committee investigating the Libya attack that the CIA’s references to “Al Qaeda involvement” were stripped from his agency’s original talking points."
David Petraeus had to be feeling heat following the Benghazi debacle. CIA contractors killed in an al Qaeda attack is bad enough. The possibility that the unseemly things they were doing would become public is worse. We now know that he was under investigation for something unseemly in his personal life at the time as well. We don't know, yet, if the FBI investigation was used by someone to coerce him to shade his statements to shift attention away from administration malfeasance in Libya.

But by the time he testified last week, it seems his boils had all been popped. His affair was made public, he lost his job, he suffered personal dishonor, and the investigation turned to whether classified information may have been compromised in the course of his affair. About the only thing that could make things worse for him would be to be found in contempt of Congress.

So, he had no reason to lie on Friday.

But that's what the White House expects us to believe.

White House national security council spokesman Ben Rhodes "told reporters the only change made by the White House to the CIA’s initial reports was to change the word “consulate” to “diplomatic facility.”

“Other than that, we worked off of the [talking] points that were provided by the intelligence community,” Mr. Rhodes told reporters traveling aboard Air Force One with President Obama on a trip to southeast Asia. “So I can’t speak to any other edits that may have been made within the intelligence community. If there were adjustments made to them within the intelligence community, that’s common, and that’s something they would have done themselves within the intelligence community.”

When a propagandist for the regime uses the same phrase FOUR TIMES IN THREE SENTENCES, you can be sure his purpose is to plant an idea in your head, not to convey truthful facts.

Buy this plane or we'll shoot you with it

This article reminds me of a famous National Lampoon magazine cover.


There are lessons here: Don't sell anything you wouldn't want shooting at you. In the international arena, there are no friends and few allies but mainly countries with temporary comity of interests. And maybe, don't trust the French.

Libya Boosts Euro Fighter Jets at Paris Air Show

LE BOURGET, France - In the war in Libya, the French Rafale fighter jet has nearly done it all: no-fly zone enforcement, air-to-ground strikes, reconnaissance, overflight missions....


In 2007, the French bungled talks with Morocco, which instead opted to buy an F-16 from Lockheed Martin Corp. The same year, Gadhafi himself began exclusive talks with France to purchase 14 Rafales - the same type of jet now hitting his military assets with laser- and GPS-guided bombs.

That sale was still pending when the Arab spring swept through Libya, prompting Gadhafi's forces to crack down on democracy-minded protesters and leading to international sanctions against his regime and an U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing a no-fly zone and measures to protect Libyan civilians.

R2P - WTF?

No, not "winning the future" I don't think. R2P apparently means "Responsibility to Protect" and it seems to be a major feature of the Obama Doctrine. This from the Globe and Mail:

"This doctrine is known as the “responsibility to protect” (R2P for short) and was endorsed by the United Nations in 2005. It mandates that the “international community” is morally obliged to defend people who are in danger of massive human-rights violations. It’s rooted in Western guilt over the failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda. R2P is the moral underpinning of the war in Libya, and it’s the reason why people such as Paul Martin, Roméo Dallaire, Mr. Rae and Mr. Axworthy have been so amazingly eager for us to rush into battle.

So have Ms. Power and her sister warriors Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State, and Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the UN."

Columnist MARGARET WENTE concludes:

"We have entered a new age – the age of humanitarian imperialism. Humanitarian imperialists are besotted with fantasies of the West’s inherent goodness. As American writer David Rieff puts it, they have promised that, from now on, all wars will “noble wars of altruism.” To them, the facts on the ground don’t matter much. What really matters is their good intentions."

The Obama Doctrine: Post-Neo-Colonialism: All the problems of colonialism without the benefits.