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" The majority of the members of the Irish parliament are professional politicians, in the sense that otherwise they would not be given jobs minding mice at crossroads. - Myles na Gopaleen (Brian O&amp;#039;Nolan, also d/b/a Flann O&amp;#039;Brien) I would like to congratulate the United States House of Representatives for the very fine show they put on today on the stage provided by the Special Committee To Keep Benghazi In The News Until The Polls Drop. There has been no better example of non-governance displayed on TV since the last time Marco Rubio gave a speech. There has been no better view granted of the sheer stupidity and incompetence that has run riot in those halls because of the last two midterm elections since the last time Steve King parted his brain on the left side. There has been no more sterling example of the now-undeniable truth that modern movement conservatism has declined into a tangled mess of myth, shibboleth, and outright fabulism since the last time Ed Klein wrote a book. \u00A0A whole philosophy of government, and still an influential one, stands exposed as little more than a puppet show for the national Id, and not a particularly sharp one, either. A movement full of grifters and ignorami, acting out a simulacrum of representative government for the benefit of an audience steeped in comfortable, narcotic delusion. Seriously, today&amp;#039;s hearings performed roughly the same public service that Patricia Neal did in A Face In The Crowd, when she threw open Lonesome Rhodes&amp;#039;s microphone when he wasn&amp;#039;t looking. Those morons out there? Shucks, I could take chicken fertilizer and sell it to them as caviar. I could make them eat dog food and think it was steak. Sure, I got &amp;#039;em like this... You know what the public&amp;#039;s like? A cage of Guinea Pigs. Good Night, you stupid idiots. Good Night, you miserable slobs. They&amp;#039;re a lot of trained seals. I toss them a dead fish and they&amp;#039;ll flap their flippers. I gave up when they came around to this Martha Roby person again. Thursday morning, Congresswoman Roby enlivened the questioning by quoting an e-mail that, for all available evidence, may well have been exchanged between a janitor at Foggy Bottom and someone in the mailroom, speculating that Hillary Rodham Clinton might not even be aware that the United States had a &amp;quot;presence&amp;quot; in Benghazi. This enabled HRC to explain to Congresswoman Roby that not everybody in the State Department is as dumb as Congresswoman Roby is, and that the Secretary of State does not know the content of every meatheaded e-mail sent by one of the 70,000 State Department employees to another. \u00A0She might as well have informed the congresswoman that a duck indeed was not sitting on her head. ROBY: It&amp;#039;s not so clear from everything that we&amp;#039;ve reviewed that you had a vision going forward in Benghazi into 2012 and beyond\u2026I want to point this out to you\u2014I say this, because I want to point you to an e-mail in early February 2012, between two staffers at your Libya desk that says, you didn&amp;#039;t know whether we still even had a presence in Benghazi. ROBY: Secretary Clinton, if I may, I hear what you&amp;#039;re saying, but this e-mail says something very, very different. CLINTON: Well, I\u2014you know, I can&amp;#039;t speak to that. I can just tell you what I was doing, and I was doing a lot. ROBY: Sure. But these\u2014this was your staff. CLINTON: Well, could\u2014could you tell me who is\u2014who are the names on this e-mail that you&amp;#039;re talking about? ROBY: Sure. I can. Turn to tab 31. You have a book in front of you. It is Alice Abdallah and I&amp;#039;m going to pronounce it wrong, Enya Sodarais (ph)? Is that correct? CLINTON: They were not on my staff. I&amp;#039;m not in any way contradicting what they think they heard or what they heard somebody say. But the people that I know\u2026 ROBY: Can you tell me who they were if they were not on your staff? CLINTON: They were not on my\u2014they were in the State Department, along with thousands of other people. They were not part of the secretary staff. But I get what you&amp;#039;re saying, Congresswoman. This exchange should have disqualified Roby from asking any question beyond her lunch order. On Thursday afternoon, Congresswoman Roby dialed the unction up to an extreme. &amp;quot;Why,&amp;quot; she asked, &amp;quot;Did you not pick up the phone and call your friend, Ambassador Stevens?&amp;quot; This is exactly the kind of question Ms. Roby&amp;#039;s constituents would have asked. More&amp;#039;s the pity. Elijah Cummings followed up with vigorous attack on the Republican claim that HRC had been neglectful of embassy security. Cummings used a video of Darrell Issa&amp;#039;s lying in some ballroom about the fictitious &amp;quot;stand-down&amp;quot; order as an example of how eager the majority on the committee has been to create scandal where there is none because, as Congressman Adam Schiff of California pointed out at the end of the morning session, this entire investigation has been nothing less than a $4.7 million in-kind contribution to the Republican National Committee. In the middle of his presentation, Roby tried to get Cummings to yield. Fat chance, ma&amp;#039;am. This was a hearing into nothing. This was a hearing made up only of the empty air. What happened in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 was a violent assault in which four Americans lost their lives. There were undeniable cock-ups in the American response, all of which have been explored at length in the several previous investigations. None of them involved what Susan Rice may have said to David Gregory on NBC. None of them involved Sidney Blumenthal&amp;#039;s opinion of Bob Gates. None of them involved anything on which Trey Gowdy wasted the Congress&amp;#039;s time or the country&amp;#039;s money Thursday. Did she hand them their own asses? Of course she did. She was cool and she was poised and, by the end of the day, she was even out-arguing them about the role of the video in the attacks across the Muslim world, which was the ur-point of this fiasco in the first place. This whole thing started because of a ginned-up controversy about what Susan Rice had said about the attacks on\u00A0Meet The Press in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. (Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio is still howling about this.) Responding to a question from Cummings, HRC actually got to explain that the video at least was partly responsible for the rage that broke out from Indonesia to Tunisia. That, alas, was beside the point. So also was Congressman Adam Schiff&amp;#039;s boot in the ass in which he pretty much demonstrated that Blumenthal&amp;#039;s appearance before this committee\u2014the transcript of which Gowdy refuses to release\u2014was a fishing expedition after material about the Clintons that could be used for future ratfcking purposes.And not even Hillary Rodham Clinton&amp;#039;s ability to stand up against the gales of innuendo and fakery will make it less so. This was a performance piece for the people residing within the conservative media bubble\u2014who already are hip to the lies of the lamestream media, and who already are too smart to be fooled by the Hildebeast and her alleged facts because Mark Levin has told them that they are too smart to be so fooled, and who watch their favorite TV news stars every night, where there is always Another Question, or Another E-Mail, or, for all I know, Another Witness who saw the ghost of Vince Foster wandering through the Mena Airport with Kathleen Willey&amp;#039;s cat in his mouth. The people out in the world are one problem, but now they&amp;#039;re pretty plainly electing each other to the national legislature. That makes it our problem. And, as the day ends, sunset spreads along the horizon and the grassy plain goes quiet as night falls. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a39099/benghazi-kangaroo-court-conservative-madness/>