Does anyone understand WTF is going on with this trumped up controversy? I watch the news, and I thought the whole thing died down after the election, when the false indignity of the Republicans was used to hopefully, maybe, possibly push Romney over the edge and into the Oval Office. It didn’t work. So it should have dimmed, even died, because there was no “there, there” as Obama has pointed out.
But the Republicans dug up their dead horse from the horse graveyard, dragged it into the political arena, and have been flogging it repeatedly in hearings that center around, in part, reporter’s characterizations of emails relayed to them on “deep background”, emails that have been redacted, edited and mis-characterized to make it appear that there is a cover-up of something that never happened.
At least, that’s what I get out of the whole brouhaha.
And Dick Cheney, that pompous jackass responsible for the sad state of affairs this country is in at the moment, claims that this is the “worst incident he’s ever seen in his career”. Hello? Did he miss, was he sleeping through, 9/11? At least Bush was standing on the rubble of the World Trade Center. Where was Cheney? Has anyone ever explained to him the meaning of the word “hyperbole”?
I have a hard time not being flabbergasted that Congress, specifically the Republicans in Congress, are spending so much time trying to pin Benghazi jello on Obama, when children are dying in school shootings, the unemployment lines have hardly shortened since 2008, and the rich are continuing to shift wealth to off shore accounts, and all they do is …well…nothing. Schools are shutting down for lack of funds, cities are filing for Bankruptcy protection, the poor are struggling, the middle class is struggling, and Congress spends its time holding hearings on Benghazi to discern why we didn’t know what we didn’t know when we didn’t know it. And why it’s all Obama’s fault.
This guy, Jim Write, posted a well written article that gives voice to the frustration I feel, but cannot articulately write about with seeing flames on the page. A little taste:
Let’s lay out the playing field.
Just to make sure we all understand the rules.
If the President is in the White House situation room surrounded by his staff and military advisors, and he, personally, on his authority as the Commander In Chief, authorizes the US Navy to take whatever action necessary, if he authorizes weapons-free and gets out of the way, and then US Navy SEAL snipers acting on the resulting orders from their on-scene commander execute an astounding feat of marksmanship which then instantly kills three Somali pirates via three perfectly executed head shots which then subsequently allows Navy boarding crews to successfully rescue American merchant Captain Richard Phillips off the Horn of Africa in the tradition of Preble and Decatur – the President gets no credit for that at all, he was only a bystander.
Likewise, if the President is in the White House situation room, surrounded by his staff and military advisors, and he, personally, gives the go/no-go order on his authority as the Commander in Chief, and US Navy SEALs then jump from a C-130 high above Adow, Somalia, and make a daring raid in the middle of the night on an armed pirate camp to successfully rescue Jessica Buchanan and Poul Hagen Thisted, and kill nine pirates in the process – well, Obama gets no credit for that either. He’s just some uninvolved asshole who watched it all on TV.
And of course, if the President is in the White House situation room surrounded by his staff and military advisors, and he, in real-time, personally, gives the go/no-go order on his authority as the Commander In Chief, and US Navy SEALs then swoop into an allied country and double-tap Osama Bin Laden right in the brainpan – Obama gets no credit for that at all. In fact, if he even mentions it in any way whatsoever, he’s grandstanding, taking credit, dishonoring the men who actually put themselves in harm’s way to neutralize one of America’s greatest enemies.
However.
However, should four Americans die in the middle of a riot in a warzone, by intent or by accident – well, then that, by the Angry Bearded Christian God, that, Sir, is all Barack Obama’s fault, one hundred percent.
And he should be impeached for it.
And maybe shipped back to Kenya.
He gets no credit for any success and all the blame for every failure. (my emphasis)
Do I have that about right?
I’m not complaining, I just like to know what the rules are.
Now go read the rest of it. It’s spot on.
Do you find that the “no credit for success/blame for every failure” thing sounds familiar? It’s an interesting dichotomy, given that if you polled all of the Republicans, you’d probably find, to a man (and the occasional woman), that they are god-fearing Christians. And that one of the hallmarks of their beliefs is that God gets all the credit for successes (they call them miracles) but never gets blamed for the failures. Do you get the sense that they are treating Obama in some pseudo-religious, perverse, reverse way as the Anti-Christ? That their religious beliefs, that see him has the Great Satan, drives them to see things so irrationally? He’s all failure, and no success. C’mon, we weren’t born yesterday.
Ok, I get the self-interest, the politics, the power hungry motivations behind a lot of it. Much is explained by “it’s politics”. But it’s relentless. I have a hard time understanding how reasonably educated, intelligent people, people that can manage political campaigns, give coherent speeches, and balance a checkbook, can actually fail to see how empty and shallow their attempts are, UNLESS you take into consideration their religious backgrounds, which require that they become proficient in juggling cognitive dissonance in their day-to-day lives on a repeated basis. They don’t see it, because they’ve been trained all their lives to ignore the contradictory positions their religious beliefs insist they hold.
And it carries over to their life in politics.
I can only hope that the bulk of the electorate see through this shit, and vote them all out of office in 2016.
