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.
SPANISH INQUISITOR 
Spanqi, the current crop of Republicans are political scum: that includes those in Congress and those who have taken over state governments around the country. They can’t stand that there’s a nigger in their White House, plain and simple. He’s just an uppity nigger standing in their path to power, and he’s shown up their best and brightest (McCain? Romney?) twice now. They’ve shown that their entire reason for existence is to live out a fantasy of power and wealth and aristocracy. Scratch any one of these guys and you’ll find a white sheet and hood just bursting to come out. You can be as thoughtful as you like about the situation as you try to suss out their motives, but they don’t go any deeper than what I’ve said. This Republican Party needs to be kicked to the curb and shoved back into the sewers they crawled out of.
I’m no fan of Obama, not any more, but compared to the sewer rats forming his opposition, he’s a knight in fucking shiny armor.
Yeah, that’s a no-brainer. Obama isn’t perfect, but no one is. But in comparison to his opposition, he’s God.
(A very apt comparison, doncha think?)
It’s not just religion, apparently. This irrational obsession with Obama could well be triggered by racism. At least, that’s the only explanation I see for one of my family members, who is an atheist yet fits pretty neatly with the Fox News crowd.
Thank you for the stonekettle article. I wrote a post about Benghazi myself today, but this was more entertaining.
Actually, I agree with you. I don’t think there is any other explanation for the Republicans clear antipathy towards Obama than Racism. Theirs, and the knowledge that there is enough people like them out there that will give them a pass because of it. But the mindset that allows them to hold two simultaneously inconsistent opinions – that come from religion.
I think it’s the other way around – it’s the mindset that allows people to hold 2 inconsistent ideas is a perfect spot for religion to take root. Though, we all have that mindset to a certain degree.
They’re not irrational assholes because they’re religious, they’re religious because they’re irrational assholes. The dual fantasies of their god getting all credit and no blame along with Obama getting no credit and all blame are the same, infantile, irrational fantasies about how they want reality to be.
Jon Stewart one night this past week expressed his anger that he had to agree with the Fox news douches, but he drew the line at Cheney and Rumsfeld expressing outrage. You can’t be a douche and then call out someone else for being a douche, unless you’re willing to own up to being a douche yourself. So if those clowns said something like, “as someone who perpetrated lies upon not just the American people but the world, I can, with authority, state that Obama….”
As much as I love bashing religion, especially Christianity, I see this as plain old politics; religion need not enter the equation at all.
I think the Republicans have two targets in their sights. One, obviously, is President Obama. They’re shitting their diapers with glee (especially David Vitter) at the thought of humiliating the (uppity – as they would say it if they had any balls) black guy who had the nerve to beat their candidates in not one, but two consecutive, elections. Frankly, the 2012 election was theirs to lose – the economic recovery has been slow, to put it mildly, which is never good for the incumbent. Had they run a semi-human candidate instead of Mitt the Nauseating, Narcissistic Robot, they could have won the White House. The problem was, Mitt was the most credible candidate they had to offer, which speaks volumes about the current state of the Republican party.
The other target is Hillary Clinton, who currently looks like a clear Democratic party favorite to run for president in 2016 (I’ve got mixed feelings about that possibility, but that’s a discussion for another day). That’s why their focal points have been a) what was Obama doing, and b) what was Hillary doing when Benghazi was going down? Were they editing talking points to cover their asses? The CIA has its hands all over this mess, yet the GOP hasn’t said one word about that agency. It’s all White House and State Department, all the time.
Having said all that, I agree that Benghazi should be a non-issue and I’m really pissed off that the media is giving the Republican games so much attention. The bottom line is, Libya is a fucking dangerous place. And sometimes, really dangerous, violent shit happens in fucking dangerous places. Hell, sometimes dangerous, violent shit happens in places that aren’t ordinarily considered as fucking dangerous places. Places like Boston and Sandy Hook, for example. Shit happens. We all wish it didn’t, but wishing doesn’t make it so.
One last thought about religion: I’m not convinced that most of the Republicans who profess to be Christians are any such thing. I think most of them are using the language of religion to manipulate the clueless who actually do believe. In other words, it all comes back to politics and power.