By Charles Hurt
The party that swept into power on promises of transparency and
accountability scrambled Wednesday to circle wagons in an extravagant
attempt to protect administration officials, the White House and the woman many Democrats hope will be their next nominee for president.
Congressional
Democrats strenuously tried covering up the inquiry into the botched
handling and dishonest aftermath of the terrorist attack on a U.S.
facility in Benghazi that left our ambassador to Libya and three other Americans dead.
It
was a performance the likes of which have not been seen in this town
since the darkest days of the Iraq War when Republicans on Capitol Hill
scraped and scrounged for any sort of defense that could be made of the Bush administration and the mountains of bad news that kept emerging from Iraq.
A Democratic Congress, we were promised back then, would be different. Democrats vowed to be a check on the White House
and the administration no matter who was president. Turns out, that was
just something that sounded good in the heat of an election campaign.
Witnesses
and documents presented at Wednesday’s hearing revealed lax security
before the murderous attack. The rescue and response to the attack was
somewhere between slow and nonexistent. And even though it was
immediately evident to everyone on the ground that what had happened was
a calculated terrorist attack, the White House
and administration officials repeatedly and publicly claimed that it
was a spontaneous protest of an anti-Islamic video posted on YouTube.
(Lost
in all the incessant squabbling is the chilling fact that before the
Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi, there had been an isolated protest of the
video at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. But by blaming the deadly Benghazi attack on the video, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
and others thrust the video into such prominence that it then sparked
massive riots among Muslims all around the world, leading to countless
more dead.)
As for Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Wednesday’s hearing looked like a wallpaper and whitewashing convention.
After months and months of trying to silence the State Department
officials giving testimony, Democrats were suddenly shocked — shocked! —
that the whistleblowers might feel a wee bit vulnerable for
contradicting some of the most powerful political hands in the country.
“I am glad the whistleblowers are here, and I will do every single thing in my power to protect the whistleblowers,” said Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Maryland Democrat.
Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, New York Democrat, gave a rousing defense of Mrs. Clinton,
implying that it was unpatriotic to raise questions about her actions
and statements in the wake of what we now know was a terrorist attack.
“I
find it truly disturbing and very unfortunate that when Americans come
under attack, the first thing some did in this country was attack
Americans,” she said. “Attack the military; attack the president; attack
the State Department; attack the former senator from the great state of New York, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.”
Mrs. Maloney’s primary focus of concern about the attack that killed four people was to argue that Mrs. Clinton had not, in fact, signed a cable from Washington denying additional security in Libya. No, Mrs. Maloney said, Mrs. Clinton’s name was typed at the bottom of the cable, not signed.
It was a real Perry Mason moment.
Mrs. Maloney
was so obsessed with this factoid that she devoted her entire
interrogation of the witnesses to that one single nonpoint. It was worse
than waterboarding.
And then there was Rep. William Lacy Clay, Missouri Democrat, who was
so dedicated to getting to the bottom of things that he spent his
entire inquiry blaming the attack on budget cuts and trying to score
some political points about sequestration and those stingy Republicans.
As President Obama recently said about preventing terrorist attacks, “This is hard stuff.” And as White House spokesman Jay Carney said the other day, “Benghazi happened a long time ago.”
Perhaps the sentiment that most perfectly sums up Democrats’ approach to getting to the bottom of everything came from Mr. Cummings himself.
“Death is a part of life,” he said. So cheer the heck up and quit asking so many hard questions.
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