Between Bluster and Brashness Over the Benghazi Bungle

 

 Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC 4th), the Chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, responded to the Hillary E-Mail controversy on CBS's Face The Nation.



 Some cynics wonder why Chairman Gowdy is now in the forefront about Hillary's sui generis e-mails while heading the State Department, as the Select Committee had knowledge of this practice going back to last summer.  Gowdy is a former federal prosecutor so he is patiently building a case and did not want Ms. Clinton to testify before he had all of the information vetted.

While a litigator in an Article III court wants all relevant information, such a broad request could be framed as a witch hunt or a fishing expedition in the political realm.  So now that there is sufficient public pressure, the former Secretary of State may feel compelled (for continued electoral viability) to "step up" and completely surrender the cyber records and not just feign compliance.

 Chairman Gowdy, who first came to office as part of the 2010 Tea Party wave elections, may distinguish himself between the bluster and the brashness of the District of Calamity by building a compelling case to discern what happened in the Benghazi bungle of September 11, 2012.

But if Gowdy fails to impressively interrogate the former chief of Foggy Bottom, conservative cynics may echo Hillary's last Congressional testimony--"What difference, at this point, does it make?"  Combined with Speaker Boehner's capitulation on DHS funding with a rider excluding Executive Amnesty (which lost 167 Republican votes on final passage), conservatives might wonder if having friends like that in high office whether they need enemies.

Former Secretary of State Clinton claimed that we should strive to figure out why the Benghazi bungle happened.  Could it be due to insecure communications from hdr22@clintonemail.com (or mau-suit@clintonemail.com)?  Or a pattern in the Obama Administration to use backdoor, off official communications, to convey inconvenient truths? It does not seem that it was just Hillary Clinton and Eric Holder, as we should not forget the pseudonym Richard Windsor (a.k.a. EPA chief Lisa Jackson ).  So much for the Obama Administration being the most transparent regime ever, as they took their anti-secrecy award in 2011 in a closed door presentation. 

Barack Obama on DHS Funding

  

 During the lame duck session of the 112th Congress, House Republicans fully funded FY 2015 budget, with the exception of Department of Homeland Security, in which a short term continuing resolution was applied to allow for a rider which would not Congressionally fund President Obama's Executive Action on illegal immigration.

 In the new 113th Congress, Senate Democrats refused to allow cloture to debate the DHS bill, lest the funding bill pass on majority terms.  The Obama White House and lackeys in the Lamestream Media and Senate Democrats are striving to frame Republicans for being obstructionists for not rubber stamping Mr. Obama's extra-constitutional effective amnesty. 

 Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has suggested bifurcating the Executive Amnesty issue from DHS funding.  But this legislative legerdemain was acceptable to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) only if House Speaker John Boehner acceded to Obama's will.  So far, Speaker Boehner holds the attitude that Senate Democrats ought to "get off their asses" and vote on the House bill. 

The GOP opponents seek to claim that Republicans will endanger the nation due to not funding DHS's $38 Billion budget. Alas, 80% of DHS's 240,000 employees are essential workers, who are required to report to work without a guaranteed pay check (even though all workers have routinely been paid after a budget standoff).  So security should not be an issue, even though the Obama Administration has been hyping the Boko Haram and al Shabob threat on the Mall of America and other Jewish owned shopping centers (but this has nothing to do with certain religions). 

So now the Obama Administration's tact has shifted to hardball politics.  During a townhall meeting telecast on MSNBC and Telemundo, President Obama dared the Republicans to pass the House bill, which would merit another Obama veto.   

  

 May the majorities in Congress stick to their principles and not quickly fold to a passive aggressive bully chief executive.  No matter what, the Lamestream Media is ready to repudiate Republicans. But the shutdown is so targeted that the public won't shed tears over the World War II monument being shut down as during the Flying Flip shutdown of October 2013.

h/t: Bruce Plante

DHS Newspeak and National Security--Help Big Sis' Out?

Mini-home malquoted doubleplusungood. Dayorder rectify goodthink for prolefeed bellyfull before Two Minute Hate.

There are times that it just seems apropos to use Newspeak from George Orwell’s seminal novel 1984 to cover the security issues in America, particularly regarding the Department of Homeland Security (Mini-home).  In the early days of the Obama Administration, Pentagon officials were warned not to refer to the Long War or the Global War on Terror but instead to bluster bureacratese “Overseas Contingency Operations”.   Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano tried to avoid refering to 9/11 or terrorism but preferred such euphemisms as “Man made disasters.” The Obama Administration considered what  Major Nidal Hasan in the 2009 Fort Hood shootings, where 13 people were killed and 29 injured was not homegrown terrorism or domestic jihad (despite the shooter screaming “Allahu Akbar”) but was a workplace violence incident.

Alas, this “nuanced” approach is not limited to Newspeak.  Just before the tax day protests which launched the Tea Party, HomeSec Secretary Napolitano sent out a nine page warning to Law Enforcement Officials on Rightwing Extremism, which including a sweeping threat assessment:

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

So Tea Party types, an older skewing demographic which gather in public places to extol elected officials to “Read the bill!” or “Follow the Constitution” are slimed as extremists with the power of the Federal Government.  Yet DHS took a more subdued approach to the Occupy Wall Street movement, despite evidence in a heavily redacted report that there was coordination amongst the anarchists and serious border crimes like human and drug smuggling.

Americans were encouraged by the Obama Administration to follow the successful New York City campaign “If you see something, say something.”   This pro-active approach from citizens thwarted the attempted Times Square bomber, uh I mean man-made disaster, of May 2010. But Obama’s Department of Justice under Eric Holder, is aggressively suing states for enforcing Federal Law on Immigration (ala Arizona) and trying to ensure voter integrity in the election process.  Moreover, President Obama’s ukase to temporarily suspend deporting illegal aliens who may qualify for the proposed DREAM act legislation has the practical consequence that Border Agents will not try to protect the border or engage in deportation cases.  This is especially true considering the DOJ hotline for deportation detainees to rat on their jailors for supposed civil rights violations.

Securing the nation’s borders and defending the nation’s security are two important enumerated responsibilities of the Executive Branch. DHS Secretary Napolitano testified before Congress last week and blithely admitted that terrorists may cross the borders from time to time.



Napolitano claims that the southern borders are heavily staffed., despite the Obama Administration’s new rules of ICE engagement, the toll-free tattle tale line and closing six ICE offices in Texas in Arizona in conjunction with the Supreme Court’s ruling on Arizona’s 1070 law.

So to translate the Newspeak slug which lead this piece into Obama era oldspeak “It is really not good that the Department of Homeland Security is quoted on something that is no longer operative. The order of the day is to rectify this by issuing alternative rhetoric which Joe-Six packs will whole-heartedly accept as part of their infotainment before the daily ad hominem attacks against our opponents.