For awhile, I thought I was watching one of the Salem witch trials; I expected the Puritan elders to haul out the torture rack to use on the suspected witch, Dame Hillary.
That’s how vicious some of the members of the House Benghazi Committee looked and acted during the televised hearing Oct. 22. The Republican members on that travesty of a committee resembled snide, pompous, condescending inquisitors from a Dark Age.
The committee fell flat on its face. In 11 breathtaking hours of sheer folly, that bogus committee imploded, proving all by itself it has been a partisan, anti-Hillary kangaroo court ever since it began 17 months ago, at a cost to us taxpayers of $4.5 million. Just as some honest Republicans have already said.
Last week, in my opinion column, I compared Benghazi committee members to dogs frantically digging for a bone that isn’t there. The pathetic spectacle I witnessed on TV Oct. 22 reinforced that opinion.
By the end of that inexcusable hearing, committee chairman Rep. Trey Goudy’s face said it all. It was glazed to a varnished sheen with perspiration, most likely caused by a mixture of desperation and anger. Desperation because he and his henchmen had tried so stubbornly to find the “smoking gun” – or at least to trip up Hillary and make a fool or a liar out of her. Anger because it must have dawned on Gowdy by the end of that hearing that his committee had spent 11 hours cooking – overcooking – its own goose. They didn’t make a fool out of Clinton; they made fools of themselves.
Through it all, Clinton – with eloquence, touches of humor and the most extraordinary grace under pressure – endured the fools’ verbal assaults, at times using pointed comments to pop their balloons, to reveal their own misguided, murky motives.
There was no logic or unity in that hearing. It was helter-skelter, like watching a pin-ball game, zig-zagging back and forth from the really ridiculous to the laughably ludicrous. The seven Republican committee members behaved like boozy hooligans at a carnival shooting gallery, firing blindly, hoping to connect with anything.
What they were trying to prove, apparently, though it was hard to tell from that ill-conceived hearing, is Clinton was the prime architect of America’s involvement in Libya and she left ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in the lurch, denying requested security enforcement before their deaths in a terrorist attack in Benghazi three years ago.
Committee members flailed about, frantically bringing up a slew of irrelevancies, including an attempt by Rep. Mike Pompeo to trip up Clinton. His long, sneering harangue was about frequent Libya-related emails from a long-time friend, Sidney Blumenthal. Pompeo made a complete ass of himself at the moment he honed in for his intended “gotcha moment” – that the Blumenthal emails proved Clinton took him more seriously than the ambassador, thus implying stupidly that Clinton blew off requests for beefed-up security.
Rep. Susan Brooks also made a fool of herself when she plopped down two stacks of Clinton emails – one fat stack, one slim stack – as if “seeing is believing” is the proof Clinton went to great lengths to set up the ambassador and others in Libya (the fat stack of emails), then brushed them off later, leaving them to die (the slim stack of emails).
Right after the sham marathon, a reporter asked Gowdy if the hearing revealed anything new. Like a deer caught in the headlights, he flailed verbally: “I think some of Jimmy Jordan’s questioning – well, when you say new today, we knew some of that already. We knew about the emails. In terms of her testimony? I don’t know that she testified much differently today than she has the previous time she testified. I’ll have to go look at the transcripts.”
A good, non-partisan Benghazi committee could have explored and then implemented ways to shore up security for Americans in the world’s most volatile areas. This Benghazi committee, however, missed the chance to do that because of its monomaniacal determination to take down Hillary. Lacking the smoking gun they so frantically seek, these Hillary-baiters have one hope left – that the FBI will indict her for security breaches.
They ought to be ashamed of themselves; they aren’t, of course. Even after Hillary Clinton is elected as the next President of the United States, they’ll just keep digging more holes deeper, finding nothing and ultimately falling into the empty holes they’ve dug.
