They just can’t quit Benghazi!
by digby
Fox News is not giving up on the scandal and neither are the Republicans. They simply won’t accept anything that doesn’t prove what they want it to prove. This is, as I’ve written before, a surefire sign of a Clinton scandal. It’s not about the scandal itself, which is always byzantine and impossible to fully grasp exactly what they think must have happened. It’s a mantra, a brand, a tribal signal. The issue itself is beside the point.
But I do have to love it that they’re getting hysterical enough that they’re going after each other:
A number of Congressional Republicans have strongly criticized House Intelligence Committee Mike Rogers (R-MI) for a report that did not fault the Obama administration in the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Rogers, on Friday, brushed off that criticism saying the critics didn’t read the whole report.
In particular Rogers pushed back on comments by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) who said the report was “crap.” That, Rogers joked, “is a technical word meaning a bipartisan, well founded, well sourced report.”
The Weekly Standard also published a piece quoting a number of members arguing that the Bengahzi report was incomplete. Rogers said those comments were just because the outcome wasn’t what those members wanted.
“First of all, they didn’t read the report. And unfortunately people wanted this report to be the expansive Benghazi report,” Rogers told TPM and other reporters right after the Christian Science Monitor Breakfast. “I told everyone, including some members on my committee that it was not going to be an expansive Benghazi report. My jurisdiction — the committee’s jurisdiction was the lane of the intelligence community. So I think they wanted a report to come out to go after the State Department or the White House. That was not my goal. I put no piece of information in a finding if we couldn’t corroborate the information. So one piece of testimony is not corroboration. I had to have other corroboration in order to do it.”
Andrea Tantaros (who is quickly becoming everyone’s favorite Fox Nut) even accused Rogers of a cover-up:
TANTAROS: And there’s also questions about Mike Rogers, because he put out that report recently. And some Republicans on the committee are very unhappy with him. They have questions.
So he put out this report where he said, oh, nothing happened here, nothing to see here. No Republicans endorsed it. Wasn’t his wife doing some consulting on security on the ground at the time? So this isn’t just a partisan issue. And it is, it is an issue now because the State Department just this week, and we talked about this a couple days ago, Harris, reported that our embassies are still not secure. So in the wake of the torture memo, have we learned anything?
He probably is corrupt, but this isn’t the likeliest form of it.
The best way to think of these trumped up scandals is political stalking. It’s a form of harassment designed to intimidate and bully the opposition, keep them off balance. And just like the personal kind of stalking, it works pretty well.
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