“Whoa: Did the IRS also target Jewish groups for ‘extra-special attention’?,” Twitchy asks:

The IRS admits to targeting conservative groups for additional review and laughably claims the witch hunt wasn’t “motivated by political bias.” What will its math-challenged spokeswoman Lois Lerner say about allegations that the IRS gave “extra-special attention to the tax-exempt status of some Jewish groups for political reason”?

* * * * *

The pro-Israel group Z STREET filed a lawsuit against the IRS in 2010, claiming an IRS agent said the organization would come under extra scrutiny because it’s “connected to Israel.”

In addition, the IRS agent told a Z STREET representative that the applications of some of those Israel-related organizations have been assigned to “a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.”

* * * * * *

The Jewish Press reports:

The IRS even took the position that because Israel is a country “where terrorism happens,” the service was justified in taking additional time to determine whether Z STREET was involved with funding terrorism.

The first hearing in Z STREET v IRS is reportedly scheduled for July.

And that’s in addition to John Podhoretz’s post at Commentary yesterday, in which he wrote:

As it happens, I know something about the chilling effect of an IRS investigation into a non-profit’s 501 (c)-3 status because in 2009, COMMENTARY (a non-profit) received a letter from the Internal Revenue Service threatening the revocation of the institution’s standing as a non-profit due to a claim that on our website we had crossed the line in the 2008 election from analysis to explicit advocacy of the candidacy of John McCain for president. (Non-profits are not permitted to endorse candidates.) The charge was false—all we had done was reprint a speech delivered at a COMMENTARY event by then-Sen. Joseph Lieberman in which he had endorsed McCain.

Taking away a non-profit’s ability to receive tax-exempt charitable contributions is equivalent to a death sentence.

We were told by counsel that, should the IRS rule against us, we would have almost no recourse. You might think free speech rights would trump any such effort, but of course no one is challenging your speech rights, merely finding that what you say runs afoul of laws dealing with non-profits. You have no constitutional right to non-profit status, after all.

Disproving the false charge, which we did eventually in part by literally printing out the 2 million words that had appeared on this site in 2008 and sending them in many boxes to the IRS to show that the words in which Lieberman said he was supporting McCain were essentially a part per million, cost us tens of thousands of dollars and dozens upon dozens of hours of lost work time. The inquiry, which never should have been brought, was closed. But talking to lawyers and strategizing and the like in such a circumstance make the experience an ordeal that leaves you a bit shell-shocked—which is, of course, the point.

Now, I had assumed that a hostile reader or hostile liberal group was responsible for the IRS inquiry into COMMENTARY, but there is a salient detail in today’s story that makes me think something else might have been at work. IRS official Lerner said the effort against the conservative groups in 2012 came from “low-level” officials in the Cincinnati office. The investigation into COMMENTARY came out of the Columbus office. Is there something going on inside the IRS offices in Ohio?

Who will find out?

“Well whaddataknow,” Iowahawk tweets today. “Turns out ‘low level IRS employees in Cincinnati’ was IRS Chief Counsel in 2011.” (Another Iowahawk tweet today was the basis for our headline above.)

More after the pagebreak.

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November 24, 2008. Curiously, Time meant their headline to be a compliment.

You can’t say you weren’t warned:

● “FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.”

— Press release, UCLA Newsroom, August 10, 2004.

● “RECOVERY SUMMER #4: Obama: Our economy is ‘poised for progress.’ Or is it #5 now?”

— Blog post, Instapundit.com, today.

Or as a recent video at Prager University asked:

Oh, and speaking of Time, when I searched Google for the above cover, I came across three stories which chart the annual progress of how Time viewed BHO in relation to FDR:

● November 24, 2008: Time magazine publishes above cover with BHO as FDR, complete with Roosevelt’s jaunty cigarette holder, which is probably the most miraculous portion of the illustration, considering the leftwing MSM’s obsession with political correctness.

●  July 6, 2009: Time’s cover headline sagely cautions, “What Barack Obama Can Learn From FDR,” which seems more than a little odd, considering that a year ago, Time thought Obama was FDR.

● February 22nd, 2010: The metatag on a Time article, in other words, the headline that comes up when searching on Google  warns,  “Why Obama is not FDR.”

Given the moribund nature of the American economy, perhaps Time’s first assessment was more correct than they realized.

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From those wonderful folks who brought you Walter Cronkite politicizing the Tet Offensive, Dan Rather and RatherGate, and Katie Couric writing Christmas poems in praise of ObamaCare comes this gem from CBS anchor Scott Pelley, speaking to Quinnipiac University:

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#JayCarneyExcuses My dog ate my talking points. And The President ate my dog.

— Hugo Hackenbush (@MangyLover) May 10, 2013

Heh, indeed.™

Related: “Picture perfect: Jay Carney gets caught ‘white washing’ during press briefing.”

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In between some thoughts on a gibberish tweet from Media Matters (aren’t they all?), at the Breitbart.com Conversation, John Hayward speculates on who might go under the bus first:

The groundwork is now laid for a big coordinated push by Democrat operatives in the media to portray Clinton as a rogue loose cannon who cooked up these phony talking points with the assistance of protocol droids like Victoria Nuland, while poor helpless Barack Obama was completely out of the loop.  Why, he and Biden were probably as shocked as the rest of us to hear Gregory Hicks’ testimony yesterday!

The bus will roll over Nuland first – she’s going to be painted as a loose cannon who spent days doctoring intelligence reports without the knowledge of poor, helpless Hillary Clinton.  If that doesn’t work, Hillary will be the next deer frozen in the headlights… except the Clintons don’t do that deer-in-the-headlights stuff.  They fight back.  That will make things interesting, especially as people like Boehlert find their in-boxes filling up with conflicting talking points from Team Obama and Team Clinton.

Jay Carney was so spooked today that he’s blaming it all on Mitt Romney.

As Paul Brandus of The Week writes that “The dam bursts on Benghazi — Thanks to a bombshell report from ABC News, GOP accusations that the White House politicized a tragedy no longer seem so unsubstantiated:”

There’s a meatpacking-like quality to all this. You don’t really want to know how your hamburger is processed, do you? The administration’s defense — and it’s looking thinner than ice on a late spring pond — is that government bureaucracy is messy and multi-layered and that’s a big part of why Rice said what she did.

Benghazi occurred seven weeks before election day. The administration’s strategy was simple: Downplay the terror attack, change the narrative, and run out the clock. And that’s what it did.

But now the dam has burst. Carney’s “here at the White House” comment has essentially thrown Clinton under the bus. Republicans, who leaked the edited emails to Karl and Hayes, have succeeded on two fronts: They’ve got the administration on the defensive over Benghazi, and they’ve weakened the Democrat’s most formidable 2016 candidate.

It seems that after all that digging, Republicans have found their pony at last.

Faster, please:

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James Taranto on “The New Nixon,” only this time around, “the press cheered as the IRS investigated the president’s opponents,” he adds:

Last year, the Post notes, “Tea Party groups complained . . . that they were receiving dozens of questionnaires from the IRS with regard to their applications for nonprofit tax status, probing their political leanings and activities.”

That prompted an editorial from the New York Times cheering on the IRS: “Taxpayers should be encouraged by complaints from Tea Party chapters applying for nonprofit tax status at being asked by the Internal Revenue Service to prove they are ‘social welfare’ organizations and not the political activists they so obviously are.” The Times did say the rules “should be applied across the board,” and the list of groups it wanted investigated included Priorities USA, a pro-Obama group, as well as a couple of conservative groups and Americans Elect, the failed third-party effort.

But the IRS now acknowledges that Tea Party people were right: The agency was investigating them because of their political profile. Viewpoint-based selective enforcement of IRS regulations would be a First Amendment violation even if the regulations themselves are constitutional. It is difficult to credit Lois Lerner’s claim that this was merely an error and not politically motivated. Imagine if the NAACP and the United Negro College Fund got hit with this sort of treatment and the IRS denied a racial motive while acknowledging it had deliberately chosen groups whose names contained synonyms for “black.”

Read the whole thing.

Regarding the Watergate flashbacks caused by Benghazi, in a guest post at Power Line, David Gelernter writes:

It is the Democratic Party that’s on trial today; and to a lesser extent, America’s mainstream media.  For Democrats (and especially Democratic senators) it is put-up-or-shut-up time: are they Democrats or Americans first?  Obviously their first instinct was to defend the Democratic administration.  Republicans would have done the same.  But starting with the Hayes story on the Rice propaganda points (and the neo-Soviet process that turned them from truth to lies), and then the Issa hearing Wednesday (and a recent ABC news piece focusing again on the phonied-up talking points), no honest observer can fail to suspect this administration of doing unspeakable things.  It is Congress’s duty to find out the truth.

How would Republicans act if a GOP administration were under this sort of cloud?  We know exactly how.  It was the radically partisan Edward Kennedy who proposed that a senate select committee investigate Watergate—but in February 1973, the Senate voted unanimously to create that committee.  Republican Senator Howard Baker was vice chairman, and asked the key question: ”What did the president know and when did he know it?”  Which Democratic senator will ask that question today, now that the issue isn’t breaking-and-entering but lying about four murders, including the murder of an American ambassador?  Which cabinet member will be Eliot Richardson and resign rather than continuing to be part of a coverup?  Will John Kerry rise to the challenge?

To ask the question is to answer it.

But speaking of All the President’s Men…

Update: Also at Power Line, John Hinderaker adds, “Come to think of it, this may be one more reason why Obama is so single-mindedly devoted to winning back the House in 2014: the way his administration’s scandals are multiplying, an all-Democrat Congress provides insurance against having to leave office via helicopter.”

And via the comments section:

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“ABC Finds Benghazi Talking Points Extensively Edited by State Dept,” Jim Geraghty’s writes at NRO’s Campaign Spot blog:

The final Morning Jolt of the week features trouble in Syria, Kerry getting static from Russia, an argument against the immigration bill from an unexpected source, more worries from . . . but the lead item is the morning’s breaking news:

BREAKING: Jay Carney Lied About the Benghazi Talking Points

Breaking this morning, from ABC News’ Jonathan Karl:

When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story.

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department. The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.

Also breaking: apparently ABC, aka, the House of Stephanopoulos, is temporarily at least, toying with the idea of getting back into the news business.

(As opposed to NBC: Lisa Myers said this morning on TV that Democrats have been calling her to attempt to undermine the testimony of Benghazi whistleblower Gregory Hicks,” the Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper notes today. What a shock.)

Also from Geraghty: “Stop Seeing Benghazi Through the 2016 Campaign Lens;” in other words, it’s as much about the man who holds himself out as Commander in Chief, as it is his former Secretary of State:

Today Andrew Malcolm asserts that “the big Benghazi mystery” was “where was Obama while four Americans perished?” The answer has always been pretty clear: at the White House. He was informed at the beginning of the evening by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey, and then informed of the aftermath the following morning. As far as he and his administration were concerned, his staff was on it.

* * * * * *

For now, one of yesterday’s most stunning revelations was the news that at no point did the U.S. ask the Libyans for permission to fly into their airspace for a rescue operation, presumably one of the first steps in putting together an operation like that. In other words, at no point during the seven hours did the ball get rolling on an effort to rescue them.

As James Lileks noted yesterday on the Ricochet podcast with Byron York, the administration was likely so terrified of a botched Jimmy Carter-style rescue mission less than two months before the election, that it never sought to mount one.

Which brings us to Allahpundit at Hot Air, with sneak previews of “Coming soon to a congressional subpoena near you.”

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News travels slow, I guess:

● “Beck TV: Hiroshima vs. Detroit – Which City Really Embraced the ‘American Dream’?”

– Headline at Glenn Beck’s The Blaze Website, February 28, 2011.

● “Kevyn Orr [Detroit's emergency manager]: Detroit Is In Worse Shape Than I Thought.”

– Headline, CBS-Detroit, yesterday.

Related: “Backlash? Public Now Trusts the GOP Over Obama to Make the Right Decisions on Gun Laws,” Ace notes. “Well, we’ve had five years of horrific failures from Obama, Reid, and Pelosi. It’s nice that the slow boats have begun joining us on the right side of the river.”

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When Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the man died last August, as Jim Treacher wrote at the time, Obama paid tribute, the only way he knows how. “This is not a Photoshop. This was actually posted on Obama’s official Tumblr page,” Treacher wrote:

Bless his heart; Obama probably thought he was being modest by appearing in silhouette.

Edwin Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr. was the second man to walk on the moon, following Armstrong out the escape hatch of the lunar module in July of 1969. Four decades later, as with Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin was little more than a photo prop for our 44th president:

On April 15, 2010, President Obama delivered his central speech on space policy at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.  Aldrin was given a ride on Air Force One to the speech.  Aldrin said tonight in front of a packed house in a National Geographic auditorium in Washington D.C. that he presumed he might have a chance to speak with the President about options for space during the flight to Kennedy.

But it didn’t happen. President Obama had nothing to say to the moonwalker and didn’t seem to want to hear anything from Aldrin on the long flight to Florida.  So Aldrin sat in the back of Air Force One and never saw Obama – until it landed.

When it landed, Aldrin said he was summoned to the front of the plane. But he found out it was not to talk about space policy.  Instead, President Obama wanted Aldrin to emerge from Air Force One next to Obama for a photo op.  The moonwalker was to be a mere prop.

Bryan Preston has the photos that emerged from the flight. Safe to say, Aldrin does not look happy.* As Bryan adds, “Aldrin believes that Obama’s current space priorities are a waste of the nation’s time, and after that flight, he knew that his own personal time had been wasted, too.”

But why would Obama need to talk to one of the few men still alive who had walked on the moon?

Obama had always had a high estimation of his ability to cast and run his operation. When David Plouffe, his campaign manager, first interviewed for a job with him in 2006, the senator gave him a warning: “I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it,” he said. “It’s hard to give up control when that’s all I’ve known.” Obama said nearly the same thing to Patrick Gaspard, whom he hired to be the campaign’s political director. “I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Obama told him. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

And no doubt, Obama thinks he knows more about space than Buzz Aldrin.

* And you do not want to make Aldrin unhappy.

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In the spring of 1976, when it was announced that Gerald Ford’s press secretary would be hosting an NBC comedy show whose centerpiece segment was an actor playing a news journalist, one of its writers, the former wife of the show’s creater/producer responded, “The President’s watching. Let’s make him cringe and squirm.”

Today, an actor who plays a news journalist is shocked — shocked! — that there may be disparagement going on in politics. He’s scared, and shaken — but his words are rather less than stirring:

Supporting his sister following her defeat for one of South Carolina’s congressional seats, Colbert, host of “The Colbert Report,” took jabs at CNN, almost denounced his love for the state of South Carolina, and wondered aloud, comically, whether the lies leveled against his sister were a common part of political campaigns.

“This scares me to my core. I’m shaken. This was the first political campaign where I knew and cared about the candidate before they got into politics. I saw first-hand how her opponents smeared her with outrageous accusations I knew to be untrue,” he said on his show Wednesday night. “And that’s made me wonder if other campaigns have done this as well.”

Gee, wait’ll Colbert discovers what he and his network did to Sarah Palin. Of course, we know it’s all a game to the faux anchor:

“The voters of South Carolina have spoken,” Colbert said. “Mark Sanford beat my sister and I believe that means Mark Sanford is now my sister. On behalf of my entire family, I want to say that we are deeply sorry about him.”

Whatever your thoughts about Sanford and his peccadilloes, reading between the lines of that last quote, at least we’ve gotten the chance to see someone in old media — those who profess to “afflict the comfortable” (and receive six and seven figure salaries while doing so) — cringe and squirm for a change. Enjoy it; it doesn’t happen often.

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Just as the NFL’s Hall of Fame celebrates both the NFL and the AFL, this museum has multiple wings as well. Reason’s Matt Welch, whose post’s title inspired ours, has what is likely a (very) incomplete list of “the officials and commentators who inaccurately blamed a murderous attack at least in part on an obscure YouTube trailer.”

Meanwhile, Red Alert Politics lists “8 journalists who downplayed the Benghazi scandal.” Which again, is likely a very incomplete list, particularly given that it occurred as old media was getting ready to go all-in to get their candidate over the finish line. And while the Red Alert post lists individual journalists, there are also those institutions that downplayed the scandal.

QED:

And finally, Rich Lowry pens a reminder of “The Benghazi patsy,” who is still rotting in jail:

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula deserves a place in American history. He is the first person in this country jailed for violating Islamic anti-blasphemy laws.

You won’t find that anywhere in the charges against him, of course. As a practical matter, though, everyone knows that Nakoula wouldn’t be in jail today if he hadn’t produced a video crudely lampooning the prophet Muhammad.

Having run afoul of America’s de facto state religion, Nakoula likely won’t be the last.

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“So if anyone wants to know what difference does it make, anyone wants to ask what difference does it make, it always matters whether or not you can trust your government. And to the families, we’re gonna find out what happened in Benghazi, and I don’t give a damn whose career is impacted. We’re going to find out what happened.”

– Rep Trey Gowdy (R-SC), yesterday.

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“Bribery? Rep. Jackie Speier asks Gregory Hicks where he’d most like to be posted,” the Right Scoop notes. The California Democrat did so, while he in the middle of testifying.

To Congress.

Does Hicks have a long estranged brother living in Sicily that Obama’s palace guard can fly into DC to sit in the audience of the hearings on short notice?

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“By the way, does everyone remember the full text of Hillary Clinton’s infamous quote?”, John Hayward asks at the Breitbart.com group blog:

“Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they’d go kill some Americans?  At this point, what difference does it make?”

Well, after today’s testimony, it’s clear that Hillary Clinton knew it was neither a protest, nor guys out for a walk with their droogies, looking for a bit of the old ultraviolence after a night of partying at the milk bar.  She was still lying through her teeth when she had her little “what difference does it make?” outburst, still pretending that when she quite literally had the 2 AM phone call she talked about in her campaign against Obama, the planned and organized nature of the attack was not made clear to her.  If American voters knew about that 2 AM phone call the day after the attack, things could have gotten very tense for the Obama re-election effort.  I doubt Hillary would have been willing to quietly resign in disgrace to save Obama’s bacon.  The 24 and 72-hour cycles after a politically dangerous event are crucial.

Now Obama and Clinton just need their media buddies to exile these new hearings to the ghetto of truth for a few news cycles, until the subject can be changed again.

Still though, it will be fun in 2016 watching the left Memory Hole not just Hillary’s incompetence and lying during Benghazi, but their Progracist demonization of both Hillary and Bill during the 2007/2008 campaign.

Roll over George Orwell, and tell Saul Alinsky the news:

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• Fox News: 108
• CNN: 17
• MSNBC: Ø

That’s the minutes of airtime devoted to live coverage of the Benghazi hearing today, not including analysis or taped reports, as calculated by Newsbusters.

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“Attkisson’s Willingness to Investigate Obama Earns Washington Post Profile,” John Nolte writes at Big Journalism:

The Washington Post found CBS News investigative reporter worthy of a profile Tuesday. Why? Well, her willingness to actually investigate the Obama White House makes her unique outside of Fox News and right-leaning media. A sad commentary on the overall media to be sure, but the Post points this fact out without irony in a piece titled: “Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News, a persistent voice of media skepticism on Benghazi.”

Believe it or not, Children, there was a time when a “persistent voice of media skepticism” towards those in power regarding an incident that involved something like the death of four Americans wasn’t unique. In fact, a long, long time ago, The Washington Post itself was pretty famous for its willingness to hold power accountable.

But all that changed over the last couple of decades, which means we have arrived at a dangerous time in our country when a reporter actually doing her job is enough of an outlier to become news itself.

But not entirely surprising, when this is the attitude that the Post itself takes in regards to today’s hearings:

To understand how the Post transformed itself from a journalistic powerhouse to its current feeble state as Obama’s palace guard, here’s a timeline of events from 2004 through 2010: Through a Gimlet Eye: Studying the Washington Post Kremlinologist-Style.

And to understand why Attkisson’s current employers are getting a bit uncomfortable that she’s actually doing her job — or at least, the job we like to think that journalists used to do — check out this post by Allahpundit at Hot Air:

For the same reason, the left takes greater exception to the Koch brothers’ interest in buying the LA Times than it would to the Kochs setting out to build their own right-wing paper from the ground up. They can’t stop conservative media from existing, but they can ghettoize it as illegitimate and “partisan” in a way that their own partisan garbage isn’t. The problem with the Kochs buying the Times is that the paper already has a reputation among wider media for being respectable and impartial (giggle). That reputation can and will be retracted by the rest of the press if/when the Kochs take it over, but it’ll take more work to delegitimize it than it would some new Koch start-up. Same with Attkisson: Skepticism about Benghazi is fine for the wingnuts at Fox, but bringing such unhelpful nonsense into an “impartial,” i.e. pro-Obama, outlet like CBS risks lending credence to the GOP’s accusations. The proper line to take on Benghazi is to dismiss the new hearings with a sneer, a la Joe Klein, or, in the case of “impartial” news coverage, to dismiss them more lightly by referencing Hillary’s long-ago whining about a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to discredit the Clintons. “Going where the story leads” is unhelpful to liberalism in this case, ergo it’s advocacy by definition.

As Allahpundit quips, “CBS’s loss will, undoubtedly, eventually be Fox News’s gain.” And if Roger Ailes calls offering freedom to go wherever the news is and a fat paycheck, I can’t blame her for taking it, but it will be unfortunate to see old media continue to defenestrate itself.

But it does answer “Why consumers are fleeing the media” — a topic explored by Howard Kurtz(!) at CNN(!!) in March.

Update: “Greg Gutfeld wins quote of the day: ‘The media is Obama’s scandal condom.’” Heh.™

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It’s all fun and games and campaign ad slogans, until the 3:00 AM phone call really does arrive:

“At about 3 a.m., I received a call from the prime minister of Libya. I think it’s the saddest phone call I’ve ever had in my life, and he told me that Ambassador Stevens had passed away. I immediately telephoned Washington that news afterwards and, again, accelerated our effort to withdraw from the compound and move to the annex.”

– Gregory Hicks, the former chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Libya.

As Bryan Preston asks, “How Do We Make Sense of Obama’s, Clinton’s and Panetta’s Actions During the Benghazi Attack?”

Update: “Four More Things We’ve Learned:” All roads — at least today — lead to Hillary.

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“Nancy Grace and Ashleigh Banfield Hold Split-Screen Interview in Same Parking Lot,” as spotted by the Atlantic:

In a bizarre television and spatial anomaly on CNN this morning, the blanket coverage of two true-crime stories led two news anchors to conduct an odd “satellite” interview from the very same parking lot, background traffic and all.

The two suspects are Ashleigh Banfield of CNN and Nancy Grace of [CNN subsidiary channel] Headline News, who were updating viewers on the latest from the ongoing and increasingly ugly Cleveland kidnapping story. (Grace being TV’s leading expert on deviant crime.) At first it seems like a normal TV “remote,” as Banfield interviews Grace from another location. Then the channel’s graphics alert viewers: both anchors are in Phoenix. That’s odd. Also: They’re both outdoors, sitting in what looks to be a parking lot. And is that same building behind them?

Then things truly get bizarre. Watch the cars moving in the background of both shots:

Do not miss the hilarious animated GIFs the Atlantic made of the same car passing through the split-screen shots of Grace and Banfield, and their artist’s illustration of where the two employees of Time-Warner-CNN-HBO were seated in the same parking lot. And then, “if you’re still not seeing it, look for the moment when the same bus is in both shots.”

Rush Limbaugh adds, “It was like when Cokie Roberts put on a trench coat in the studio because it was really cold out there and made to look like she was outside on Capitol Hill doing a report. She was in the studio bundled up to make it look like it was cold front of a backdrop.”

It also reminds me of this infamous moment on the Today Show in 2007, when after Katie Couric accusing GWB of staging news was followed by reports of flooding in New Jersey, a Today Show reporter in the field was caught rowboating through rather shallow water:

At some point spooked by the success of Fox News, or perhaps because of Karmic blowback from Ted Turner’s Godwinizations, CNN went from being The Most Powerful News Network on cable to a low-rent public access cable channel. Their current series of on-air disasters are a sort of Zen Koan. (Or Zen Cohen for you Brothers Judd readers):  Are they increasing because no one is watching, or because no one is watching, no one at CNN cares, and that’s why they’re happening?

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The phone call came at 2:00 AM, not at Hillary’s preferred 3:00 AM, so perhaps that made the difference:

After the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, after four Americans were slaughtered, Hillary Clinton looked the American public in the eye and claimed that a YouTube video was responsible. There were cracks in that narrative from the very beginning. But this morning, Gregory Hicks, Deputy Chief of Mission at the embassy, delivered a final, devastating blow.

Hicks testified that Clinton had called him at 2 a.m., while the attacks were underway.

Hicks also confirmed that the military were told to stand down in Benghazi; their response? “They were furious.”

As Charlie Spiering of the Washington Examiner notes today:

During the House and Oversight Committee hearing on Benghazi this afternoon, Gregory Hicks testified that the YouTube video that was blamed for sparking a protest had nothing to do with the attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

“The YouTube event was a non-event in Libya,” Hicks stated flatly, when asked about whether it sparked a protest in Libya.

The attacks occurred in Benghazi on September 11th, 2012. Hillary was briefed on the night of the attack. “The YouTube event was a non-event in Libya,” Hicks states today. But as Stephen F. Hayes notes at the Weekly Standard in his article, “The Benghazi Talking Points — And how they were changed to obscure the truth:”

In ensuing days, administration officials emphasized a “demonstration” in front of the U.S. facility in Benghazi and claimed that the demonstrators were provoked by a YouTube video. The CIA had softened “attack” to “demonstration.” But as soon became clear, there had been no demonstration in Benghazi.

More troubling was the YouTube video. Rice would spend much time on the Sunday talk shows pointing to this video as the trigger of the chaos in Benghazi. “What sparked the violence was a very hateful video on the Internet. It was a reaction to a video that had nothing to do with the United States.” There is no mention of any “video” in any of the many drafts of the talking points.

Still, top Obama officials would point to the video to explain Benghazi. President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even denounced the video in a sort of diplomatic public service announcement in Pakistan. In a speech at the United Nations on September 25, the president mentioned the video several times in connection with Benghazi.

On September 17, the day after Rice appeared on the Sunday shows, Nuland defended Rice’s performance during the daily briefing at the State Department. “What I will say, though, is that Ambassador Rice, in her comments on every network over the weekend, was very clear, very precise, about what our initial assessment of what happened is. And this was not just her assessment, it was also an assessment you’ve heard in comments coming from the intelligence community, in comments coming from the White House.”

And as we mentioned yesterday, on September 14th, 2012, Hillary Clinton had this to say at Andrews Air Force Base, in what the State Department called her “Remarks at the Transfer of Remains Ceremony to Honor Those Lost in Attacks in Benghazi, Libya:”

“This has been a difficult week for the State Department and for our country. We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing do to with. It’s hard for the American people to make sense of that, because it is senseless, and it is totally unacceptable. The people of Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia, did not trade the tyranny of a dictator for the tyranny of a mob. Reasonable people and responsible leaders in these countries in these countries need to do everything they can to restore security and hold accountable those behind these violent acts. And we will, under the president’s leadership, keep taking steps to protect our personnel around the world.”

No wonder, as Ace adds today, “Hicks Was Told Not to Speak Alone to Congressional Investigators; Hillary’s ‘Fixer’ Cheryl Mills Insisted On Being Present At Every Meeting.”

Bryan Preston is live blogging today’s hearings at the Tatler; describing numerous examples of stonewalling, fillibustering, and Alinsky-style attack the accuser-style tactics emanating from the port side of the aisle.

Oh, and speaking of Alinksy-style tactics:

As Jim Treacher writes, “In 40 years, WaPo has gone from All the President’s Men to… THIS.”

Why, it’s as if the very JournoList itself runs through the Washington Post’s offices.

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Now is the time when we juxtapose, Small Dead Animals-style:

“‘No such thing as ethical oil,’ Al Gore tells Toronto audience.”

— The Toronto Globe and Mail, yesterday.

“Al Gore is now richer than Mitt Romney – and it’s all thanks to big oil.”

— The London Telegraph, January 12th, 2013.

(Via Colby Cosh.)

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