I guess this brilliance is why California keeps electing Feinstein to office. It sure isn’t her animal magnetism.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) questioned John Brennan Thursday over the activities of al Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki at Brennan’s confirmation hearing at length.
“I think–and this is just me–I think what people forget is that they will kill us if they can,” Feinstein concluded.
No, it’s not just you, Senator. It’s them. They want to kill us. Some of us have devoted our careers to pointing this out, and often find ourselves speaking to a nation that doesn’t want to hear it.
As you may be able to tell from the tone of this post, I can’t help feeling jaded after watching some of today’s hearings. On the CIA side, John Brennan made the case that waterboarding terrorists to extract useful intelligence out of them is worse than killing them and everyone around them with a drone, even if they’re American citizens. Obama comes to making these life-and-death decisions with no background in law enforcement or the military, but no one is pointing this out. He has never been a judge or a police officer or, until his presidency, had to make any grave decisions. Now he makes such decisions over what amount to Top Terrorist Baseball Cards, with no review and no transparency.
The Republicans did a decent job on the Benghazi side, getting Panetta and Dempsey to admit that President Obama was not involved in any of the response to the attack — Obama was AWOL, if you like — and that Hillary Clinton’s State Department never even asked the military for any help. So, according to Panetta and Dempsey, the military never responded. The president never seemed to care. After one briefing early in the assault, he checked out and never inquired about the fates of the Americans involved again. The next day, he was off to Vegas for a fundraiser. Obama lives to campaign, even while he left Americans to die.
The jaded feeling comes in with the realization that none of this will really matter. While the Democrats mostly wasted time today, the Republicans failed to get Benghazi into the national conversation so that people care about it. They never asked the simple question, “Where was the president, and what was he doing?” They didn’t coordinate their questioning so that they could build a compelling narrative out of the assault. As a result, plus the usual mainstream media coverup, it won’t matter. Tomorrow, Obama will be out there again calling for new laws on guns that won’t stop criminals but may disarm law-abiding citizens, or race-baiting on immigration, and it will be as if the nation never learned that under the current president, we do leave our people behind, and it may now be open season on our diplomats around the world. For the most part, the nation will not have learned that, and among those who did, will be millions who do not care.
Despite her failure before and during the attack, and her lies afterward, Hillary Clinton will suffer no political fallout for the deaths of four Americans that occurred in her department under her watch, and for whom she should have provided more security. Obama’s poll numbers won’t move. Even blood on the hands of a Democrat no longer matters.
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