Benghazi hearings: Hillary Clinton given another ‘pass’

Watch the exchange, via NBC News.

It’s disappointing that a piece of political theater is the most effective thing congressional Republicans can find to do with their time.

Defending Thursday’s panel, Gowdy said there are “credibility” issues involving Clinton’s testimony. It was not the prevailing attitude, as I remember, toward the hearings of the Senate Watergate Committee or the impeachment debate at the House Judiciary Committee (on whose staff Clinton served) 40-something years ago. Democrats didn’t say that.

Speaking of which, whatever Republicans hoped to accomplish in the hearing, they fell embarrassingly short.

Eerie similarities echo between that moment and this one for Republicans in Congress. Unquestionably, the revelation that Clinton exclusively used a private email address and server while she was the nation’s top diplomat had damaged her front-running campaign for the Democratic nomination.

Savage ended up arguing that the GOP’s performance was so weak that the Republican committee members must have been secretly trying to help Clinton. “I sort of felt she was going to do okay”, he added.

“As the family and I have worked through the – the grieving process, I’ve said all along what I’ve said time and again to others: that it may very well be that that process, by the time we get through it, closes the window on mounting a realistic campaign for president”. Because of this, as the media turns more towards entertainment in news and delivers less information grounded in fact, the public becomes less capable of making political decisions.

Rachel Maddow asked Clinton if she was “glad” or feels that the hearing was a “waste of time” after committee chairman was quoted as saying afterwards “I don’t that she testified that much differently today than the previous times she testified”.

The only “news” to emerge from the hearing was email corroboration that Clinton knew immediately after the attacks that they were committed by terrorists and not by street demonstrators reacting to a dumb video, as initially and serially reported.

If the Republican game plan was to get her goat, push her to counterattack, take her down before the American people even, the endless hearing was a total failure.

Clinton now has her highest Democratic primary voter support in the Tar Heel State since May, according to the Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey.

“And there wasn’t any rational argument – because I was in on a few of those discussions, on both “don’t ask, don’t tell” and on – on DOMA, where both the president, his advisers and, occasionally, I, would chime in and talk about, “You can’t be serious. Very hard day and I fear more of the same tomorrow”.

The hearing was roundly denounced by the media as fruitless. Bush and nearly all Republicans wisely refused to heap blame on Clinton, and nearly all politicians – except Donald Trump – have not heaped blame on Bush.

In testimony at a House of Representatives hearing today, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered a particularly weird assessment of the death of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens in the 2012 attack on the Benghazi consulate, suggesting it was the consequences of the USA withdrawing its military after the Libya War.