An ardent supporter of fiscal austerity, Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn is demanding budget cuts are made elsewhere before funding disaster relief for the tornado victims in his state. Coburn spokesman Jon Hart wrote to Politico telling them that “He’ll [Coburn] ask his colleagues to help Oklahoma by setting priorities and sacrificing less vital areas of the budget”.

This is clearly political suicide for the Senator, who along with Sen. Jim Inhofe have voted repeatedly against funding disaster relief around America. Reports the Huff Post:

They [Coburn and Inhofe] also have opposed increased funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which administers federal disaster relief.

Late last year, Inhofe and Coburn both backed a plan to slash disaster relief to victims of Hurricane Sandy. In a December press release, Coburn complained that the Sandy Relief bill contained “wasteful spending,” and identified a series of items he objected to, including “$12.9 billion for future disaster mitigation activities and studies.”

If they remain steadfast and demand the cuts, they should be given credit for consistency. But certainly not compassion.

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This afternoon in Oklahoma:

A massive tornado with winds of up to 200 miles per hour devastated the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore on Monday, killing at least 37 people as it tore up entire tracts of homes, two schools and a hospital, leaving a wake of tangled wreckage.

The death toll of 37 was expected to rise, said Amy Elliott, chief administrative officer of the Oklahoma chief medical examiner’s office. Some 20 to 30 school children were missing and feared dead beneath the rubble, KFOR television reported, citing unnamed officials from the scene.

Rescue workers raced against the setting sun to find survivors in Oklahoma as the dangerous storm system threatened as many as 10 U.S. states with more twisters.

Police and fire crews pulled third-graders from the devastated Plaza Towers Elementary school in Moore, a KFOR television reporter said from the scene, and aerial video showed teams sifting through the rubble left behind.

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New Orleans Mother’s Day Shooting: Apparently not a tragedy

“George Bush does not care about black people!”

 - Kanye West going seriously off-script is amongst the most iconic unplanned television moments of the 21^st century.

Whilst being careful not to place too much gravitas on a man who refers to himself as ‘The Louis Vuitton Don,’ Mr West must be credited for risking his career with the most honest statement injected into the midst of a public show since a Danish child declared his Emperor should probably put some pants on.

George Bush would later say that Kanye’s attack was the worst moment of his Presidency, worse than 9/11, Iraq and the 2008 crash. “I’m not racist” Bush protested (which, by the way, only ever makes people sound more racist). All those years later, he still couldn’t comprehend what Yeezy could have meant by that statement. Well if it’s still giving ‘W’ sleepless nights on the ranch, maybe he could look at the media response to the New Orleans Mother’s Day shooting, compare it to the response that followed the tragic events that took place in Massachusetts or Connecticut recently and see if that doesn’t help clarify things a bit

Kanye, as rappers tend to do, chose his words careful when he said what he said in 2005. He didn’t say Bush hates black people, he said ‘he doesn’t care.’ He was saying Bush sees poor black people as people, but still belonging to a cultural group distinct from his own. These are not people that Bush looks at and shares a sense of identity with. Kanye was alluding to the fact that Bush’s empathy could not overcome the hurdles erected by the social distinctions of race, class and wealth. These hurdles barred Bush, consciously or subconsciously, from prioritizing the suffering of the people of New Orleans as he would with rich white people in his neighborhood in Texas.

In 2013, there is a new President of darker pigmentation. But a change in President doesn’t lead to an immediate change in society’s power structure – and that power structure still dictates normative narratives that continue to edit out America’s tragic tale of New Orleans.

I was fortunate enough to spend a few months living in New Orleans whilst working with a law firm last year. My impressions was that New Orleans is certainly a city apart; it is aware of its outsider status and wears it’s technicolored lifestyle proudly on its sleeve. Maybe it is this self-conscious embrace of difference that leads to the mainstream seeing it as somehow ‘un-American .’ Its kind of European, it has a little of the African, a bit of the Caribbean and a lot of the outer-space about it. But it is also associated with violence and a reputation as being America’s ‘murder city’. The combined effect of all this allows the media to view the city as a place where horrific events like the shooting that occurred last Sunday, are ‘meant’ to take place. The shooting in New Orleans has been subtly denied the status of tragedy as the domestic and international coverage has been virtually non-existent. David Dennis wrote an excellent piece in The Guardian this week asking why the New Orleans shooting isn’t being considered a tragedy. He highlighted the fact that the story hadn’t even finished before the media lost interest. The suspects were still at large as the story disappeared from the newspapers.

Remember the media coverage when the Boston suspects were on the run?

A tragedy is not determined by facts or the body count, it is reliant upon public perception. Writer Aldous Huxley told us ‘We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look.” What we collectively decide to be a tragedy says more about us that about the actually horror of the event we mourn. When we decide that the shooting of innocent teenagers in our hometown is tragic but not the unprovoked drone strike that killed on 16-year old U.S citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlak in Yemen, we are subconsciously revealing who we think should be included in the club of empathy. Watch the below video for the reality of the tragedy that the media has minimized:

When you see this you have to ask, why isn’t this a bigger story? Why isn’t there blanket media coverage, outcry from all over the globe and vocal demand from all media outlets to find out how this could have happened? Where are the Alex Jones conspiracy theories, the internet trolls posting ‘THE TRUTH’ on every Youtube video, blaming Obama for orchestrating the whole thing to take away their liberty? The reason for the absence of Benghazi-level paranoia is the same reason behind Bush’s lethargic response to Katrina, the same reason why the anniversary of Katrina passes each year with minimal acknowledgement, whilst a few a weeks later mourning for 9/11 is compulsory even for us here in London. People I got to know in New Orleans hadn’t forgotten how it felt to be deserted and then demonized by the rest of the country when they were crying out for help; I’m sure they are not too surprised with the lack of reaction to the Mother’s Day shooting either. As President ‘W’ said: Fool me once, erm… fool me twice… fool me you can’t fool me again.”

An enduring irony of the global appeal of America is that it often comes from the margins, those who are being excluded from the official national narrative. In other countries it is usually the culture of the mainstream that is exported overseas. Yet it was the second class negroes of this ‘un-american’ city who are credited with creating the first ‘American artform’ in Jazz. Jazz was embraced around the world in same way the hip-hop of the South Bronx left behind by Reganomics would also be nearly a century later. New Orleans will of course recover from this latest tragedy; behind all the magic and madness in city was a toughness that any visitor could not ignore. However, the rest of America may wish to start expanding its empathy to include this city again. Because with its multi-cultural influences and avowed lust for life, not just is New Orleans part of America, it might just be its best part.

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Among the minor media ventures I’ve dabbled in over the past couple of years to keep me from being evicted from my apartment have been a few stints on reality TV shows. No, I don’t fluff the ladies of Ru Paul’s Drag Race or sell my soul by greasing the idiocy of The Real Housewives of Wherever-the-Hell so that it can more easily slip into your home and poison the minds of your family. But, yes, I do have some experience putting together the relatively cheap programming that claims to be unscripted and otherwise “real” and I can therefore confirm your suspicions that this description isn’t entirely true. While most reality shows aren’t start-to-finish bullshit — although there are definitely a few that come close — many are the product of a lot of behind-the-scenes cunning by mischievous producers and clever editors who determine based on the material they have what they want the narrative to be and then massage the action to make it so. I’m not exactly giving away state secrets by divulging this, by the way; any astute viewer can pretty much figure out what’s completely for real and what’s been slightly adjusted.

Knowing this, though, and being acutely aware of some of the go-to tools in the reality TV bag of tricks, I tend to pick apart every reality show I watch, wondering what if anything was fudged and how it might have been done. That’s why, as I sat there last night watching the episode of Kitchen Nightmares that everyone’s having a blast talking about right now, I looked hard for something, anything that might let me know that what I was witnessing was fake. I actually wanted it to be phony. I didn’t want to believe that people like Amy and Samy Bouzaglo actually existed, except in the fevered mind of a reality show producer, who dreamt them up as pure 14-karat TV gold. Alas, apparently Amy and Samy are for real. Which means that the world is a shittier and stupider place than even I had imagined.

If you haven’t yet seen the show I’m referring to, do yourself a favor, drop everything you’re doing, and watch it immediately; it’s once-in-a-lifetime viewing. You all know how I feel about meme culture and what I think it’s doing to our sanity and intelligence as a nation, but social media hyper-connectivity was made for something like this. I’m terrified at the prospect of the Bouzaglos becoming celebrities — the objects of morning show fawning and maybe even the stars of a couple-you-love-to-hate show of their own — but for now the nationwide shaming these two idiots are being subjected to is the internet at its best.

If the 42 minutes of remorseless hostility, abuse of customers and employees, unethical business practices, and flat-out bug-eyed crazy on Kitchen Nightmares didn’t convince you that Amy Bouzaglo needs to be forcibly removed from society before she kills somebody and Samy Bouzaglo needs a serious lesson on the difference between a trophy wife and one that barely qualifies as an “honorable mention,” then their two-person crusade against the entire internet absolutely will. What began a couple of days ago with a damn-near-psychopathic, all-caps-locked lashing out against the “haters, bullies, and liars” who’d been bombarding them with bad Yelp reviews — and ridicule since the show aired — has degenerated into a full-on meltdown of biblical proportions. There’s been the invoking of God, threats to call the FBI, bullshit claims their restaurant’s Facebook page was hacked, and, now, even an online battle with Patton Oswalt. (Patton’s Twitter bio jokingly reads: “Mr. Oswalt is a former wedding deejay from Northern Virginia,” which Amy apparently fell for completely and attempted to mock accordingly when Patton got in on the feeding frenzy.)

Basically, while Gordon Ramsay may have walked off his own show for the first time in almost a hundred episodes, the saga of Amy’s Baking Company and its beaver-shit crazy proprietors was a dream come true for the producers of Kitchen Nightmares, the kind of reality TV fodder they go to sleep at night praying for. But what happened on TV was obviously just the beginning. What’s happened since provides a flawless example of how not to handle internet criticism and how fucked you are these days if, as a business owner, you happen to be a breathtakingly arrogant control freak who’s become far too used to keeping a tight leash on everyone around you. If you believe that you can run, say, a restaurant like a mental hospital, as Samy Bouzaglo and his Bride of Frankenuts mistakenly believe, regular customers — and potential joiners-in — now have the ability to bring you down a few dozen notches. And that’s putting it mildly.

What the Redditors, Yelpers, Farkers, 4Chaners, and general merry misanthropes of the internet are now doing is making life a living hell for Crazy Amy and Psycho Sam. If you haven’t been keeping up, because as usual it’s moving at a lightning-fast pace, in addition to the predictable vicious and comical “reviews” that have been piling up there, there have been pictures of various kinds of animal shit and cat remains posted to Amy’s Baking Company’s Yelp page (the latter because of one of the most, um, “revealing” comments made by Amy during the show, about her supposedly having “three little boys trapped inside cat bodies”). Meanwhile, for a time somebody had redirected the business’s web address to a White House petition to have Amy Bouzaglo committed, and the Reddit community went digging and uncovered what appears to be a felony credit card fraud conviction in Amy’s past. The couple says that because of the attention, which, let’s face it, they kind of brought on themselves, they’re now getting death threats. That obviously hasn’t stopped them from responding with even more of the vitriol and insanity that was on grand display during their Kitchen Nightmares appearance.

What any idiot knows in the era of social media is that you don’t feed the trolls and you absolutely don’t go out of your way to antagonize the Redditors. They will fucking eat you alive. And that’s exactly what they’re doing to Amy and Samy Bouzaglo. The internet denizens are an uncontrollable bunch; they’ll tear you to pieces even if you leave them alone, but they’ll absolutely eviscerate you if you go out of your way to bleed in the water.

It takes a special kind of delusional psychopath to think he or she can take on the internet and win. Of course, in case it’s not already glaringly obvious by now, Amy Bouzaglo and her husband are very special delusional psychopaths indeed. And yeah, it looks like they’re as real as reality TV gets.

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The Obama Administration has found itself in yet another scandal this week after it was revealed that law enforcement officials had obtained records for the telephone lines of journalists at the Associated Press. From the NYTimes:

The A.P. said that the Justice Department informed it on Friday that law enforcement officials had obtained the records for more than 20 telephone lines of its offices and journalists, including their home phones and cellphones. It said the records were seized without notice sometime this year.

The organization was not told the reason for the seizure. But the timing and the specific journalistic targets strongly suggested they are related to a continuing government investigation into the leaking of information a year ago about the Central Intelligence Agency’s disruption of a Yemen-based terrorist plot to bomb an airliner.

Gary Pruitt, the president and chief executive of The A.P was not amused and wrote to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr calling the seizure a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into its operations and told him that “there can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters.” He continued: “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the news gathering activities undertaken by The A.P. during a two-month period, provide a road map to A.P.’s news gathering operations, and disclose information about A.P.’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

A Justice Department spokesman said that the agency was “always careful and deliberative in seeking to strike the right balance between the public interest in the free flow of information and the public interest in the fair and effective administration of our criminal laws.” The JD’s reference to the ‘public interest’ referred to the complicated CIA operation in Yemen that was attempting to thwart a plot by Al-Qaeda to attack a US bound airliner. From the Huff Post:

On May 7, 2012, AP reporters Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, citing anonymous sources, reported that the CIA had thwarted a plot by an al-Qaeda affiliate to “destroy a U.S.-bound airliner using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.”

The AP acknowledged then that it had agreed with the White House and CIA requests “not to publish” its story “immediately because the sensitive intelligence operation was still under way.” But “once officials said those concerns were allayed,” the news organization went ahead with its story rather than wait for the Obama administration’s official announcement.

It was later revealed that the “would-be bomber” was actually a U.S. spy planted in the Yemen-based group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. On May 18, U.S. and allied officials suggested to Reuters that the leak to the AP had forced the end of an “operation which they hoped could have continued for weeks or longer.”

Regardless of public safety threats, media freedom advocates are maintaining that the ability of the press to maintain confidential relationships with their sources should be protected at all costs.  The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released the following statement:

“The media’s purpose is to keep the public informed and it should be free to do so without the threat of unwarranted surveillance. The Attorney General must explain the Justice Department’s actions to the public so that we can make sure this kind of press intimidation does not happen again…..

Obtaining a broad range of telephone records in order to ferret out a government leaker is an unacceptable abuse of power. Freedom of the press is a pillar of our democracy, and that freedom often depends on confidential communications between reporters and their sources.”

And the Newspaper Association of America issued a statement saying:

“Today we learned of the Justice Department’s  unprecedented wholesale seizure of confidential telephone records from the Associated Press. These actions shock the American conscience and violate the critical freedom of the press protected by the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

The Obama Administration’s record on civil liberties is becoming increasingly worrying - the NDAA, the Material Strikes Law and drone strike policy all point to a general disregard for basic constitutional rights, and make it difficult to argue that Obama is any better than the Bush Administration in this regard. Government attacks on press freedom is nothing new – the Bush Administration launched broad initiatives targeting journalists and their possible government sources, but this is no excuse.

Obama was elected in part to put a stop to the egregious abuses of executive power by the Bush Administration. Instead, it appears to be upping the ante.

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After a week in which the Republicans and Fox News Channel had eagerly anticipated a bombshell from the House Oversight Committee’s Benghazi hearings, essentially nothing new was revealed during the proceedings other than some of the whistleblowers were hoppin’ mad. But on Friday, ABC News reported that a State Department spokesperson, Victoria Nuland, worked with the CIA to sculpt the wording of the CIA’s Benghazi talking points for Susan Rice’s September 16, 2012 TV appearances regarding what had happened and who might’ve been responsible.

Shock horror! Well, there it is: the cover-up I’ve been spammed about by right-wing conspiracy trolls for the last several days. Game over.

Wait.

No.

Other than the acquisition of a State Department memo (revised 12 times), nothing else in Jonathan Karl’s report is, you know, new information. How do we know this? Republican superhero and former CIA chief David Petraeus testified last year during the Senate’s Benghazi hearings that the CIA authorized and approved the State Department’s revisions. He also revealed that the proper names “al-Qaeda” and “Ansar al-Shariah” (an al-Qaeda affiliate) were edited out of the talking points so the groups wouldn’t be “tipped off” to the fact that they were being investigated by the FBI and closely surveilled by U.S. intel.

The ABC News report also revealed that the State Department removed a line from the talking points about a CIA warning gleaned from the Ansar al-Shariah Facebook page (yes, Facebook) that demonstrations were planned for September 11 and that “jihadists” might try to break into the embassy. Cue dramatic orchestra blast. This might be the big cover-up! In the third paragraph of Karl’s report:

“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.” [emphasis mine]

For some reason, Karl uses the phrase “warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi” even though the only specific CIA warning about an impending attack was about a jihadist attack planned for the U.S. Embassy… in Cairo. Not the Benghazi consulate.

How do we know this? Because it’s in the actual talking point revisions document provided by ABC News: “On 10 September we [the CIA] warned of social media reports calling for a demonstration in front of the Embassy Cairo and that jihadists were threatening to break into the Embassy.” [Emphasis mine.]

The ABC News report is totally misleading about this point, and so most of the conservative wingnutosphere has exploded in a massive group freakout about how the administration was warned about the attack in Benghazi, did nothing to protect our ambassador, then tried to cover it up by deleting the line. But, again, the only specific CIA warning was about Cairo. Not Benghazi. Now it’s possible that Karl interpreted some other part of the memo as a “warning,” like the mention of random “attacks” by “unidentified assailants” that took place earlier that year in Libya. However, Karl didn’t write a single word about the Cairo warning to differentiate it from his mention of so-called Benghazi warnings.

By the way, for the benefit of any conspiracy theorist fire-eaters joining us today: located 675 miles from Benghazi, Cairo is an entirely different city in a different nation called Egypt. Also, the administration, acting on the CIA’s warnings, supplemented embassy security in Egypt in advance of September 11. The very pro-Obama Wall Street Journal reported on September 21, 2012: “U.S. officials issued alerts and ordered security precautions in neighboring Egypt ahead of protests and violence on Sept. 11.” There was nothing about this in Karl’s report.

So this is the scandal? A big, fat nothing?

As with the testimony in Darrell Issa’s hearings, the “shocking” ABC News report is stale, recycled information with a few minor details added for flavor. Furthermore, the existence of the edited memo is being treated as if it was the centerpiece of everything that happened during the week of the attack — the magic bullet of the Benghazi story. It was nothing more than notes for the Sunday morning TV shows, which, by the way, aren’t bastions of integrity and substance these days. Meanwhile, it ought to be common knowledge that any memo intended for public consumption is severely edited for content, national security considerations and, yes, politics, regardless of which party occupies the White House. But it’s the amateurish purview of desperate reporters and neophyte conspiracy theorists to grapple onto documents like this because they reveal a behind-the-scenes, sausage-making glimpse into how top-level officials communicate in the aftermath of a crisis. Stop the presses! Public remarks were edited and some political considerations were incorporated into a memo provided to a political appointee! Impeach! Impeach!

Worse than anything else connected with this ABC News item, of course, is the unforgivably misleading nature of the reporting about the September 10 warning. Until Jonathan Karl clarifies his story, it’s fair to ask why he omitted such an important detail — that the CIA’s September 10 warnings were about Egypt and not Benghazi, and that the administration did, indeed, augment security in Cairo.

But now, due to shoddy, specious reporting and no real evidence of malfeasance, we’re facing years of conspiracy-mongering about Benghazi, especially given how the Republican mob is being ushered in the direction of Hillary Clinton and clearly for the purpose of 2016 politics.

The Republicans are determined to find a scandal in this non-scandal. And if they look hard enough they’ll find mistakes — and certainly the administration’s reaction wasn’t flawless, but neither was Bush’s reaction to September 11, or his reaction to Abu Ghraib, or his reaction to the long list of attacks on our embassies during a time when he claimed to be “keeping us safe.” By the way, there were also whistleblowers regarding the Bush administration’s manipulation of CIA intelligence in the lead-up to Iraq. Just thought I’d mention it.

This is a scandal simply because the Republican Party and Fox News are actively colluding to turn it into one. They keep trying and trying, with investigation after investigation and bombshell after bombshell. Still, nothing. They’re inflating national security sausage-making into malfeasance and mistakes into conspiracies, and they’re exploiting the deaths of four Americans as a means of scoring political points and to derail Obama’s second term agenda while, using their well-honed Orwellian chops, wagging their fingers at the administration for playing politics with the attack. And yet they’ve got nothing. No evidence, no smoking gun, nothing.

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Breaking news out of New Orleans:

Gunmen opened fire as dozens of people marched in a Mother’s Day second-line parade in New Orleans on Sunday, wounding at least 12 people, police said.

Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas told reporters that a 10-year-old girl grazed by a bullet was among those wounded in the shooting around 2 p.m. She was in good condition. He said three or four people were in surgery but their conditions weren’t known. No deaths were reported.

Serpas said that the procession had been accompanied by officers, who saw two or three suspects run from the scene in the city’s 7th Ward.

The Times-Picayune reports there were about 200 people at the event when gunfire erupted.

Nobody has been arrested. It’s unclear what sparked the gunfire.

Second-line parades are loose processions in which people dance down the street, often following behind a brass band. They can be impromptu or planned and are sometimes described as moving block parties.

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What do you do when your big hearing with “whistleblowers” turns out to be a dud, as far as scandal-mongering goes? You pretend as if there are still NEW QUESTIONS to be asked.

That’s how these things operate. While the GOP got angry when people asked questions about the wrong war of choice they initiated, they insist that there are “questions” yet to be answered after a series of investigations, hearings, and more that revealed details about the attack but delivered a giant nothingburger as far as political scandal.

The two major hearings on this so far were supposed to “answer questions” but instead were the usual Congressional exercise in posturing before asking witnesses nominal questions. As previously noted, the back to back Clinton hearings simply allowed the GOP to stamp their feet over losing the election, while yesterday’s show contrasted understandably distraught civil servants with Republicans grasping for this generation’s Whitewater.

So now they have more questions, and we’ll be treated to yet another round of Republicans stoking the fire on Fox News, acting in mock anguish as they just want their “questions” answered.

It’s no coincidence that conspiracy theorists usually go on at length about the “questions” they have. The supposed unanswered questions about the 9/11 attacks – “we don’t know what really happened” – are still rolling on 12 years later, and they’ll never stop because absolutely nothing can actually answer them.

The right doesn’t care about the actual attacks, they just want something to compensate for their inability to win a presidential election for the second contest in a row.

They have questions.

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The Republican inquisition over the attacks against Americans in Benghazi has never really gone away, but it appears as though in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing and the House Oversight Committee’s Benghazi hearings this week there’s renewed psycho-histrionics over Benghazi.

Lindsey Graham and Fox News Channel in particular are each crapping their cages over new allegations from an alleged whistleblower, while they continue to deal in previously debunked falsehoods about the sequence of events during and following the attacks. Fox News is predictably helming the biggest raft of hooey on the situation — turning its attention to Hillary Clinton in an abundantly obvious early move to stymie her presidential run before it even begins.

So I thought I’d revisit some territory I covered back in October as a bit of a refresher — especially since it appears as if no one, including and especially the traditional press, intends to ask any of these obnoxious, opportunistic liars about why they’re so obsessed by this one attack yet they entirely ignored the dozen-plus consulate/embassy attacks that occurred when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were allegedly “keeping us safe.”

The Benghazi attacks (the consulate and the CIA compound) are absolutely not unprecedented even though they’re being treated that way by Republicans who are deliberately ignoring anything that happened prior to Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009.

January 22, 2002. Calcutta, India. Gunmen associated with Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami attack the U.S. Consulate. Five people are killed.

June 14, 2002. Karachi, Pakistan. Suicide bomber connected with al-Qaida attacks the U.S. Consulate, killing 12 and injuring 51.

October 12, 2002. Denpasar, Indonesia. U.S. diplomatic offices bombed as part of a string of “Bali Bombings.” No fatalities.

February 28, 2003. Islamabad, Pakistan. Several gunmen fire upon the U.S. Embassy. Two people are killed.

May 12, 2003. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Armed al-Qaida terrorists storm the diplomatic compound killing 36 people including nine Americans. The assailants committed suicide by detonating a truck bomb.

July 30, 2004. Tashkent, Uzbekistan. A suicide bomber from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan attacks the U.S. Embassy, killing two people.

December 6, 2004. Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Al-Qaida terrorists storm the U.S. Consulate and occupy the perimeter wall. Nine people are killed.

March 2, 2006. Karachi, Pakistan again. Suicide bomber attacks the U.S. Consulate killing four people, including U.S. diplomat David Foy who was directly targeted by the attackers. (I wonder if Lindsey Graham or Fox News would even recognize the name “David Foy.” This is the third Karachi terrorist attack in four years on what’s considered American soil.)

September 12, 2006. Damascus, Syria. Four armed gunmen shouting “Allahu akbar” storm the U.S. Embassy using grenades, automatic weapons, a car bomb and a truck bomb. Four people are killed, 13 are wounded.

January 12, 2007. Athens, Greece. Members of a Greek terrorist group called the Revolutionary Struggle fire a rocket-propelled grenade at the U.S. Embassy. No fatalities.

March 18, 2008. Sana’a, Yemen. Members of the al-Qaida-linked Islamic Jihad of Yemen fire a mortar at the U.S. Embassy. The shot misses the embassy, but hits nearby school killing two.

July 9, 2008. Istanbul, Turkey. Four armed terrorists attack the U.S. Consulate. Six people are killed.

September 17, 2008. Sana’a, Yemen. Terrorists dressed as military officials attack the U.S. Embassy with an arsenal of weapons including RPGs and detonate two car bombs. Sixteen people are killed, including an American student and her husband (they had been married for three weeks when the attack occurred). This is the second attack on this embassy in seven months.

A few observations about this timeline. My initial list was quoted from an article on the Daily Kos which actually contained several errors and only 11 attacks (the above timeline contains all 13 attacks). Also, my list above doesn’t include the numerous and fatal attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad during the Iraq war — a war that was vocally supported by Lindsey Graham, John McCain and Fox News Channel.

Speaking of Graham, I ran a search on each attack along with the name “Lindsey Graham” in the hopes of discovering that Graham had perhaps commented about the attacks or raised some questions about why the administration didn’t prevent the attacks or respond accordingly to prevent additional embassy attacks. No results. Of course. Now, this could mean the search wasn’t exhaustive enough. But one thing’s for sure: neither Graham nor any of his cohorts launched a crusade against the Bush administration and the State Department in any of those cases — no one did, including the congressional Democrats, by the way.

This leads us to the ultimate point here. Not only have numerous sources previously debunked the Benghazi information being peddled by the Republicans and Fox News (for example, contrary to what the Republicans are saying, yes, reinforcements did in fact arrive before the attack on the CIA compound), but none of these people raised a single word of protest when, for example, American embassies in Yemen and Pakistan were attacked numerous times. Why didn’t the Bush administration do something to secure the compounds after the first attacks? Why didn’t he provide additional security?

Where was your inquest after the Karachi attacks, Mr. Graham? Where were you after the Sana’a attacks, Mr. Hannity? What about all of the embassy attacks in Iraq that I didn’t even list here, Mr. McCain? Do you realize how many people died in attacks on U.S. embassies and consulates when Bush was supposedly keeping us safe, Mr. Ailes? Just once I’d like to hear David Gregory or George Stephanopoulos or Wolf Blitzer ask a Republican member of Congress about the above timeline and why they said nothing at the time of each attack. Just once.

Nearly every accusation being issued about Benghazi could’ve been raised about the Bush era attacks, and yet these self-proclaimed truth-seekers refused to, in their words, undermine the commander-in-chief while troops were in harm’s way (a line they repeated over and over again during those years).

So we’re only left to conclude the obvious. The investigations and accusations and conspiracy theories are entirely motivated by politics and a strategy to escalate this to an impeachment trial. In doing so, the Republicans have the opportunity not only to crush the president’s second term, but also to sabotage the potential for a Hillary Clinton presidency.

Even if they never arrive at that goal, they have in their possession a cudgel formed of horseshit — a means of flogging the current administration with the singularly effective Republican marketing/noise machine, including the conservative entertainment complex. Very seldom does this machine fail to revise history and distort the truth. Ultimately, they don’t even need a full-blown impeachment proceeding when they have a population of way too many truthers and automatons who take all of these lies at face value — not to mention dubiously sourced chunks of “truth” proffered by radio and cable news conspiracy theorists who, if nothing else, are masters at telling angry conservatives precisely what they want to hear: that the probably-Muslim president is weak on terrorism. And so they’ll keep repeating “Benghazi-Gate, Benghazi-Gate, Benghazi-Gate!” without any regard for history or reality. Like always.

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Wednesday’s Congressional hearing on Benghazi is actually part two of the Benghazi show. Season two in the DVD box set, if you will.

Previously, on Benghazi!

Hillary Clinton, in her last appearance before Congressional committees as Secretary of State, was supposed to collapse at the feet of her GOP inquisitors, helpless before them as they posed for the cameras and delivered Fox-generated storylines. In reality, Clinton’s testimony resembled Neo from the Matrix, batting away nonsense and helping to remind the world why she has a historical legacy of her own apart from her husband.

Now with the latest dog and pony show, we will be treated to more GOP harrumphing and more Fox News alerts that will largely be about old, well-worn nonsense that the conservative media will treat as bombshells but turn out to be nothingburgers.

Pardon my grizzled cynicism, but I have seen this storyline before, with Clinton and Whitewater and breathless mumbles of scandal from the mainstream press that turned out to be nothing.

Today’s belt-tightened press corps is comprised of many easy-led by the nose veterans along with young pups who could barely vote in the 2008 election, let alone have any context for the Republican scandal machine of the late 1990s.

The same people who clutched their pearls at the idea of a bipartisan investigation of 9/11 would now like us to believe that the sanctity of the republic is at stake because of multiple versions of talking points. They have more anger towards those who edited a document than the attackers who took the lives of our diplomats.

It’s all as fake as the claim that a tiny Arkansas land deal was an abuse of power. I’ve seen this show before, it sucks and it’s a perversion of our government. In other words, standard issue conservative politics.

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