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THE MORNING JOLT AT NRO FROM JIM GERAGHTY

Posted By Ruth King on May 7th, 2013

www.nationalreview.com

Happy Election Day, South Carolina’s first district.

The Powers That Be at NR will be doing some marketing for the Morning Jolt in the near future, and we’re collecting kind words from readers, including, hopefully, some big names. If you’re one of those big names, and wouldn’t mind your blurb-like praise being cited in an NRO ad — “I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats!” — then feel free to send it along. If you’re not one of those big names, well, you can still praise the Jolt and it will be good for my ego; it just may or may not be quoted in any marketing materials.

The Benghazi Hearings: This May Be the Week That Defines Obama’s Second Term

Dear Republicans on the House Oversight Committee:

Please do not grandstand. Please do not take the time before the television cameras to tell us how outraged you are, even though what you are investigating is, indeed, outrageous. There will be plenty of time for that after the hearing. All day Wednesday, give us the facts, and then more facts, and then more facts.

Just ask the questions of the witnesses. Let them speak and don’t cut them off. Do not give the Obama administration any cover to claim that this is a partisan witch hunt from unhinged political opponents. Don’t waste time complaining about the media’s lack of interest or coverage so far. Just give them — and us — the facts to tell the story, a story that will leave all of us demanding accountability.

Sheryl Attkisson’s excellent reporting for CBS gives us a sense of what to expect, with three big issues.

First: Leading up to September 11, why did State Department’s keep reducing the amount of security protecting diplomatic staff in Libya, in light of the increasingly dire requests from those in country?

The former deputy chief of mission for the U.S. in Libya, Gregory Hicks, was interviewed by congressional investigators on the House Oversight Committee in April. He told them, “we had already essentially stripped ourselves of our security presence, or our security capability to the bare minimum.”

Second: Precisely what happened that night? Was there a time when a rescue could have been authorized, but wasn’t? Were any forces told to “stand down” and not attempt a rescue?

From Hicks’ interview:

A: So Lieutenant Colonel Gibson, who is the SOCAFRICA commander, his team, you know, they were on their way to the vehicles to go to the airport to get on the C-130 when he got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, you can’t go now, you don’t have authority to go now. And so they missed the flight. And, of course, this meant that one of the . . .

Q : They didn’t miss the flight. They were told not to board the flight.

A: They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it. So, anyway, and yeah. I still remember Colonel Gibson, he said, “I have never been so embarrassed in my life that a State Department officer has bigger balls than somebody in the military.” A nice compliment.

Wait, there’s more from another witness:

On the night of Sept. 11, as the Obama administration scrambled to respond to the Benghazi terror attacks, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a key aide effectively tried to cut the department’s own counterterrorism bureau out of the chain of reporting and decision-making, according to a “whistle-blower” witness from that bureau who will soon testify to the charge before Congress, Fox News has learned.

That witness is Mark I. Thompson, a former Marine and now the deputy coordinator for operations in the agency’s counterterrorism bureau. Sources tell Fox News Thompson will level the allegation against Clinton during testimony on Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

Third: What happened afterward, and was there an effort to lie to the American people about what happened?

Hicks, again:

Greg Hicks: The net impact of what has transpired is the spokesperson of the most powerful country in the world has basically said that the President of Libya is either a liar or doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The impact of that is immeasurable. Magariaf has just lost face in front of not only his own people, but the world… my jaw hit the floor as I watched this… I’ve never been as embarrassed in my life, in my career as on that day… I never reported a demonstration; I reported an attack on the consulate. Chris’s last report, if you want to say his final report, is, “Greg, we are under attack.” … It is jaw-dropping that – to me that – how that came to be.

Finally, did the previous efforts to investigate this amount to a cover-up? Jed Babbin:

Last week, we learned that the State Department’s Inspector General is investigating the Pickering-Mullen “Accountability Review Board” for, among other things, its failure to investigate and get statements from the Benghazi survivors. Before there were whistleblowers there were survivors, yet the comprehensively misnamed “Accountability Review Board” didn’t question them.

Which isn’t a surprise. The ARB did what it was paid to do: limit the damage and blame people under Hillary Clinton for the failures of leadership and management. It was, simply, a whitewash. We’ll probably wait a long time for the IG to report the facts — 2017 sounds like the right time frame.

In the press conference announcing the report, Adm. Mullen said something that’s been bothering me ever since. He said that no military assets could have been deployed in time. In time to do what?

Jed makes a good point here: Just how did the U.S. military and diplomatic folks outside of Benghazi know how long they had to rescue anyone? How did they know how long our guys would be able to hold out, or how long the attack would go on? After the fact, you can calculate that not enough forces could have reached the site in time, but how did they know that as the events were ongoing?

If that means, in Clintonian terms, that they wouldn’t have been in time to save Ambassador Chris Stevens, that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have been in time to save the SEALs.

If you parse Mullen’s words — as we learned we must when Hillary’s hubby was president — he almost certainly meant that the ambassador was killed in the early moments of the attack.

In short, what we don’t need is a bold, expectation-setting, agenda-hinting prediction like this:

Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said on his radio show Monday that President Obama “will not fill out his full term” because he was complicit in a “cover-up” surrounding the attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Libya.

“I believe that before it’s all over, this president will not fill out his full term,” Huckabee said. “I know that puts me on a limb, but this is not minor.”

Will Democrats Talk Themselves Into Believing Losing Is Winning in South Carolina?

Okay, who got to Chris Cillizza?

Losing a potentially winnable seat in a special election might wind up helping Democrats nationally more than emerging victorious would.

Here’s why.

Sanford is damaged goods, politically speaking, thanks to his acknowledgment in 2009 that he had disappeared from the state to visit his mistress in Argentina as well as more recent revelations that he had trespassed in his ex-wife’s house in order to watch the Super Bowl with one of his four sons.

And it’s not just in South Carolina where people know about Sanford and his transgressions over the past four years. His initial defense of his 2009 absence — Sanford told staff he was “hiking the Appalachian Trail” (thereby ruining any actual hiking trips for married men everywhere) — became a national story and made the then-governor a punchline for late-night comedians.

A Sanford victory puts that guy in the House Republican Conference. That means that not only do the late-night jokes start again but, more importantly, every GOPer in the House and Senate will be asked whether they support Sanford and what they think of serving with him.

“The late-night jokes start again” . . . So what? Part of being a Republican in this world is knowing that you and your party will have (often very lame) jokes told about you on late-night shows.  Are we to believe the GOP should hope to lose this seat so that they won’t endure Jay Leno telling some Sanford jokes that most of his California low-information-voter studio audience won’t understand? (Have you noticed this phenomenon? I don’t watch his monologue all that often, but when I do, I’ve noticed most of Leno’s politics-related jokes bomb. It’s as if the spectacularly uninformed L.A. airheads who used to be featured in his “Jaywalking” segments are now the majority of his studio audience.)

“Every [Republican] in the House and Senate will be asked whether they support Sanford” . . . support him in what? This special House election is not a referendum on Argentinean mistresses. (Why do I have a feeling I’ve just steered some search engine traffic my way by using that phrase?) Sanford is not running on a platform that what he did in 2009 is a good thing deserving of endorsement; he’s running on a whole host of economic, foreign-policy, and social issues.  Here, take a look.

If Sanford arrives in Congress and then suddenly misses votes and committee hearings because he’s disappeared again, well . . . then yes, there will be heck to pay. But if that happens, it will get addressed in the June 2014 primaries.

Cillizza looks at the outlook in 2014 and concludes, “Colbert Busch would be renting the seat for 19 months — and the rent would be VERY high.”

Yes, but today some portion of the 179,908 or so Republicans in the district who voted for Tim Scott can go to the polls and make all of that Democratic spending for nothing:

Through April 17, Colbert Busch, the sister of comedian Stephen Colbert, had raised almost $1.2 million, while Sanford had raised just $787,000. But Colbert Busch had spent more, leaving her $254,000 in cash on hand, while Sanford had $284,000. OpenSecrets.org has unveiled profiles for all of the upcoming special elections,including the one in South Carolina’s First District.

Besides raising far less money than Colbert-Busch, Sanford is taking a huge hit when it comes to outside spending. According to OpenSecrets.org’s profile of the race, outside groups have spent more than $929,000 on independent expenditures against Sanford. Conservative groups have spent only about $15,000 to help him. Meanwhile only about $4,600 has been spent by outside groups attacking Colbert Busch, while $1,500 has been spent supporting her.

NRO Digest — May 7, 2013

Today on National Review Online . . .

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