Could somebody please explain Benghazi to me?!

[justdrew]

HA HA
stupid fucking republicans

National Security Brief: Poll Finds Americans Aren’t Buying GOP Benghazi Witch-Hunt
By ThinkProgress on May 14, 2013 at 9:05 am

Public Policy Polling released a poll on Monday finding that more Americans trust former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over Republicans over the GOP-ginned up Benghazi controversy.


Forty-nine percent trust Clinton, versus 39 percent for Republicans. Meanwhile, PPP finds, “Congressional Republicans remain very unpopular with a 36/57 favorability rating.” Americans also think Congress should be focusing on more pressing issues such as immigration reform and gun control:

Voters think Congress should be more focused on other major issues right now rather than Benghazi. By a 56/38 margin they say passing a comprehensive immigration reform bill is more important than continuing to focus on Benghazi, and by a 52/43 spread they think passing a bill requiring background checks for all gun sales should be a higher priority.

A whopping 41 percent of Republicans polled think the Obama administration’s handling of Benghazi is the greatest scandal in U.S. history. “One interesting thing about the voters who think Benghazi is the biggest political scandal in American history,” PPP adds, “is that 39% of them don’t actually know where it is. 10% think it’s in Egypt, 9% in Iran, 6% in Cuba, 5% in Syria, 4% in Iraq, and 1% each in North Korea and Liberia with 4% not willing to venture a guess.”


In other news:

[*]Reuters reports: A video of a Syrian rebel commander cutting the heart out of a soldier and biting into is emblematic of a civil war that has rapidly descended into sectarian hatred and revenge killings, Human Rights Watch said on Monday. The BBC has more.

[*]The Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank, said in a report released on Monday that the Pentagon could save $1 trillion over the next ten years without eroding combat capabilities — or double the amount of cuts mandated under sequestration.

[*]The Washington Post reports: After failing to halt Iran’s nuclear advances with harsh economic sanctions, a group of U.S. lawmakers and analysts is proposing a more drastic remedy: cutting off Iran entirely from world oil markets.

[*]McClatchy reports: Disagreements among the countries backing the rebels in Syria have led to a drop in weapons shipments, leaving rebels vulnerable to a government military offensive.

[seemslikeadream]

CBS: It was congressional GOP who faked Benghazi email (video)
5/16/2013 8:47pm by John Aravosis

CBS Evening News let out a bit of a bombshell tonight, admitting on the air that it was Republicans on the Hill who provided the media with false quotes that are the only real smoking gun the GOP has buttressing its conspiracy-theory surrounding the Benghazi attack.

As I noted the other day, the email at the core of the Republican case that the White House ‘fixed’ the Benghazi talking points, in the immediate aftermath of the attack on our consulate, in order to edit out any reference to ‘terrorism,’ in a supposed effort to minimize public concern about the attack in the weeks before the 2012 election, is a fake.

The actual White House email, far from proving an attempt by the White House to “spin” Benghazi for political purposes, shows a White House concerned about getting the facts right.

CBS News said tonight that the false quotes “had been provided by Republicans,” and that “on Friday, Republicans leaked what they said was a quote from Rhodes,” referring to then- White House Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes.

CBS’ story online makes clear that they’re referring to “Republicans on Capitol Hill.”

Republicans on Capitol Hill claimed they found proof in White House emails that they leaked to reporters last week. It turns out some of the quotes were wrong.

To make the point even more clear, CBS had these handy graphics:







You can read my earlier post for more of the background on the fake and real Benghazi emails.

As Josh Marshall notes, usually when sources lie, reporters don’t do anything about it. At the very least, they never hold the lying source accountable publicly. This time, without naming names, but by naming parties, they are.

If the Republicans can’t come up with a real scandal, they’ll manufacture one.

[seemslikeadream]

Benghazi: What Did the CIA Know, and When Did It Know It?
Forget the talking points. The CIA's cover-your-ass operation may be the real mystery.
—By David Corn | Fri May. 17, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

GOP scandal-chasers have been obsessed with the Obama administration's talking points about the attack on US facilities in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, and the White House on Wednesday tried to put the pseudo-scandal to rest by releasing a batch of interagency emails related to the talking points.

These emails thoroughly undercut the conservative charge that the White House massaged the talking points to whitewash the attack and protect President Obama's reelection prospects. One email from a CIA official noted that the White House "cleared quickly" the talking points drafted by the CIA but the State Department had concerns. Poof—there goes the conspiracy theory that Obama's aides excised references to terrorism and an Al Qaeda-linked group for campaign-related reasons. But questions about the Benghazi episode remain, particularly this one: Has the CIA avoided scrutiny for its central role in this affair?

Last week, the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler noted that the revised talking points indicated that Obama administration officials in various agencies were inhibited by a key fact as they were grappling with what could be said publicly about the attacks in Benghazi: The assault had targeted a CIA annex in addition to a temporary State Department mission. That made the job tough for the drafters of the talking points. As Kessler wrote,

from the State Department perspective, this was an attack on a CIA operation, perhaps by the very people the CIA was battling, and the ambassador [Chris Stevens] tragically was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, for obvious reasons, the administration could not publicly admit that Benghazi was mostly a secret CIA effort.

Kessler emphasized an obvious point: The initial talking points drafted by the CIA implied that "State screwed up, even though internally, it was known that this was a CIA operation." Naturally, at the time, Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman, objected to this. So here was a bureaucratic tussle—not White House skullduggery. Yet the CIA's attempt to duck blame may be the more important story than what UN Ambassador Susan Rice was handed in preparation for her Sunday talk show appearance.



Advertise on MotherJones.com

One of the early iterations of the made-in-Langley talking points contained this paragraph:

The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa'ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya. These noted that since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador's convoy. We cannot rule out the individuals has [sic] previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.

This version also contained another line from the CIA: "On 10 September we warned of social media reports calling for a demonstration in front of the [Cairo] Embassy [in response to an anti-Muslim video] and that jihadists were threatening to break into the Embassy." And the CIA drafters noted that the "currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests" in Cairo and "evolved into a direct assault" on the "US Consulate and subsequently its annex."

Put this all together, and here's what the CIA was saying: We told you there was possible trouble in Benghzai; we warned you about the mess in Cairo; the assault in Benghazi was initially related to the video-sparked protests in Cairo; and the attack hit two State Department facilities (not one of ours). This is, as they say in the business, a cover story—but for the CIA, not the White House.

Now turn to the unclassified version of the report of the State Department's Accountability Review Board for Benghazi and consider this finding:

The Board found that intelligence provided no immediate, specific tactical warning of the September 11 attacks. Known gaps existed in the intelligence community’s understanding of extremist militias in Libya and the potential threat they posed to U.S. interests, although some threats were known to exist.

This seemingly contradicts the self-protecting statement that the CIA had tried to place in the talking points (which was eventually excised at the State Department's request): the assertion that the Agency had "produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa'ida in Benghzi and eastern Libya." Where were these numerous reports? Were they kept from the Accountability Review Board, which was run by veteran diplomat Thomas Pickering and retired Adm. Michael Mullen?

Given that the CIA operation in Benghazi—which was reportedly trying to gather weapons—had three times the staff of the State Department temporary mission there, it could be expected that the Agency would have a better handle on the security situation in the area than the State Department. Yet the Pickering-Mullen review diplomatically criticized the CIA for "gaps" in its "understanding" of extremists in Libya. Nevertheless, all the outrage on the right and elsewhere has focused on Foggy Bottom, not the CIA. It's possible, too, that the CIA activity in Benghazi was somehow related to the assault—if only because local extremists might have been aware of the CIA presence. A former Obama administration official notes that that best explanation for the attack is that "a bunch of well-armed creeps watched the Cairo demonstrations on television and decided to round up the boys and go after the Americans." The State Department's mission in Benghazi was assaulted before the CIA annex. Still, a full investigation would examine whether the CIA operation in the area had done anything to increase the target value of both sites.

The Accountability Review Board report was justifiably tough on the State Department—citing "systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels"—but the CIA has largely escaped unscathed. "They've gotten a pass on a lot of this," a former Obama administration official says. Perhaps that's the real scandal.

WEEKEND EDITION MAY 17-19, 2013
Deceptions and Lies About the CIA's Operations in North Africa
Benghazi, Petraeus, and the CIA
by HORACE CAMPBELL
Two years after the failed NATO intervention, Libyan society is in chaos. Over 50,000 were killed in a mission that was meant to protect civilians, and there are reportedly more than 1,700 competing militias marauding the streets. One outcome of this chaos was the attack on U.S. mission in Benghazi which led to the death of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens on September 11, 2012. There have been Congressional hearings on this attack, and on May 8, U.S. Representative Darrell Issa, the California Republican who heads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, called another inquiry into the September 11, 2012 event. At this inquiry, Greg Hicks, the deputy chief of mission in Libya who became the top U.S. diplomat in the country after Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed, testified that the U.S. government did not do enough to intervene to rescue Ambassador Stevens.

What Greg Hicks and Representative Darrell Issa did not probe was the role of the CIA and Petraeus in the use of Benghazi as the largest CIA station in North Africa, where they ran militias into Syria. When the information about the attack on the US ‘facility’ in Benghazi was first brought to light, there was confusion because this information had the potential of putting the vaunted military in its proper perspective. Was the space that was attacked a consulate, a State Department facility, a CIA safe house, or indeed a prison for captured militias? This confusion took attention away from the reality that elements in the military/intelligence hierarchy had formulated a policy to align with certain militia groups in Eastern Libya and that these militias (sometimes called jihadists) had in the past been linked to groups that the U.S. called ‘terrorist organizations.’ France, the CIA, and the U.S. Africa Command had aligned with these jihadists to destabilize Libya, freeze billions of dollars of assets, execute Gaddafi, and use Libya as a rear base in the drive for regime change in Syria.

The Republicans had sought to benefit from the confusion and disinformation that had been spun by the intelligence and the military about the real causes of the death of the Ambassador in Benghazi. The hearings called before the Republican-controlled Congress did reveal that the private military
establishments had a prime place in the protection of U.S. legations around the world. But these hearings did not come close to the real questions that should be posed to David Petraeus: what role did the use of Benghazi as a CIA station for the training of Jihadists play in the attack?

Now that the conservative media is calling the revelations of the CIA revision of the ‘talking points’ a cover up, it may be instructive to obtain a clearer picture of the role of Petraeus and the CIA in Benghazi. Why did Petraeus travel to Benghazi? What was the nature of his report? These questions have not been properly addressed and although the Accountability and Review Board, which was headed by Thomas Pickering with retired Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did issue a scathing report about the absence of leadership, the issues of Petraeus and the Jihadists have been buried in the hearings.

Pickering and Mullen’s scathing report released in December found that “systematic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels” of the State Department meant that security was “inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.”

What this review and these hearings are obfuscating are the real issues that emanate from the role of the CIA in recruiting Jihadists in Benghazi. On Monday at a press conference, Obama called the continued discussions on Benghazi a “side show.” However, for the millions of persons in North Africa that have been negatively affected by the NATO intervention and the role of the CIA, private
militias and private military contractors, the debates in the USA can be viewed as another diversion to cover up the CIA operations in North Africa. Ethan Chorin, one of the operators in Libya and close ally of Ambassador Stevens, has weighed in with an op-ed piece in the New York Times that stated,

“The biggest American failure wasn’t in the tactical mistakes about security at the diplomatic mission where Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans died. It lay in thinking that an intervention in Libya would be easier or less costly than it has proved to be — a judgment that led the United States to think it could go in light, get out fast and focus on the capital, Tripoli, without paying enough attention to Libya’s eastern provinces, where the rebellion began as a call for a constitution and increased civil liberties.”

Chorin, who was an insider in Benghazi, continues to insist that the NATO intervention was “inspired and skillfully executed, and had the potential to do more good than harm.”

In my book, Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, I have challenged this verdict that the intervention did more good than harm. Some other supporters of the Libya intervention are now calculating the costs as embassies rush to leave the people to the mercy of the militias. According to the British newspaper the Guardian, “the fear of further violence has led to the British and US embassies withdrawing some staff, the European Union closing its mission in Tripoli and BP announcing it was pulling out non-essential staff.” France had already scaled back its operations after a military attack on its mission in Tripoli. What Daryl Issa and the forces calling the issues of Benghazi a cover-up are refusing to deal with is the deceptions and lies that led to the catastrophic situation in Libya and North Africa today.

Pickering, Mullen reject request to testify on Benghazi in private

By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — The two retired senior U.S. officials who oversaw an internal State Department review of last year’s attacks on U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, on Thursday rejected as “an inappropriate precondition” a Republican request that they submit to a closed-door interview before testifying in public.

The letter from former Ambassador Thomas Pickering and retired Adm. Mike Mullen added new tension to the battle between Republican lawmakers and the Obama administration over the assaults last Sept. 11 on a diplomatic mission and a CIA complex that killed four Americans, including Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya.

The latest development came as Democrats on Capitol Hill praised the White House for releasing 100 pages of documents that they asserted put to rest Republican charges that the administration had tried to cover up a bungled response to the attack to protect President Barack Obama’s bid for re-election.

“I think that on the talking points, the president’s right: That piece of it is a sideshow,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., repeating a description that Obama had used earlier in the week. “It’s an evasion of what we really need to do. We need to pass a budget that fully protects to the extent that we can . . . our diplomats abroad.”

At the White House, the president called on Congress to “support and fully fund” the administration’s budget request to improve security at U.S. diplomatic posts worldwide.

Speaking at a Rose Garden news conference with visiting Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Obama said he was intent on ensuring that another Benghazi didn’t occur and that the administration was following the recommendations of the Accountability Review Board that Pickering and Mullen led.

Responding to criticism that U.S. military units and aircraft weren’t positioned to reach Benghazi in time to save Stevens and the other three Americans, Obama said he’d directed the Defense Department "to ensure that our military can respond lightning-quick in times of crisis."

Despite the White House document release, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told a news conference that an investigation by five GOP-run committees into the attacks and the administration’s response would forge ahead, contending that the White House has more to disclose.

“We have a job to get to the truth. And the administration can make this a lot easier by doing what they did yesterday: turning over emails from Benghazi,” Boehner said.

The emails and other documents released Wednesday showed that sweeping changes to talking points written for Congress that described what happened in Benghazi were made by the CIA, not the White House. It was the CIA, they indicated, that wrote that the assault stemmed from a spontaneous protest outside the consulate, although numerous U.S. officials knew at the time that it was a planned operation by Islamist extremists, some linked to al Qaida.

A protest never took place, and the CIA has yet to explain how it reached its preliminary assessment.

Obama, other Democrats and U.S. intelligence officials have defended the assessment, saying it was the CIA’s best judgment given what it knew at the time. The assessment was among the talking points that were given to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice for use on five Sunday talk shows.

The president and other Democrats accuse the Republicans of exploiting the deaths of the four Americans for political purposes, including trying to unjustly discredit then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the early front-runner in either party in the 2016 presidential election.

The investigation is being spearheaded by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who asked Pickering and Mullen earlier this week to submit to a closed-door transcribed interview about the Accountability Review Board before a public hearing.

Issa and other Republican panel members have raised questions about the integrity of the board’s final report, citing testimony by three State Department officials at a hearing last week that the inquiry was incomplete because it failed to hold senior leaders accountable for the consulate’s inadequate security.

The three also said the board should have interviewed some officials who weren’t asked to testify, and some lawmakers have questioned why Pickering and Mullen decided not to formally interview Clinton.

Pickering and Mullen wrote to Issa on Thursday to say they want to testify on the inquiry in public – they suggested the dates of May 28 or June 3 – but that they considered the request for an advance private interview “highly unusual” because they weren’t witnesses to the attack.

“In our view, requiring such a closed-door proceeding before we testify publicly is an inappropriate precondition,” they wrote. “Moreover, notwithstanding what your understanding may be, Ambassador Pickering did not agree to such a closed-door proceeding; his sole focus has been on testifying in an open hearing. If you and he were talking past each other that is unfortunate.”

There was no immediate response from Issa.

Stevens and Sean Smith, a State Department communications specialist, died when dozens of armed Islamist militants stormed the poorly guarded diplomatic compound and set fire to the building they were in. Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, former Navy SEALs who were working as contract security guards for the CIA, died hours later when attackers fired mortars at the CIA annex to which the survivors of the consulate assault had fled. The annex was about a mile from the compound.

The Accountability Review Board’s report was scathing in its criticism of the State Department leadership, saying it had failed to provide sufficient security to U.S. facilities in Libya despite requests from Stevens and others for more protection as crime and Islamist violence rose in the wake of the U.S.-backed revolution that toppled the late dictator Moammar Gadhafi in October 2011.

The unclassified version of the report, however, didn’t identify any culpable officials, although Clinton publicly took responsibility.

In their letter to Issa, Pickering and Mullen defended their effort as “perhaps the most transparent accountability review board ever. It is only the second to have its full report provided to the Congress.”

[seemslikeadream]

http://news.yahoo.com/petraeus-said-sho ... itics.html
During a talk last month at the University of Denver, Broadwell raised eyebrows when she said the CIA had detained people at a secret facility in Benghazi, Libya, and the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate and CIA base there was an effort to free those prisoners.

[justdrew]

Could somebody please explain Benghazi to me?!

it's part of the republican's ghost dance

[justdrew]

Fringe right-wing radio host Pete Santilli made disturbing comments about Hillary Clinton last week, calling for sexual violence against the former secretary of state because of her alleged involvement in a bizarre conspiracy theory.

“Miss Hillary Clinton needs to be convicted, she needs to be tried, convicted and shot in the vagina,” he said. “I wanna pull the trigger. That ‘C U Next Tuesday’ has killed human beings that are in our ranks of our service.”

Santilli alleged Clinton was involved in drug trafficking in Arkansas and the killing of U.S. troops overseas.

“I want to shoot her right in the vagina and I don’t want her to die right away,” he added. “I want her to feel the pain and I want to look her in the eyes and I want to say, on behalf of all Americans that you’ve killed, on behalf of the Navy SEALS, the families of Navy SEAL Team Six who were involved in the fake hunt down of this Obama, Obama bin Laden thing.

“That whole fake scenario, because these Navy SEALS know the truth, they killed them all. On behalf of all of those people, I’m supporting our troops by saying we need to try, convict, and shoot Hillary Clinton in the vagina.”

The remarks were first reported by Right Wing Watch, which said it began monitoring Santilli after National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent and Gun Owners of America director Larry Pratt appeared on his online radio program.

On his website, Santilli specifically claims that he is not a conspiracy theorist and that he is not crazy.

“As Alex Jones puts it, there is a war for your mind and its a well known fact that you are not winning. Everything you supposedly perceive as reality has been fabricated by the Wizard of Oz; the little old man behind the curtain,” he explained on his about page.

well, in the spirit of what's good for the goose is good for the gander...

crazy conspiracy theorist Pete Santilli needs to be killed slowly, his broken corpse dragged through the city behind a team of overfed diuretic horses til it fades into the general muck.

no but really I would love to see this pig beaten within an inch of his miserable worthless life.

at the very least I EXPECT and DEMAND substantial FCC fines for each and every radio station that broadcast this.


please direct a complaint right here:

http://www.fcc.gov/complaints

of course that's all non-sense, but he does need to be fired, divorced with no visitation rights, and made homeless.

[JackRiddler]

Santilli - this is the guy whose demented rant over HAMP on CNBC in 2009 was used to kickstart the Tea Party phenomenon.

[justdrew]

Santilli - this is the guy whose demented rant over HAMP on CNBC in 2009 was used to kickstart the Tea Party phenomenon.

I don't think it's the same Santilli

[seemslikeadream]

PJ Media
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

PJ Media is a media company and operator of an eponymous conservative opinion and commentary website. The organization was formerly known as 'Pajamas Media'.
Founded in 2004 by a network primarily, but not exclusively, made up of conservatives and libertarians led by writer Roger L. Simon it was originally intended as a forum to present blogs "with the intention of... aggregating blogs to increase corporate advertising and creating our own professional news service."[1] PJ Media's name, formerly Pajamas Media, is derived from a dismissive comment made by former news executive vice-president Jonathan Klein of CBS during the Killian documents affair involving then-CBS anchorman Dan Rather in the fall of 2004: "You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances at 60 Minutes and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas."[2]

PJM EXCLUSIVE: Ex-Diplomats Report New Benghazi Whistleblowers with Info Devastating to Clinton and Obama

May 21st, 2013 - 12:05 am

More whistleblowers will emerge shortly in the escalating Benghazi scandal, according to two former U.S. diplomats who spoke with PJ Media Monday afternoon.

These whistleblowers, colleagues of the former diplomats, are currently securing legal counsel because they work in areas not fully protected by the Whistleblower law.


According to the diplomats, what these whistleblowers will say will be at least as explosive as what we have already learned about the scandal, including details about what really transpired in Benghazi that are potentially devastating to both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

The former diplomats inform PJM the new revelations concentrate in two areas — what Ambassador Chris Stevens was actually doing in Benghazi and the pressure put on General Carter Ham, then in command of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and therefore responsible for Libya, not to act to protect jeopardized U.S. personnel.

Stevens’ mission in Benghazi, they will say, was to buy back Stinger missiles from al-Qaeda groups issued to them by the State Department, not by the CIA. Such a mission would usually be a CIA effort, but the intelligence agency had opposed the idea because of the high risk involved in arming “insurgents” with powerful weapons that endanger civilian aircraft.

Hillary Clinton still wanted to proceed because, in part, as one of the diplomats said, she wanted “to overthrow Gaddafi on the cheap.”

This left Stevens in the position of having to clean up the scandalous enterprise when it became clear that the “insurgents” actually were al-Qaeda – indeed, in the view of one of the diplomats, the same group that attacked the consulate and ended up killing Stevens.

The former diplomat who spoke with PJ Media regarded the whole enterprise as totally amateurish and likened it to the Mike Nichols film Charlie Wilson’s War about a clueless congressman who supplies Stingers to the Afghan guerrillas. “It’s as if Hillary and the others just watched that movie and said ‘Hey, let’s do that!’” the diplomat said.

He added that he and his colleagues think the leaking of General David Petraeus’ affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell was timed to silence the former CIA chief on these matters.


Regarding General Ham, military contacts of the diplomats tell them that AFRICOM had Special Ops “assets in place that could have come to the aid of the Benghazi consulate immediately (not in six hours).”

Ham was told by the White House not to send the aid to the trapped men, but Ham decided to disobey and did so anyway, whereupon the White House “called his deputy and had the deputy threaten to relieve Ham of his command.”

The White House motivation in all this is as yet unclear, but it is known that Ham retired quietly in April 2013 as head of AFRICOM.

PJ Media recognizes this is largely hearsay, but the two diplomats sounded quite credible. One of them was in a position of responsibility in a dangerous area of Iraq in 2004.

We will report more as we learn it.

[coffin_dodger]

President of CBS News and WH Benghazi fiction-writer are blood brothers

by Jon Rappoport

http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/05/23/explosive-president-of-cbs-news-and-wh-benghazi-fiction-writer-are-blood-brothers/

[Belligerent Savant]

Justdrew wrote:

well, in the spirit of what's good for the goose is good for the gander...

crazy conspiracy theorist Pete Santilli needs to be killed slowly, his broken corpse dragged through the city behind a team of overfed diuretic horses til it fades into the general muck.

no but really I would love to see this pig beaten within an inch of his miserable worthless life.

at the very least I EXPECT and DEMAND substantial FCC fines for each and every radio station that broadcast this.


please direct a complaint right here:

http://www.fcc.gov/complaints

of course that's all non-sense, but he does need to be fired, divorced with no visitation rights, and made homeless.

Eh. Fined, yes -- he should be fined, perhaps. Otherwise he should be ignored for the fool/troll that he is.

Not sure why such venom is being directed at such wholly ignorable clowns that are looking to simply generate attention/page views/air traffic among those that fully subscribe to this "Left wing/Right wing" divisive nonsense.

Also, Hillary is not so honorable a human to deserve to be defended in the manner depicted above [far from it] -- semi-jest or not.


This whole Benghazi thing is silly from several angles. Yet it's up to 10 pages here already!

Looks like we're not quite ready to move beyond diversionary constructs.

[Simulist]

Justdrew wrote:

well, in the spirit of what's good for the goose is good for the gander...

crazy conspiracy theorist Pete Santilli needs to be killed slowly, his broken corpse dragged through the city behind a team of overfed diuretic horses til it fades into the general muck.

no but really I would love to see this pig beaten within an inch of his miserable worthless life.

at the very least I EXPECT and DEMAND substantial FCC fines for each and every radio station that broadcast this.


please direct a complaint right here:

http://www.fcc.gov/complaints

of course that's all non-sense, but he does need to be fired, divorced with no visitation rights, and made homeless.

Eh. Fined, yes -- he should be fined, perhaps. Otherwise he should be ignored for the fool/troll that he is.

Not sure why such venom is being directed at such wholly ignorable clowns that are looking to simply generate attention/page views/air traffic among those that fully subscribe to this "Left wing/Right wing" divisive nonsense.

Also, Hillary is not so honorable a human to deserve to be defended in such a way [far from it].


This whole Benghazi thing is silly from several angles. Yet it's up to 10 pages here already!

Looks like we're not quite ready to move beyond the constructs.

Pete Santilli is indeed a "wholly ignorable clown" who is "looking to simply generate attention/page views/air traffic among those that fully subscribe to this 'Left wing/Right wing' divisive nonsense." And — absolutely! — this Benghazi nonsense is thoroughly worthy of ridicule.

At the same time, I can certainly understand some of the anger at a person like Pete Santilli, because his words are not only inflammatory towards Hillary Clinton, they are also deeply misogynistic — and, as a special little "bonus," they are also incitements to violence.

Because of this, I agree with JustDrew that he should be dealt with by the FCC has harshly as is legally possible. (Hell, they fined CBS because Janet Jackson showed a nipple, for God's sake! Pete Santilli should at least be removed from the airwaves for this.)

And I'd love to know if Pete Santilli is related to that Ray Santilli, the jerkwad of "alien autopsy" infamy.

[justdrew]

this "Left wing/Right wing" divisive nonsense.

I know you'd like to think it's "divisive nonsense" - it would make things so much simpler. but it's not. There are profound and deep psychological differences involved and if you look, throughout human history you can see this basic struggle. The words themselves are poor proxies I admit, but in our current context they are the dominant signifiers.

[Simulist]

this "Left wing/Right wing" divisive nonsense.

I know you'd like to think it's "divisive nonsense" - it would make things so much simpler. but it's not. There are profound and deep psychological differences involved and if you look, throughout human history you can see this basic struggle. The words themselves are poor proxies I admit, but in our current context they are the dominant signifiers.

Any good con job looks credible to the targeted mark.

[Belligerent Savant]

.
Valid points of course [both Simulist and Justdrew], and I grant that my reply was a bit flippant. And I further grant that if I dedicated some time towards listening to this Santilli goon for even a few minutes I'd surely begin drawing up plans on a nearby napkin for his torture - to be applied slowly with a dull, splintered wooden spoon.

I try to avoid the white noise if I can help it -- which is increasingly difficult nowadays what with the ubiquity of media. And once one encounters [or is invaded by] even a snippet of the pap out there, it's difficult not to react strongly to it.

Vile creatures. Let us all pray to the Sun God to bring forth the Almighty Massive Solar Flare to bring down these technological blights to our evolution.