Hillary Clinton Testimony

[Jaga]

Guys, if I was more quiet in the forum recently, it was partly due to watching and reading about Hillary Clinton testimony in Benghazi committee. I hope that this committee would finally dissolve.
Hillary did a great job, she was cool and collected and people should watch it just to learn how to deal with the situation like that. The committee members were often disrespectful, not-prepared, their questions showed not knowing of the procedures how to deal in the situation of the danger in foreign diplomatic complex - for instance asking why .... the ambassador did not have Hillary's private phone number or address.....
their is a chain of command, their is a procedure, safety emergency people.

here is one of the articles, which I found very interesting:

crooksandliars.com/2015/10/last-night-republicans-handed-hillary
The GOP May Have Just Handed Hillary Clinton The White House

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton endured 11 hours of the Republicans' Benghazi hearing circus. (I sent her $11 last night -- one dollar for every hour.)
I use the word "endured" because that's what women do best. We smile, we nod, we seethe inside. We have to if we want to keep our jobs, or get a better one. Or if we want men to like us, we dare not rail outwardly at the subtle insults we so frequently endure. It might hurt their feelings.
We make sacrifices. We work through the pain. It's always expected of us.

Why can't Hillary Clinton be "authentic"? Because she's a woman -- and worse, a woman in politics. Can you imagine Bernie Sanders putting up with that nuts yesterday? Hell, no. He probably would have pounded the table, told the committee members to shove it up their collective ass, and stomped out of the hearing room. Even the journalists would have cheered.
But Clinton doesn't have those options. In order for a woman to become president, she has to be a robot. She can't show emotions. She has to smile when they badger her, she has to listen thoughtfully as they spout lies and insinuations.
She has to think like a hostage.

And don't think she wasn't a hostage. She wasn't free to leave. She had to jump through those hoops, and she had to do it perfectly, with patience and without a hint of resentment.

She should get the Oscar.

I was in awe of her performance. I wasn't the only one. Last night, I saw hundreds of pissed-off women on Twitter who praised her ability to endure -- and sent money. I saw dozens of women voters who said, "I was leaning toward Bernie, but anyone who can endure what she just did has my vote." Even Republican women took to Twitter to express their outrage over the committee's treatment of Clinton.
This isn't how it works, Reince. This isn't how you get women to support your candidate, by bullying Clinton as if she's a criminal defendant.
There's still much that can happen between now and next November. But I'm pretty sure the Republican thugs just propelled Hillary Clinton into the White House. As Markos put it last night:
Hillary was "meh" with significant portion of the activist left. Thanks GOP, for helping change that!

[Nictoshek]

static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2012/4/11/1334137968389/Funny-faces-Hillary-Clint-008.jpg

[Jaga]

Nictoe - what you posted is a FALSE Picture, distorted image which does not do any good to anybody. We are not here to spread lies. If this is not a lie, please subnit the reference. The link you posted it from sounds very suspicious. We are not a hate site like Charlie Hebdo.

Here is real excerpt from Hillary Clinton testimony from PBS:


and from CNN:

[Nictoshek]

You're right. The photo didn't do Billary justice. But Maureen Dowd DOES:


The Empire Strikes Back



OCT. 24, 2015



WASHINGTON — NOBODY plays the victim like Hillary.

She can wield that label like a wrecking ball.

If her husband humiliates her with a girlfriend in the Oval Office, Hillary turns around and uses the sympathy engendered to launch a political career. If her Republican opponent gets in her space in an overbearing way during a debate, she turns around and uses the sympathy engendered to win a Senate seat. If conservatives hold a Salem witch trial under the guise of a House select committee hearing, she turns around and uses the sympathy engendered to slip into the H.O.V. lane of a superhighway to the presidency.

Hillary Clinton is never more alluring than when a bunch of pasty-faced, nasty-tongued white men bully her.

And she was plenty alluring during her marathon session on Thursday with Republican Lilliputians, who were completely oblivious to the fact that Hillary is always at her most potent when some Teanderthal is trying to put her in her place.

Trey Gowdy and his blithering band of tea-partiers went on a fishing expedition, but they forgot to bring their rods — or any fresh facts.

It was a revealing display of hard-core conservatives in their parallel universe, where all their biases are validated by conservative media. They crawled out of the ooze into the sea of cameras, blinking and obtuse. Ohio’s Jim Jordan, bellowing. South Carolina’s Gowdy, sweating. Alabama’s Martha Roby, not getting the joke. And Indiana’s Susan Brooks, allowing that “most of us really don’t know much about Libya.”

Hillary acted bemused, barely masking her contempt at their condescension. She was no doubt amazed at what an amateur job they were doing at character assassination.

The Republicans came across as even more conspiratorial than their other target, Sidney Blumenthal, and his nickname is “G.K.,” for grassy knoll. One conservative on the panel, trying to paint Clinton as an addled 68-year-old, as of Monday, kept snidely offering to pause while she read the notes her posse was passing her.

They must have been mistaking her for W., who always looked as if he wouldn’t know what to say if his notes blew away in the wind.

It is not the terrain of Gowdy’s lame committee, but it is legitimate to examine Clinton’s record in the Middle East.

As a senator, she made a political vote to let W. invade Iraq. As much homework as she did to get ready for the Libya committee, she chose not to do her homework on Iraq in 2002 — neglecting to read the sketchy National Intelligence Estimate. She didn’t want to seem like a hippie flower girl flashing a peace sign after 9/11.

Then she urged President Obama to help topple Muammar el-Qaddafi without heeding the painful lesson of Iraq — that if America went into another nebulously defined mission, there would have to be a good plan to prevent the vacuum of power being filled by militant Islamic terrorists.

Since she was, as her aide Jake Sullivan put it, “the public face of the U.S. effort in Libya,” one of the Furies, along with Samantha Power and Susan Rice, who had pushed for a military intervention on humanitarian grounds, Hillary needed to stay on top of it.

She had to be tenacious in figuring out when Libya had deteriorated into such a caldron of jihadis that our ambassador should either be pulled out or backed up. In June 2012, the British closed their consulate in Benghazi after their ambassador’s convoy was hit by a grenade. A memo she received that August described the security situation in Libya as “a mess.”

Sorry to see the lame wit inquisitors did not come through for Ms Dowd when the accused spinning circles around the accusers. But face it,...
Larry Fleming 1 hour ago

The hearing established a number of items:1. Hillary Clinton is not a leader.2. Hillary Clinton established that Embassy Security wasn't her...

Careful, Maureen, your hatred is showing.Victim? Seriously? I'm afraid I totally disagree with you about her playing any kind of victim...

When you are the Valkyrie who engineers the intervention, you can’t then say it is beneath you to pay attention to the ludicrously negligent security for your handpicked choice for ambassador in a lawless country full of assassinations and jihadist training camps.

According to Republicans on the committee, there were 600 requests from J. Christopher Stevens’s team to upgrade security in Benghazi in 2012 and 20 attacks on the mission compound in the months before the Sept. 11 siege.

In a rare moment of lucidity, Representative Mike Pompeo of Kansas said to Clinton: “You described Mr. Stevens as having the best knowledge of Libya of anyone,” but “when he asked for increased security, he didn’t get it.”

As Hillary kept explaining, that job was the province of the “security professionals,” four of whom were later criticized for providing “grossly inadequate” security at the Benghazi compound and removed from their posts.

The 11-hour hearing showcased the good Hillary, but there were occasional flashes of the bad. She still doesn’t believe that setting up her own server was so wrong. Even though the inspector general of government intelligence said that there was top secret information in her emails, she sticks with her parsing. “There was nothing marked classified on my emails, either sent or received,” she told Jordan.

She seemed oddly detached about Stevens, testifying that he didn’t have her personal email or cell number, “but he had the 24-hour number of the State Operations in the State Department that can reach me 24/7.”

There were no call logs of talks between Stevens and Clinton, and she said she could not remember if she ever spoke to him again after she swore him in in May. “I was the boss of ambassadors in 270 countries,” she explained.

But Libya was the country where she was the midwife to chaos. And she should have watched that baby like the Lady Hawk she is.

[Jaga]

Maureen Dowd is very mean-spirited for some time but at least she is a real person and this is just her distorted view... which is OK but still just an opinion of a person who is embittered, cynical and sarcastic.

[kaima]

Oct 24, 2015 22:13:18 GMT -7 Jaga said:

Maureen Dowd is very mean for some time but at least she is a real person and this is just her distorted view... which is OK but still just an opinion of a person who is embittered, cynical and sarcastic.

I agree Jaga. The article was also poorly presented on this Forum, with it difficult to tell where Doud's opinion stopped and the other critique started.

The Republicans shot themselves with this one. They couldn't have set it up better to show Clinton off in a better light! She sure looked good, Presidential as they so much like to say. And the Republicans looked like pitiful unhappy kindergarteners. It makes me wonder what other idiots we have in Congress that reach such a low level of achievement!

This is supposed to be our example of the Best of Representative Government? This is what I would expect from the Republic of Congo and not Republic of USA.

[Jaga]

Kai,

yes, I worry about the quality or rather lack of quality of our representatives. If these people represent us.....no wonder not too much constructive dialogue is going on.
Unfortunately, even in such an obvious case of Hillary's win, you can find these 1% of hateful mail and somebody would follow up on it.
There will always be Hillary and Bill Clinton's haters, that would hate them just because they are Clintons/

Majority of conservatives agree that Hillary Clinton hearing was not good for GOP. But of course if somebody is CLinton's hater she/he can always find this small fraction would see things differently.

Here is more:

crooksandliars.com/2015/10/conservatives
Conservative Pundits Bash Benghazi Committee As A Bust

Outside of Megyn Kelly and a few other Fox News employees, most of the conservative world admitted that Hillary destroyed the Benghazi committee witch hunt.
Charles Krauthammer told Bret Baier that Hillary did a very good job and the committee wasted too much time on Sidney Blumenthal:

I think A.B. [Stoddard] right. The judge [Andrew Napolitano] said there are three audiences, the main audience that matters, unless she's indicted, is the people. American people watching this. They don't care about [Sidney] Blumenthal.

She had her way, when she lowered her voice, and talked about the sleepless nights, it was a gripping performance, which is the way I would put it so I can remain neutral on this. But showing that she really cared, et cetera or at least giving that impression. And that's what's going to be shown.
Here's a roundup of a few other conservative voices that were not happy about Gowdy's committee:
Byron York: Benghazi bust

So a hearing billed as an epic, High Noon-style confrontation — granted, the hype came from the media, not Republican committee members themselves — instead turned out to be a somewhat interesting look at a few limited aspects of the Benghazi affair. In other words, no big deal. And that is very, very good news for Hillary Clinton.

Erick Erickson: The Benghazi Hearing Should Not Be, But Is, A Waste of Time
It was all a political spectacle. God bless Trey Gowdy for trying to learn the facts and understand what happened. But the rest of it was just a carnival road show of back bench congresscritters playing to the cameras and Hillary Clinton working hard to play persecuted victim.

John Podhoretz: Hillary wins — theatrically — in Benghazi hearing
The GOP, damaged by Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s jaw-dropping gaffe about how the committee had done its work by making Hillary’s poll numbers fall, didn’t have much running room. And two of them, Reps. Mike Pompeo and Peter Roskam, squandered what little they had by veering off on weird tangents.
She looked big. They looked small. She spoke like a person engaged with highly serious matters, and they mostly sounded as though they were niggling, fussing and poking ineffectually at her.

[Jaga]

Republicans are ‘in denial’ about Hillary Clinton

from: www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/10/26/morning-plum-republicans-are-in-denial-about-hillary-clinton/

As I asked the other day: Do Republican strategists and establishment types really think beating Clinton in 2016 will be easy?

A new report from Mark Halperin supplies the answer: Yes, they do. Halperin concludes that Republicans are “in denial” about Clinton’s various 2016 advantages.

Halperin describes those advantages as follows: the Clinton team is far more competent than in 2008. She may wrap up the nomination early, while the eventual GOP nominee will be bloodied by a very long and bitter process. Clinton is a formidable debater. Clinton will have a demographic edge. Some of the positions Clinton is taking now may have majority support in a general election (a point your humble blogger has made as well).

But one of the most important advantages Clinton may have, according to Halperin, is the quality of Republican thinking about the 2016 election:

Some Republicans so detest Hillary Clinton they are badly underestimating how likely she is, at this point in the campaign, to be America’s 45th president. Their denial is just as strong now as it was a month ago, before Clinton began a run of political victories that have enhanced her prospects….many elite and grassroots Republicans believe Clinton’s personality, which they can’t stand, will keep her out of the Oval Office no matter what.

Republicans are erroneously convinced they can beat Clinton solely with talk of Benghazi, e-mails, and other controversies that have nothing to do with the economy and the real lives of real people. Nowhere does the Fox News-Rush Limbaugh echo chamber more hurt Republican chances of beating Clinton than in the politics of scandal and controversy. To paraphrase the famous line attributed to Pauline Kael: everyone who conservatives know think the Clintons should be in prison. The problem is that swing voters don’t share that view in sufficient numbers to actually warrant banking a victory on placing those arguments front and center.

[pieter]

I agree very much with your point of view Jaga. I was not a very large supporter from the start, but she has gained my respect with her pragmatism, classical liberalism, moderate centrists stance. I believe she can unite democratic, republican and independent women behind her.
And maybe the white male and black male middle classes and working classes too. The high class and upper classes will traditionally support the Republican party.

She has decades of experiance in Little Rock, Arkansas; Washington D.C. and New York State as a senator. She has lived in the White House with a president which was her husband, she has been the state secretary (minister of foreign affairs for European readers), had her personal
campaign against Obama in 2008 (and must have learned a lot from that. That struggle toughens and roughens you too). And she was a Republican activist in her youth being raised in a Republican family.

Raised in a politically conservative household, Rodham helped canvass Chicago's South Side at age thirteen following the very close 1960 U.S. presidential election, where she found evidence of electoral fraud against Republican candidate Richard Nixon. She then volunteered to campaign for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in the U.S. presidential election of 1964. Rodham's early political development was shaped most by her high school history teacher (like her father, a fervent anticommunist), who introduced her to Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative, and by her Methodist youth minister (like her mother, concerned with issues of social justice), with whom she saw and met civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. in Chicago in 1962.

So she has decades of experience with both Republican and Democratic activism, and national and Federal politics. She is probably the best candidate. Donald Trump is a loose canon. I hope he will not win the elections and becomes the next president. A populist clown as a president.


It is like if in the Netherlands Emile Ratelband would become prime minister. ( www.ratelband.com/biography-emile-ratelband )

Her he is confronted by an irritating Dutch comedian who follows him and shows him a mirror about how he behaves. You sees his lack of humor and ability to put things into perspective:

[Jaga]

Pieter,

I am glad that we both belong to people who can evolve and change our views. I did not like Hillary for some time. I felt that she was too liberal and in the bubble. I was supporting pres. Obama, not Hillary the last time. I think that she learned a lot through her husband's presidency and her own failure 8 years ago. She was always professional, but she is also evolving and probably the most mature politician from all the presidential candidates.