While he didn’t watch the Bill O’Reilly interview with President Obama, Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) is sure the President told an “outrageous lie” during it about Benghazi, which he likened to being “just like ObamaCare”. The scope of the President’s cover up is just like Watergate, Inhofe charged in his interview with Oklahoma radio station KFAQ.
Inhofe doesn’t believe that Benghazi is a conspiracy theory created by Republicans and sold by Fox. (It is.) “It’s just an outrageous lie, it is kind of hard to call it anything else. It’s kind of like Obamacare. He has to come up and say something and blame someone else.”
Blame someone else, eh? Kinda like Republicans pointing the finger at Obama and Hillary Clinton for Benghazi when in point of fact, House Republicans denied funding for security to Libya. During one of the Republicans’ 2012 witch hunts/campaign ads, Democrat Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) exploded that they had:
“the audacity to come here” when the administration requested, for worldwide security, “$440 million more than you guys wanted to provide. And the answer is that you damn didn’t provide it! You REDUCED what the administration asked for to protect these people. Ask not who the guilty party is, it’s you! It is us. It is this committee, and the things that we insist that we need have to cost money.”
So, Republicans cut funding for security to protect these people, and since that ended up being a costly mistake, they’ve spent their time pointing fingers at President Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Inhofe vowed to carry on with this GOP manufactured conspiracy theory until the day he dies, “I will say this to my dying day!” Oh, good. He continued, “I know people don’t realize it now, but that’s going to go down in history as the greatest cover up. And I’m talking about compared to the Pentagon Papers, Iran-Contra, Watergate and the rest of them. This was a cover up in order for people right before the election to think that there was no longer a problem with terrorism in the Middle East.”
No. No that’s not what happened at all. What happened was within hours of the Benghazi attack, a very smugly confident and sly Mitt Romney went on TV to blame Obama for it, disregarding the dangerous situation and using it to his own strategic advantage in a disturbingly detached way.
From the beginning, Obama said it was an act of terror. He said that again in the interview with O’Reilly: “Obama said, “Understand that by definition, anybody who is attacking our compound is an act of terror.”
If you say it’s an act of terror, how can you be guilty of also trying to say there is no problem with terrorism?
This moving of the Benghazi goal posts in a desperate effort to create a scandal has been an ongoing problem for Republicans. In May of 2013, Republicans argued that Obama saying “Act of terror” in the Rose Garden on September 12 was not a real reference to terror. At the same time, they are arguing that the phrase — from the Benghazi email John Boehner never read until it was too late — “Islamic extremists” can be read and interpreted as “Islamic terrorists”.
At any rate, Republicans’ record on getting terrorism right is so dim as to be non-existent, especially if we factor in what they got wrong. We’re in the negative here, and it’s ugly. Suffice it to say their opinions on Obama and the Middle East are best saved for local Tea Party rallies and GOP tent revivals, because they bear no relationship to reality.
Republicans might want to consider starting to read and watch the things they feel so free to comment on. You know, before they comment.
Inhofe didn’t even watch the interview. Is he always this careless with facts? Is he always so free to accuse a sitting President of orchestrating a cover up on par with Watergate over a denial he didn’t even hear first hand?
Inhofe going Watergate/Benghazi as Republican Governor and 2016 hopeful Chris Christie looks to be facing real charges along those lines and other Republicans are making impeachment noises really tells you that the GOP is desperate. It’s an election year and they have nothing.
Republicans are going to try to rebrand the War on Women as their War FOR Women, but other than that and their already failing pretense to care about immigration reform, all they have is hate. Again. Hate covering up policies that harm the 98%.
So impeachment talk and Watergate charges it will be.
Listen to the interview here (via Politico).
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Connect with Sarah on Post, Mastodon @PoliticusSarah@Journa.Host, & Twitter.
- Philly DA Warns Anyone Planning to Play Militia ‘F Around and Find Out’ - Mon, Nov 4th, 2024
- Opinion: Republicans Kill Another Woman with Abortion Ban as Pregnant Teenager Dies - Fri, Nov 1st, 2024
- Musk Flouts the Law with No Repercussions in Pennsylvania - Thu, Oct 31st, 2024
