Saturday, November 22, 2014

If You Give a Wingnut a Cookie...



...he's going to scream for Impeachment.

Even when it turns out there is no cookie.

House intel panel debunks many Benghazi theories

A two-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees.

Debunking a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies, the investigation of the politically charged incident determined that there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, intelligence about who carried it out and why was contradictory, the report found. That led Susan Rice, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to inaccurately assert that the attack had evolved from a protest, when in fact there had been no protest. But it was intelligence analysts, not political appointees, who made the wrong call, the committee found. The report did not conclude that Rice or any other government official acted in bad faith or intentionally misled the American people.

The House Intelligence Committee report was released with little fanfare on the Friday before Thanksgiving week. Many of its findings echo those of six previous investigations by various congressional committees and a State Department panel. The eighth Benghazi investigation is being carried out by a House Select Committee appointed in May...
There is no cookie because there is never any cookie.  

But as you may have noticed, the fact that every single OMFG!Liberal!Tyranny! fairy tale Conservatives rush to embrace turns out to be just one more lie from the same people who have been lying to them all along has no effect on Conservatives whatsoever.
How Fox News Dismissed Today’s Benghazi Report in Less Than 30 Seconds
Which means, tragically, that the basic Liberal concept of trying to reason with people who disagree with us and persuade them to look back across the long arc of all the Conservative lies they have been fed over the decades is worse than useless.  It is long past time to stop pretending that completely debunking one Conservative hoax after another is ever going to wean them off of Roger Ailes' toxic teat.  

They can't stop believing now.  

It would kill them to stop believing now, and so they've dug in like tics, shuttered themselves away from any facts that make them feel icky, and are never going to give up.

So what can we do?

Well, as every reader of this blog is keenly aware every single time a Conservative liar takes a massive hit to their claptrap, they scuttle immediately to the nearest "Both Sides Do It" charging station, and there they remain until the have replenished their Health Points and the threat of Talking Point Death from Massive Fact Damage is over.

Access to these recharging stations -- more commonly as the entire Beltway Media including the now nearly-unwatchable "Up with Steve Kornacki"
I..I..I...don't want to put too much of an academic point on this or anything, I...I...when I think about where our politics is right now I..I..I...think there's a cynical motive to this lawsuit  that I just expressed a minute ago but I do think we're reached...this...this... this...we're always talking about how broken Washington is -- how much worse it's gotten the last few years -- and it's gotten worse because you have one party controlling the White House you have another party controlling the Congress right now and you can talk all you want about the motives of each side but the fact is they have not been able to work together and I can't see how that's going to change in the next couple of years and one thing  that a lawsuit like this count start to clarify...
-- is how the clown gets out of the box and how crazy gets mainstreamed.

With a steady supply of "Both Sides Do It", there is no limit of how far Conservatives can go or how much damage they can do.

Without a steady supply of "Both Sides Do It", they will start to wither and die.

2 comments:

Horace Boothroyd III said...

On a similar note, Raw Story is reporting that Germany has dropped its investigation into the alleged-by-Snowden hacking by the NSA of Chancellor Merkel's cell phone.

For lack of evidence that it or anything like it ever happened.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/11/germany-to-drop-investigation-into-us-spying-on-merkel-report/

Just as the Republicans are incapable of processing evidence that does not validate their preconceptions, the kossacks and firebaggers are being oddly quiet about this development. My money is on the scenario, that they settle on a speculative scheme as to how the NSA infiltrated German counter intelligence before the investigation ran too deep and became too dangerous.

Which, if you think about it, is more plausible than the claim that the NSA cracked Digby's laptop to watch her masturbate.

driftglass said...

Conspiracy theories are like the TARDIS: it'll always be big enough to hold anything the writer needs it to hold.