“I’m not sure she had rehearsed for that type of question,” Johnson told BuzzFeed Wednesday afternoon, after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. “I think she just decided before she was going to describe emotionally the four dead Americans, the heroes, and use that as her trump card to get out of the questions. It was a good way of getting out of really having to respond to me.” [Buzzfeed]
WASHINGTON – Republicans tripped over their feeble attempts at verbal jujitsu. They served up their best talking points, even went so far as to suggest she should have been fired for not reading State Department cables. Clinton lowered the boom on that silly notion and in the process finally removed any remaining doubt that Senator Rand Paul is anything but an uninformed, foreign policy challenged, preening grandstander. Clinton so demolished Republican Senator Ron Johnson that he resorted to cheap sexism to soothe his crushed ego.
At one point Secretary Clinton had to fight back laughter when Senator Rand Paul actually asked if we were shipping weapons from Libya to Turkey. “To Turkey?”, she asked incredulously. It caught Paul channeling Fox News “sources.”
During her House testimony, Clinton also unpacked why Paul’s arrogant notion that if he were president, a fantasy itself, she would have been sacked for not reading State Department cables, by offering up a whopping number and a dose of reality, too.
“1.43 millions cables a year come to the State Department and they are all addressed to me. They do not all come to me.” – Secretary Hillary Clinton
Republicans were foolish enough to think they could corner, fluster or get the better of Secretary Hillary Clinton, instead of concentrating on their job. This starts through having the humility in the first place to be willing to discover, through mining Clinton’s vastly superior knowledge of statecraft and diplomacy in dangerous regions, how they as members of the House can make certain that Benghazi like attacks never happen again.
Instead, from Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul to members of the House, Republicans one by one illustrated their hyper partisan game plan towards Clinton, proving they weren’t there for information, but had come to continue their Benghazi witch hunt.
The mission to hang Benghazi around Clinton’s neck was never going to be successful.
In the case of Benghazi, Clinton was in no danger of being hitched to a shooting Starr. She did the smart thing and appointed an Accountability Review Board headed by the likes of Mike Mullen, the retired admiral and former Joint Chiefs chairman, and the legendary diplomat Thomas Pickering. There’s no better “scandal” management than leading the charge to get to the bottom of things. – Why Benghazi Hasn’t Brought Down Hillary Clinton–and Won’t
Not only did Clinton show up fit and ready for verbal battle, but she didn’t need talking points to get the better of the boys or the singular Republican female they allowed to speak. It takes policy expertise and vast professional experience, not to mention time put in on a job, to so ably talk extemporaneously, transparently and with no agenda or concern for anything but offering all the information she could on the events of Benghazi, and to do so with such alacrity.
Even Senator John McCain, with his continued dissatisfaction with everything associated with President Obama’s foreign policy, didn’t have the spine to suggest any of his displeasure with what happened in Benghazi had anything remotely to do with Secretary Clinton’s failure. But he was still displeased with what she said, because there was nothing that anyone from the Obama administration could offer that would have altered his present persona of an angry old man.
When Secretary Clinton left the building, she left a pile of vanquished partisan Republicans in her wake. They better get used to it.
Coming so shortly after President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address, this week has been Christmas in January for Democrats.
Well, that is until Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid redefined the meaning of leadership downward on the filibuster.
Taylor Marsh, is a veteran political analyst, a former Huffington Post contributor, Broadway babe and talk radio dabbler, and is the author of The Hillary Effect, available at Barnes and Noble and on Amazon. Her new-media magazine www.taylormarsh.com covers national politics, women, foreign policy, and culture.