The Republican clown car has crashed into Benghazi and may never come out again. German General Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, captured the city easily in 1941 but the Republicans have walked into their own minefield, or at least gotten lost, as they struggle vainly to find an argument, let alone a conspiracy. As is the case in war, it is easier to start an Inquisition than it is to end one. The thing takes on a life of its own, and consumes ever more human kindling.
The way it’s looking now, there may not be any survivors.
Saturday Night Live hit the nail on the head this weekend when it examined the results of the GOP’s latest “Let’s get Obama!” foray: the infamous Benghazi hearings.
In the sketch, according to Rep. Doc Hastings, the sole purpose of the Benghazi hearings is to boost Capitol Hill’s “ratings” (though to boost the GOP’s ratings would be more precise). As a witness, they call Jodi Arias (whose trial, after all, had better ratings).
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Watch, courtesy of CNN:
Jodi Arias: Who do you think did it?
Rep. Peter King: W-Well we know who did it. It was Ansar al-Sharia.
Jodi Arias: Well, if you know who did it, then why are you holding these hearings?
Rep. Peter King: [Speechless open-mouthed stare]
King’s face was a mirror of America’s. I mentioned yesterday that I laughed at the long list of reasons Republicans have used since 2009 to impeach President Obama but an open-mouthed stare works just as well.
The Republican Inquisition knows who attacked the embassy. They even know why the embassy was vulnerable to attack, since they are the very people who cut funding for embassy security. They even know why they are attacking the Obama administration: because Benghazi was next on their list of things to impeach President Obama for.
Next week, or whenever they finally find their way out of Benghazi, it will be something else. It might be somebody’s dog dying or their goldfish being flushed, or maybe even a toilet clogged by all the Republican bullshit on Capitol Hill. Rest assured, Obama will be to blame for it.
The longer this clown show goes on - and I don’t expect them to clue into this any time soon - the more ill-repute they attach to themselves. They wish, of course, to portray themselves as heroes, as defenders of Republican virtue, but there the fly in the buttermilk is, there is no Republican virtue to protect. There is only small-minded, mean-spiritedness and a desire to lash-out in revenge against not only Barack Obama for daring to be elected, but against the American people who had the audacity to reject their corporate-sponsored message of enslavement.
What they come out looking like is a bunch of evil pricks.
And, well…there is a further purpose to the Inquisition: it affords them another excuse to avoid doing their jobs, that is, upholding their oaths of office and actually governing America. If you’re not governing America you have a lot of free-time on your hands, some holes in your calendar. There are only so many votes you can hold, after all, on overturning affordable healthcare, free cancer-screenings and kids lunches – or even eliminating overtime pay.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
