Fox News’ Sandy Rios Calls Clinton a Professional Liar and the Hearings a Disaster

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It’s just piling on at this point. Republicans on the Benghazi committee have to feel like a train ran over them – twice – as the cascade of criticism continues, this time from the American Family Association’s Sandy Rios, whom we last saw endorsing Ted Cruz for president, calling the committee incompetent and the hearing a “disaster.”

Listen to the consummate apologist and liar – this is the same woman who claimed Bush left the Middle East in peace – accuse another woman of being a consummate apologist and liar, and with such compelling sincerity. Rios is truly at artist at everything but looking in the mirror:

I thought it was interesting how they conducted the hearing, that they had – what I would describe it as unending answers – for Hillary Clinton. They just let her go on and on and on, and she is wonderful at this. Hillary Clinton is the consummate apologist, and she has had probably more experience than any living woman in our country right now at defending herself against scandals under oath, of parsing her words. She is a consummate professional at lying and covering up. And so by even having her there and letting her go on in unending fashion is a disaster just waiting to happen.

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And if you didn’t pay attention to the words, she looked great and she was compose and she looked presidential. She did. Whatever that means, she looked it. She played the role very well. Problem is, she was lying. It was amazing to me at the end of Jim Jordan’s back and forth with her, she chides him he should read her book because she talks about…she even at one point claims she is – has lost more sleep over this issue in Benghazi than anyone in that room. She’s lost more sleep. She wondered what they could have done differently, practically in tears. This is a performance – it was a fabulous performance. And I watched the first two hours and then bits of the rest of it later.

Of course, what Rios saw is not what the rest of us saw, and she might have had difficult watching any more than she did because her own network – Fox News – found it so embarrassing that they cut away from coverage of the hearing before it was over (CNN and MSNBC continued theirs).

And people noticed, as Lawrence O’Donnell’s tweet shows (surely Rios noticed too?):

Somehow, like Erick Erickson, Rios could condemn the hearing as a farce while still seeing something magnificent, something Parsifal-like, in Trey Gowdy in thinking he could have stood up to Hillary Clinton:

And its always an issue of competence. What are they doing? Why do they do it the way they do it? I don’t know. Why would you have a committee meeting like that and allow everybody lined up there to ask their questions. Some of them looked extremely…the’re not capable! They are lined up with a professional. Should have been prosecutors asking her questions. Maybe one. Maybe two. I mean prosecutors on the committee. They certainly have them. Trey Gowdy could have handled the whole thing. And maybe – but no, they have to use it as a showboating. Because it is in many cases a political maneuver on both sides. And of course the Democrats led by Elijah Cummings did – all of their questions were filibusters to you know pull down the clock and defend Hillary which is amazing. Just statements about how ‘You’re innocent right? You didn’t do anything. And they’ve accused you of this and you didn’t do that right?’

Rios wanted a witch trial. She talks about a prosecution but even during a prosecution the defense gets to ask questions, while here she objected to Democrats being allowed to do the same. Clearly, like her AFA compatriot Bryan Fischer, she lacks an understanding of how Democracy works. Hillary Clinton has not been proved guilty of anything. Far from it. In fact, she has been repeatedly exonerated by everyone except the GOP, which refuses to let any facts upset their Benghazi Hoax narrative.

It is no wonder the Republican cart came crashing into a wall and broke into a million pieces. This is what happens when fantasy meets reality. No fantasy narrative can survive the introduction of facts. The result was all too predictable, and only a party so lost to the dictates of their self-imposed ideology could have failed to see it coming.

Rios is both right and wrong: the Republican committee members were no match for Hillary Clinton, but she did not win because she is a “professional liar and apologist.” She won it, because in a trial by fire, she had the truth on her side.



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