Hillary falls on Benghazi sword
Nik sends us a link to CNN which reports that Clinton fell on her sword in an interview with CNN in regards to the blame for the lack of security at the Benghazi consulate on September 11th;
“I take responsibility” for what happened on September 11, Clinton said in an interview with CNN’s Elise Labott soon after arriving in Lima, Peru for a visit. The interview, one of a series given to U.S. television networks Monday night, were the first she has given about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
Clinton insisted President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are not involved in security decisions, Clinton said.
“I want to avoid some kind of political gotcha,” she added, noting that it is close to the election.
Of course, we knew that. I’m pretty sure that the president and vice president don’t pour sweat out over staffing considerations at every single consulate in the world. But the president does appoint the people who do make those decisions. It appears to me that a lot of people in the Obama Administration take a fall for their decisions. I seem to recall some presidents who took the blame as well as the credit for their administration has done right or wrong.
Of course, this president’s first staffing consideration was Joe Biden as if that shouldn’t have been a warning for the rest of us of the type of people he considered worthy of doing the people’s business. I could go on from Bite-Me, but I won’t.
Clinton also sought to downplay the criticism that administration officials continued to say the attack was a spontaneous product of a protest over an anti-Muslim film, a theory that has since been discarded.
In the wake of an attack, there is always “confusion,” Clinton said. But the information has since changed, Clinton said in the interview.
Yeah, well, most of us could read news reports and look at the calender and be able to tell that it wasn’t a spontaneous protest. Don’t they have TVs and calenders at the State Department?
Category: 2012 election, Barack Obama/Joe Biden
Oh to be a fly on the wall listening to both Clintons at this point.
This is not nearly enough. She fell on a rubber sword and didn’t even say all of the magic words, “I take FULL responsibility.” Does her sense of partial responsibility include the torture and the murders? Her concern seems to be only the political fallout. No surprise there but no less repulsive either.
Well. I truly did not think she would do this — take the blame for what went wrong. I was wrong.
She’s the only person outside the circle of Bo’s wagons who has stayed this long from day one. You can’t count Biden, he’s the veep, but if you think about it, he could leave, too.
So the real question is, how much longer will she be there?
Has she already cleaned out her desk and left the keys?
From my post in the ‘How Obama Lost Syria’ column:
When I said if I were Hillary, I’d get out, I meant that, but I doubt that she’ll do so.
I did think that she would stay until after the elections.
Now, interesting thing. Clinton has often said she’s no longer interested in becoming president. Think this pretty well seals that she’ll never be? I don’t think she’d make it out of the primaries with such an admission on record. ‘Course, Libs are pretty forgiving…toward other libs.
Damn for her man now for this lame administration.
The Clintons are Teflon-coated, and they know it. If her boss is reelected, then her job is safe. If not, she’ll pull some other carpet-bagging exercise like she did to represent NY. Or maybe she’ll just retire. Either way, I think the Clintons don’t have much to worry about.
What if she just wants to distance herself from the contamination?
There’s a rift between the Clintons and Bo, growing wider and wider.
I think she’s getting ready to pull out, right after the elections.
Don’t they have TVs and calenders at the State Department?
Their calendars have been all messed up since they got the special ones without Wednesdays… as a Clinton, she doesn’t like to have anything (especially keyboards) with a “W” on it.
Now have any of you ever had a job where you didn’t know what thefuck you were doing? Well, that’s what happened here….none of them know what they’re doing…ms clinton, the prez etc…none of them know what they’re doing.
It would be like if we were asked to fly the Space Shuttle. I’m sure it’d crash…but would it be our fault? Hell no…they should have known better than to give an old grunt the keys to something like that.
@10
If we were asked to fly the shuttle and we crashed it, it would be our fault. We should, upon being asked to fly the shuttle…and knowing we don’t know shit about being astronauts…we should say “Hell no”. And that’s what Clinton/Obama/Biden should have done upon being asked to run for office.
They KNOW what they’re doing. They’re too smart to not know what they’re doing. I’d feel better if I just thought they were idiots, but they are Harvard educated.
Watch for Chelsea to run in the 2014 elections.
As I point out in my own post on this, linked here, Obama may be able to claim ignorance and malfeasance for ignoring the Intel Briefs, he can not blame anyone but himself for not sending in the Marines when the walls were breached, or for sending the Marines out into the middle of the Pacific, or for asking a TRANSITIONAL govt to send re-inforcements, instead of someone from Rota.
What if Hillary’s political acumen is just as over-hyped as Obama’s? Sure, Bill makes Machiavelli look like Mr. Rogers, but skill doesn’t automatically transfer over to a person’s spouse.
I hate to break it to Hillary, but this reminds me of the time I went to my favorite Sports-bar and the waiter screwed up my beer order, brought out cold food, and then screwed up my check. When I complained he asked me “Do you want me to get fired?” My response was “No, I want to fire the guy that hired you.”
WOTN: negative. Intelligence does not imply competence across the board in any and all fields. The most intelligent lawyer in the world is not a good choice to design missiles.
Further, being intelligent does not imply one can even become competent at any and all assignments. Different professions require different skills and abilities. A great lawyer with little mathematical ability will almost certainly never become a competent engineer. He or she simply lacks a key skill necessary for the job.
I have no doubt that many people in the current Administration are intelligent. However, it is manifestly obvious that many of them are also not competent at the duties they’ve been assigned and also have not managed to become competent while in office. Therefore, at this point many of them do not truly know what they’re doing – even if they may think they do.
Hillary is dumber than she looks…. this was more of a grenade then a sword, but I don’t want to take anything away from the few that actually did that…
I think that Hillary is more like Lucretia Borgia, and that Obama had better be watching his six big time.
Obama stabbed her in the back during his election campaign, and she’ll never forgive him for that. She has something up her sleeve, some card that I suspect she’s getting ready to play because in her world, she ALWAYS gets even.
My real question here is the following: When does the buck stop at the top for this Administration?
We have the Fast and Furious incident(s) at the ATF but none of the higher ups seemed to know about it. At the least they probably plan to use Eric Holder as a cut out to shield the President. Now you have Hillary Clinton, acting as a shield for the Lybia, right after they tried to thow the Intel Community under the bus…When is enough enough and you have to say maybe its not the people running those organizations, maybe its the directions/policies they are getting from their boss….
-Ish
This President only takes credit when something goes right and everyone around him takes the fall when something goes wrong. Fast and Furious? Not Obama and not Holder, but some lacky took it in the short and curly’s for that. $4 per gallon gas? Nope, that was because of Bush (it’s interesting that the dems haven’t held a press conference to blame the $4 per gallon gas on Obama like they did Bush when it was $3 per gallon back then). Benghazi? Oh, that’s got to be the intelligence community and State Dept. Bin Laden? Yeah, I did that.
November 6th can’t get here fast enough.
Plausible deniability covers a LOT of things. This ain’t one of them.
What Clinton just did was show the world that she has a larger pair than anyone else in the administration. Not that there ever was a doubt.
She also managed to highlight (again) that things the executive should have known he did not. Not that it matters, but there are some folks out here in flyover country who still believe that the executive must know a little something about everything he/she is charged with managing.
As to their collective intelligence? Oh, they are plenty smart but that isn’t the problem. It’s their agenda that is the problem. They (and all those guys behind the curtains) have been working the agenda for decades, and it is coming to fruition.
Doesn’t matter who wins a single election. The agenda is all that matters to the left. The current occupier is but one pawn, a tool, in advancing the agenda for the true believers. His not being reelected just might serve the cause better. They are already suggesting riots and all manner of civil disobedience would result. They are drooling at the prospect.
When one asks whether the Administration is incompetent or knows exactly what it is doing, and has set on that path, purposely, the latter is by far the scarier answer.
But, the Administration told us they had an agenda. It included “sharing the wealth,” “fundamental change,” and “negotiations without preconditions” with our enemies.
Geitner is recognized as a genius in his field. Hillary has decades of political experience, and remains the most pragmatic person in the Administration. Panetta has decades of public policy experience. Obama has a law degree with a speciality in Constitutional law.
They will say what they have to say to get their politicians re-elected, but they have an agenda, and 2009-10 demonstrated that they will push it through regardless of what The People want, even when it becomes apparent that they will lose votes because of it.
Not everyone of their political ideology will like each other, get along, or support each other, but Hillary is supporting Obama, because he’s their best shot to keep the White House.
It may be more comforting to believe they are just the Keystone Cops of politics, but when you really look at how smart they are, and where their experience is, it’s more difficult to believe that they are committed to these many idiotic errors on accident.
An example is that Panetta and Obama continue to call for cuts to the Military as China’s Military budget and technology has quadrupled since 2000, and begins claiming islands of its neighbors.
@21 I took her taking this hit as an indication she realizes it makes her look like the one attending briefings and making decisions. It also makes it clear she believes that it makes political sense for her to say she misinterpreted the evidence. By stating that Biden and Obama don’t make security decisions, she will be able to say later that she has learned from this experience while making many other positive decisions while she served.
You are right that she is really very intelligent, she and her husband are also very self serving and always have been. This will be a net positive for her somewhere down the line. Probably in about 4 years.
Well if I were Romney, I’d be ecstatic. Hillary taking the blame can work perfectly for his campaign. “Ms Clinton is taking the hit on this, but as everyone knows, the buck really stops at the top. Why is the President so afraid of taking the blame for his administration’s mistakes?”
The fact that the President is letting her take the blame speaks volumes about his (lack of) character. That should be readily exploited. Commiserate in the debates and advertisements with Hillary. Squarely place the blame on BO and hope that, combined with the heinous nature of the lapse in Libya is enough to catapult the Obama family back to Chicago.
That’ll create the need for some special handling of the 2016 elections. They’re going to need a stellar record to run on to defeat Clinton (if she goes for the office).
I want to know what Obama has on her to make her throw herself under the bus like this…
Flagwaver, you have that backwards.
Bo is going to get thrown under the bus by Hilary.
You know nothing about why women carry big purses.
Would not surprise me if part of the plan is for him to claim responsibility (very nuanced, of course) tonight. Responsibility only to the degree that he shoulda/coulda/woulda, parsed in such a way as to actually place blame elsewhere.
If you listened very carefully to how she worded her acceptance of the blame, it really wasn’t quite what it was constructed to appear to be.
Very slippery. Very clever.