You Want Us to TRUST You?

Tell me again why we're supposed to trust that our government has our best interests at heart. Because I'm having a hard time reconciling that worldview to reality.

Let's go down the list, shall we? Nile Gardiner at the London Telegraph had made it really easy for us, with a nice, easy to follow list.

1. The American public is losing trust in Obama.

Frankly, Obama's adminsitration has given us no reason to trust them. Regularly they insist on conducting their business behind doors. Whether it's the clandestine seizure of journalists phone records and the subsequent closed-door briefing to issue guidelines to journalists on how they should behave in leak investigations, or it's classification of drone activities, or completely redacted FOIA requests, Obama's administration has made it clear that they have plenty to hide. This coming from the "most transparent administration".

And it doesn't stop there. I'd like to expand that to cover the rest of our government. Congress has repeatedly approved of the measures Obama has used to spy on American citizens, hunt down people on American soil, and the indefinite detention of terror suspects.

Tell me how we're supposed to trust them? Our government has declared they are above the law, even as they impose new and more onerous regulations on citizens.

The coincides perfectly with number:

2. The Obama Administration is imperial in style and outlook. 

I'd once again like to expand that to cover the rest of our government. This isn't an issue of Republican versus Democrat or right versus left. It's an issue of a rapid expansion of powers coinciding with an increase in abuse of those powers. Consider the PRISM program that forces internet providers and major internet companies to provide direct access to their servers and through that the data of millions of American citizens. The defense is that it's perfectly legal and the real problem is the fact that issues pertaining to national security were leaked to the media.

Let me restate. The problem isn't that our government has granted itself unrestrained powers to monitor and spy on its citizenry. The problem is that someone let us know about it...  

I wish I was making this up.

Obama's further defense is that these programs weren't secret because "hey, we told Congress about it, and they said it was cool. Don't worry. We're using this information in the right way. We've established our own oversight, and they said we're cool."

...

I'll be unpacking some of the other points later either tonight or this week. So stay tuned for more outrage to come.

Benghazi Hearings: What difference does it make?

Today partisanship was on full display as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took to the House and Senate floors to defend her department's handling of the attacks on Benghazi in September of last year. Those attacks took the lives of four Americans including the Libyan ambassador and two CIA agents who allegedly disobeyed orders to get Americans out of harms way. For more information, look here. 

The partisanship in the issue was in how this testimony was handled.

Republicans have attacked both Clinton and Obama for mishandling the affair, for knowingly and recklessly putting Americans in harms way, and for lying to the public about it. They claim that the Obama administration and Clinton's State Department covered up the fact that this was a planned attack meant to target the American embassy on the anniversary of September 11th.

The thing is, right after the attack, Obama and various officials including UN Ambassador Susan Rice claimed the attacks were a spontaneous demonstration emerging from a protest over a YouTube video. They claimed this for weeks afterwards and downplayed the idea that this was a planned terror attack. Those claims lead to accusations by the Republicans of lying to the American public when they knew all along that the attack was planned well in advance and executed in accordance with those plans.

If that was true, Republicans say, then it shows either a gaping hole in American intelligence in the area, a failure to act on gathered intelligence, or blatant disregard for the lives that were lost that day.

When new senator Ron Johnson angrily accused Clinton of misleading the public to cover up the fault of the department, save her own job, or protect Obama in an election year, Clinton angrily replied:

"With all due respect, the fact is that we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?"

The Difference It Makes

The thing is, it really does make a difference. Though the Republicans are largely focused on this ridiculous "cover up" angle, the real difference is in determining why these attacks happened.  

I'm not talking about knowing exactly what the motivation was of those who attacked our embassy. We can guess any number of reasons why Libyans would attack Americans on their soil, and most of those reasons would hold some relevance.

The issue is that if we knew there were planned attacks (and it seems the State Department definitely did), and if we failed to respond adequately or in a timely manner (and it seems that there were multiple failures in communication and deployment of assistance as reinforcements took over 7 hours to arrive), and if similar attacks in the future are handled in a similar way, then we will lose more lives while Congress bickers at each other.

There were very real failures in the Benghazi attacks, and it does make a very big difference if the attacks were the result of a planned militant action against multiple US targets or just a bunch of guys deciding to "go kill some Americans." But using this as an opportunity for political posturing, blame throwing, and conspiracy spinning is beneath even the jokers we elect to make our laws.