Benghazi: A Republican/Fox News Feature!

Republicans and conservatives mount pressure on President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over their obsession with Benghazi. 

The Republican outreach is a total failure. The outreach to win minority voters is not succeeding.

They're practically begging themselves for a defeat. If you're getting frustrated with the job of Congress, you're not alone. The low approved Congress hasn't passed major legislation since President Barack Obama was sworn in for his second term. The failure of compromise has poisoned Washington.

The Republicans are gathering their talking points from the folks over at Loserville and they're continuing a strategy that is determined to eventually backfire. The Republicans have no real strategy to win back Congress. Their only objective for the Republican majority in the House of Representatives is to draft the Articles of Impeachment over issues such as this controversy, Syria, the Boston Marathon tragedy, gun control, and the impending sequester they've supported. They're dragging Congress all the way to the bottom.

For one thing, I am not concerned about the controversy.

Let me take that back! I am concerned about it in a way that the deceased are being used a "props" for this ridiculous witch hunt. Yeah, since they want to use that term to describe those families of the Sandy Hook tragedy, I found it worthy of my time to say the same about this issue.

Attack on U.S. Consulate in Libya.

I never knew that Republicans are so quick to pinpoint a horrible tragedy. I mean weren't we all Americans on September 11, 2001?

We all stood in unison when that happened. George W. Bush managed got a huge rise in popularity during this tragedy.As far as it goes, no one should talk negative about September 11, 2001. Remember whenever someone criticized the tragedy, you would expect Republicans and conservatives screaming out of their lungs wanted someone to be punished for attacking on the dead.

This tragedy in Benghazi continues to be a political football among the kookspiracy.

The United States Consulate in Benghazi comes under attack.

It was an act of terrorism sparked by an active group of individuals who have ties to some extremist group. They've used the cover of Middle East protests to sneak into the consulate and kill four Americans.

We're not done yet! Congressman Darrell Issa (R-California).

The attack began during the night at a compound that is meant to protect the consulate building. A second assault in the early morning the next day targeted a nearby CIA annex in a different diplomatic compound. Four people were killed, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. Ten others were injured. The attack was strongly condemned by the governments of Libya, the United States, and many other countries throughout the world.

The Republicans crusade to get "all the answers" to what happen continues on.

The Republicans continue to beat down a drum to obscurity with this hearing this Wednesday.

Congressman Darrell Issa (R-California), Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) are leading a panel of these  "whistle-blowers" who were there during the attack. The Republicans shut the Democrats out of the panel.

Mark Thompson and Greg Hicks are the key figures in this panel. They will try to prove the Republicans talking point that Benghazi was a "cover up" and the president allowed people to die.

The Washington Post reports that the new details are certain to reignite a debate over whether the Obama administration has been sufficiently forthcoming in its public accounting of the events and missteps that resulted in the first death of a U.S. ambassador in the line of duty in a generation. If Republicans in Congress succeed in portraying the administration’s response as feckless, the episode could dog any future political aspirations of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was secretary of state when the attacks happened.

After the attacks ended without planes being scrambled or special forces dispatched, the lieutenant colonel in Tripoli who commanded the Special Operations team told Hicks he was sorry his men had been held back.

Four American diplomats were killed.

“I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life that a State Department officer has bigger balls than someone in the military,” the officer told Hicks, according to the diplomat’s account. Hicks called that “a nice compliment.”

Hicks may have been the last American official to speak with Stevens. After an embassy security official ran into his residence to tell him about the attack, Hicks managed to get Stevens on the phone.

“Greg, we’re under attack,” Stevens blurted out, according to Hicks. “My response is ‘Okay,’ and I’m about to say something else and the line clicks.”

The administration has said the independent review of the Benghazi attack was exhaustive, and State Department officials have vowed to implement reforms to make U.S. missions abroad safer. Republicans, however, say Hicks’s account suggests the administration has not been entirely truthful.

“The White House and the Pentagon have allowed us to believe that there were no military options on the table,”  Chaffetz said in a phone interview. “The model of the military is to leave no person behind, and it’s stunning and unacceptable to think we had military willing and ready to go and the Pentagon told them to stand down. That’s just not the American way.”

Combative debate over Benghazi

Chaffetz said the troops who were not allowed to travel to Benghazi would have arrived after the attack on the CIA base but may have provided first aid to wounded personnel. He noted that the order to keep them from traveling was given before the second attack.

A Pentagon spokesman said he would review the Hicks testimony. State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell told reporters that the Republican-led inquiry appears to be politicized, saying it was “not a collaborative process.”

He said, however, that the State Department is not seeking to suppress the accounts of whistleblowers. “We have always encouraged any State Department employee who wants to share their story and tell the truth,” he said.

Part of the Benghazi debate has focused on whether prompt action might have saved lives. In the initial attack, militants overran the compound where Stevens was staying and he and another State Department officer, Sean Smith, were killed. Others made their way to a nearby annex used by the CIA, where two Americans, former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, died in an attack several hours later.

Hicks, a veteran foreign service officer who is scheduled to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday, told congressional staffers that he and others in Libya thought that flying U.S. military jets over Benghazi during the early hours of the attack could have had a deterrent effect.

“If we had been able to scramble a fighter or aircraft or two over Benghazi as quickly as possible after the attack commenced, I believe there would not have been a mortar attack on the [CIA] annex in the morning, because I believe the Libyans would have split,” Hicks said. “They would have been scared to death that we would have gotten a laser on them and killed them.”

Hicks said that late on the night of Sept. 11 he called the embassy’s defense attache, Lt. Col. Keith Phillips, and asked about the viability of sending jets.

“Is there anything coming?” he said he asked.

Phillips told Hicks that the nearest planes were at Aviano Air Base in Italy and that it would take two to three hours to get them off the ground, the diplomat told congressional staffers. There also were no aircraft nearby that could have refueled airborne planes.

“The answer was, it’s too far away, there are no tankers, there is nothing, there is nothing that could respond,” he said.