As you know, I'm not an Obama fan. But there's just no "there" there with this Benghazi story. Unfortunately, with yesterday's email release, the administration only added more chum for the sharks in the water and nothing this president does will be enough to satisfy them. Who could have known?

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House release of some 100 pages of emails and notes about the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year has failed to satisfy congressional Republicans, who are demanding more information.

“Why not release all of the unclassified documents?” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “The president has repeatedly said that when he gets new information, he’ll release it to the public. Why not release — instead of the hand-picked ones — why not release all the unclassified documents?”

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Wednesday Republicans hoped “this limited release of documents is a sign of more cooperation to come,” while the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee pressed the Pentagon for more details about military orders around the time of the attack and what military aircraft were in the region.

Four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed when militants struck the U.S. mission and CIA annex in twin nighttime attacks on Sept. 11, 2012.

Republicans have accused the Obama administration of misleading the American people about the circumstances of the attack, playing down a terrorist strike that would reflect poorly on President Barack Obama in the heat of a presidential race. Obama has dismissed charges of a cover-up and suggested on Monday that the criticism was politically motivated.

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Batten down the hatches, the neocons are coming...again. Mitt Romney already has his national security team lined up. No big surprises in it -- it reads like a re-air of the Bush Administration, and Sean Hannity is in his element.

Here are the people Sean Hannity calls "the best, brightest military minds, heroes" that he has ever had the opportunity to meet. Evidently he doesn't get out much. Sean's list includes Oliver North (convicted felon), Gen. Thomas McInerney (birther), KT McFarland (Reagan PR hack), Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Republican tea party water carrier, and more.

Hannity's purpose in convening this tribunal was to try the president for the crime of "spiking the football." Well, that and also to foment some sympathies for a war with Iran, and also pimp some participants' books, and also to further justify torture. It truly was a shameless display from a shameless partisan who feels not even a pang of compunction at stirring up support for more senseless death and destruction in the world.

In the first section, we have Oliver North cheerleading for torture, and condemning the "media and the far left" for challenging waterboarding techniques so they can repeat the trope that "enhanced interrogation techniques" led to the capture and killing of Bin Laden. Meh. Only True Believers actually buy that nonsense. It's as much of a myth as WMD in Iraq at this point. I might actually take Hannity seriously if he had actually manned up and taken Keith Olbermann's challenge to be waterboarded himself.

Hannity then moves on to the question of the imminent takeover of the entire world by radical Islamists, while ignoring the takeover of our country by radical Catholics and far right-wing Christians. Birther McInerney takes over this segment for Sean, earnestly informing his audience that these Islamists "are just getting started," and how the ideology is as evil as "Nazism, fascism and communism." McInerney finishes off his statement with the declaration that the "Muslim Brotherhood is in the White House."

I kid you not. He actually said that. Not to be outdone, Hannity earnestly questions this disgrace of a general about whether this is World War III, and are we going to have to "launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran?"

Holy crap, these people are nuts. I can only hope no one bothered to watch this travesty and waste of broadcast time because they're just flat-out crazy.

The final piece of this clip deals with pearl-clutching over negotiations with the Taliban. Clearly Sean Hannity has not managed to understand the distinction between the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban. They're two different and distinct organizations, and the Afghan Taliban are going to be a necessary part of any effort for Afghanistan to be self-sustaining and responsible for their own security. Not negotiating with them guarantees the country will continue to be ripped apart by civil war.

I realize these folks only understand "kill, maim, and destroy" as a solution, but they are shouting into a void, unless one is a Romney supporter. Romney definitely agrees with their fearmongering ways, but by a clear and concrete margin, Americans do not. Roger Ailes and Sean Hannity can keep flogging the fear and hoping they get some ears to hear, but what I know is that this country is tired of war, tired of losing our best and brightest to death by IED, and tired of going broke doing it. When only 17% of the country supports military action with Iran, no amount of Hannity and Associated Neocon Bloviation is going to move that needle.

If ever there was a case to be made that Rupert Murdoch and Associates are not competent to run a news network, Sean Hannity and his Gang of Neocons should be the closing argument. Disgusting.

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With all the consequences of Republican destructive economic policies coming down on us this week, I knew that both the corporate media and the multitudes of GOP politicians would be spinning mightily. Not one would have the self-awareness or intellectual honesty to look at their own behaviors -- focusing the debt/deficit instead of jobs, playing the false equivalency game, acting as if the economy only got bad on January 20, 2009, etc. -- and acknowledge that everyone involved owns the S&P downgrade and the rotten economy that we have.

On This Week, the roundtable went down predictable routes. George Will spouted his oft-repeated and still incorrect whinging that nothing the Obama adminstration has done, especially the stimulus, has worked. But relative Sunday pundit newcomer Mellody Hobson injected the fresh air of outside-the-Beltway thinking and told all these Villagers that their focus was wrong. It's not about cutting budgets right now to improve the economy; it's all about bringing the jobs back. And here's where Hobson showed up these Villagers: she had some possible solutions:

Yeah, so we have to put more -- you know, one of the things that people don't want to talk about is corporate incentives. Right now, no one wants to give the corporations any extra help, but there are corporate incentives out there that could move the job story.

So, one, giving the corporations the ability to repatriate all this money that they have all over the world without a huge amount of taxation. If you tied it to job creation and investment spending, that would help this country.

I heard a great idea from Alan Khazei, who's running for Senate in Massachusetts, who talked about the 99ers, the people who are getting 99 weeks of unemployment insurance. Give the corporations a sponsorship for those 99ers. Tell them, we will give you a voucher for 99 weeks of compensation with the hope that you will bring these people on full time, not to mention how it affects people's psychology that they can get up and go to work every day. Talk about affecting sentiment in this country.

Wait, wait...tying tax incentives to bringing back onshore jobs? Giving 99ers a chance to get back into the workforce? That's crazy talk. No, really. According to Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, that's just ridiculous:

Well, we're not just one good tax increase away from prosperity. That's not the way that we're going to actually grow the economy and grow jobs in this country.

We in the reality-based community who value logic and sense recognize that Chaffetz entire argument is better known as Ignoratio elenchi. Did Hobson--who gave lucid and cogent suggestions of things Congress could do right now to improve the economy--actually suggest that taking steps towards getting people employed would result in instant prosperity? Of course not. But listen to Chaffetz's suggestion:

We need stability in our government. We need predictability.

If you look at all the new regulations that have been -- health care, the EPA, in my state of Utah, energy is a huge -- in fact, that's where the best jobs are. We don't have an energy policy in this country. So there are lots of things we can do to grow jobs, but stability is part of it.

Bumper stickers, signifying nothing. If a lack of regulation stimulates growth, where the hell was all of it during the Bush administration? As Cokie Roberts rebukes Chaffetz, if stability is needed, that ship sailed with the GOP shenanigans during the debt ceiling debate, as the S&P specifically mentioned.

But this is exactly why we can't have nice things in this country. We get bumper stickers instead of solutions and not one of the Villagers shaping dialog for the country can be honest about it.

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In their zeal to manufacture something -- anything -- to try and erode President Obama's national security credentials, Darrell Issa and his Utah pal Jason Chaffetz had a little hearing yesterday on the Libya Embassy attacks.

Sadly, they had to admit that Republicans cut the funds for embassy security. They also, according to Dana Milbank, managed to out the CIA in Benghazi.

He writes:

Through their outbursts, cryptic language and boneheaded questioning of State Department officials, the committee members left little doubt that one of the two compounds at which the Americans were killed, described by the administration as a “consulate” and a nearby “annex,” was a CIA base. They did this, helpfully, in a televised public hearing.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) was the first to unmask the spooks. “Point of order! Point of order!” he called out as a State Department security official, seated in front of an aerial photo of the U.S. facilities in Benghazi, described the chaotic night of the attack. “We’re getting into classified issues that deal with sources and methods that would be totally inappropriate in an open forum such as this.”

As soon as Chaffetz had his hissy fit in public, Darrell Issa jumped in, making it even worse:

Now that Chaffetz had alerted potential bad guys that something valuable was in the photo, the chairman, Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), attempted to lock the barn door through which the horse had just bolted. “I would direct that that chart be taken down,” he said, although it already had been on C-SPAN. “In this hearing room, we’re not going to point out details of what may still in fact be a facility of the United States government or more facilities.”

May still be a facility? The plot thickened — and Chaffetz gave more hints. “I believe that the markings on that map were terribly inappropriate,” he said, adding that “the activities there could cost lives.”

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