Just How Stupid Is Jennifer Rubin, Really?

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The inexplicably still employed Jennifer Rubin, still pumping Benghazi as a scandal, posted this in the early evening yesterday:

BREAKING: The president knew the truth about Benghazi

By Jennifer Rubin

In a blockbuster report, John Solomon, the former Associated Press and Post reporter, has ferreted out the president’s daily brief that informed him within 72 hours of the Sept. 11 attack that the Benghazi attack was a jihadist operation.

Please proceed, Ms. Rubin.

Citing officials directly familiar with the information, Solomon writes in the Washington Guardian that Obama and other administration officials were told that “that the attack was likely carried out by local militia and other armed extremists sympathetic to al-Qaida in the region.”

Overlooking the fact that there’s some space between “likely carried out” and “was a jihadist operation,” let’s look at what our old buddy David Petraeus told Congress yesterday. This is from an Associated Press story posted yesterday on the WaPo website:

Testifying out of sight, ex-CIA Director David Petraeus told Congress Friday that classified intelligence showed the deadly raid on the U.S. Consulate in Libya was a terrorist attack but the administration withheld the suspected role of al-Qaida affiliates to avoid tipping them off.

The recently resigned spy chief explained that references to terrorist groups suspected of carrying out the violence were removed from the public explanation of what caused the attack so as not to alert them that U.S. intelligence was on their trail, according to lawmakers who attended Petraeus’ private briefings.

He also said it initially was unclear whether the militants had infiltrated a demonstration to cover their attack….

;;;After the hearings, lawmakers who questioned Petraeus said he testified that the CIA’s draft talking points in response to the assault on the diplomatic post in Benghazi that killed four Americans referred to it as a terrorist attack. Petraeus said that reference was removed from the final version, although he wasn’t sure which federal agency deleted it.

Adding to the explanation, a senior U.S. official familiar with the drafting of the points said later that a reason the references to al-Qaida were deleted was that the information came from classified sources and the links were, and still are, tenuous. The administration also did not want to prejudice a criminal investigation in its early stages, that official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the process publicly.

Even the John Solomon article Rubin cites explains what happened pretty well —

Most of the details affirming al-Qaida links were edited or excluded from the unclassified talking points used by Rice in appearances on news programs the weekend after the attack, officials confirmed Friday. Multiple agencies were involved in excising information, doing so because it revealed sources and methods, dealt with classified intercepts or involved information that was not yet fully confirmed, the officials said.

“There were multiple agencies involved, not for political reasons, but because of intelligence concerns,” one official explained.

The rightie blogosphere (collective IQ: 12) is still screaming that Obama lied to the American people. As Kevin Drum pointed out a couple of days ago, this is a conspiracy in search of a motive.

As best I can tell, the suggestion from the right has been that Obama didn’t want to admit that Benghazi was a terrorist attack because….well, I’m not sure, exactly. Something about how this would blow a hole in his claim to be decimating al-Qaeda via drone attacks. Or maybe it would remove some of the luster from being the killer of Osama bin Laden. Or something. But one way or another, the story is that Obama was deeply afraid of admitting that terrorists are still out there and want to do us harm.

This has never made a lick of sense. If anything, the continuing existence of terrorists justifies his drone attacks. And it certainly wouldn’t do him any harm in an election. The American public routinely rallies around a president responding to a terrorist attack.

Of course, if George W. Bush were still in the White House and running for re-election when this happened, he and his minions would be screaming TERRORISTS TERRORISTS TERRORISTS GONNA GITCHA IF I’M GONE BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA even if it meant throwing sources and methods under the bus.

If you didn’t already know Petraeus pretty much shot down the claim that the Obama Administration was engaged in some kind of political coverup, just watch John McCain immediately after the testimony:

He was deflated like an old, tired balloon. McCain’s no genius, but we now know he’s a few shades brighter than Jennifer Rubin. Given enough time he actually can add two and two together and come up with four.

24 thoughts on “Just How Stupid Is Jennifer Rubin, Really?”

  1. Just how stupid is Mr. Rubin?
    Well, one starts to understand the concept of infinity when one contemplates that question.

    And then multiply infinity by itself.
    Then, one might understand how truly stupid and pig-ignorant she is – with my apologies to pigs for using that term. If pigs had fingers, they’d write more sensible sh*t.

    Poor, poor Conservatives. Trying to huff the Benghazi tragedy into a full-blown conspiracy.*

    Oh, and btw, Conservatives, Susan ain’t no Condi.
    You can search the archives all you want, but you won’t find a PDB that she missed, entitled: “Terrorists determined to attack Consulate in Benghazi!” Susan didn’t miss that the way Condi did bin Laden and 9/11.

    *And my favorite thing, by far, is when all of the Conservatives talk about conspiracies, they always use their own – “Watergate,” “Iran-Contra,” etc.
    Hmm…
    I wonder why it is that they can’t think of any conspiracies that happened under Democratic Presidents?
    If I were a Conservative, I’d at least try something like “The Bay of Pigs,” or, “The Gulf of Tonkin Incident.”
    You make yourselves look bad, stupid actually, when you reference imaginary Democratic conspiracies, with real Republican ones.
    But then, you proabably all read Jennifer Rubin.

  2. AAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

    “Ms. Rubin,’ NOT “MR. RUBIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

    Y kent oui haz “Edit?”

  3. The latest? Some Repub lame-brains are calling for the formation of a Special Committee to ‘investigate’ what they’re calling “a cover-up bigger even than Watergate.”

    Ms Rubin, apparently, approves the Bush approach – jump in feet first, launch two wars first and then, somewhere down the road littered with dead and dying bodies and a treasury seriously depleted of funds figure out how to gracefully extricate yourself from the mess you’re created.

    Perhaps Obama etal have studied how terrorist groups operate? Launch an attack, wait (and pray) for a mega-reaction from the aggrieved party, thereby gaining world-wide notice (and hopefully a flood of new recruits.) Perhaps Obama etal have had the common sense not to accommodate the terrorist group by adhering to its game plan?

  4. When even Peter King recognizes that demagoguing Benghazi is now officially not helpful to the GOP cause, you know it’s done:

    Rep. Peter King (R-NY) has admitted that the CIA and intelligence community approved U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice’s talking points before she made her much-derided Sept. 16 appearance on several Sunday news shows to discuss the attacks in Benghazi. King, one of the most outspoken critics of the Obama administration’s response to the attack, came to his conclusion following testimony from former CIA Director David Petraeus.

  5. I mean, if I was trying to pump up Benghazi into some kind of scandal, I wouldn’t be splitting hairs over who said what words when. I would be blaming the President for letting the attacks happen in the first place. That just seems self-evident to me. You’re trying to manufacture some outrage here, and it’s just much easier to get outraged over murdered Americans than over the number of hours that passed before a specific word was uttered.

  6. Some Repub lame-brains are calling for the formation of a Special Committee to ‘investigate’ what they’re calling “a cover-up bigger even than Watergate.”

    Yes, I think what they’re really looking for is a pretext to appoint a special prosecutor. It doesn’t really matter what the pretext is, the important thing is to get the investigation started. That’s how it worked with Clinton–just start the investigation, and eventually you’ll come up with something you can use to impeach the President, even it’s just a stupid sex scandal that has nothing to do with whatever you were supposedly investigating in the first place.

    Of course, one problem this time is that it’s extremely difficult to imagine Obama getting involved in a sex scandal.

  7. Prof. Juan Cole deflated this farcical canard several weeks ago (I don’t have the link). The “jihadists” who carried out the attacks may have been members of Ansar al-Sharia, but they are NOT al-Qaeda and only “affiliated” with al-Qaeda by virtue of the fact they both share a common religion. Ansar al-Sharia are not interested in the “far enemy” like al-Qaeda and their members most certainly have never met any of the al-Qaeda inner circle or trained at al-Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Grandpa McCain and these other shit-for-brains Republicans think anyone who is a Muslim and doesn’t like the United States are “al-Qaeda”. They have no clue about the Muslim world and their simple-minded lumping together of all Muslims in one big, bigoted bucket labeled “terrorism” does grave damage to how the world views the United States and guarantees future attacks of this type!

  9. Why is McCain huffing and puffing? Asthma? Lung-crushing disappointment at hearing Petraeus definitively quash any possibility of a “conspiracy of silence”? Between this, Boehner’s “let’s put it all off for a year” re the budget, the finger-pointing over Mitt’s loss, and etc., you’ve got a GOP consisting of guys in thousand-dollar suits making grave pronouncements about fuck-all to an audience yawning and looking at its watch.

  11. I don’t get the whole Benghazi thing. How is it that Repugs think Obama is such an ineffective leader yet he can pull off a Watergate-level coverup?

  12. JM,
    Because Obama is both an evil IslamoKenyanSocialistFascistCommunistAtheistMuslim Usurper, AND a feckless “Step ‘N Fetchit” Nigrah. Only someone like that could pull this off!
    Oh – he’s also a furniture polisher, AND a dessert topping!

  13. Benghazi is one of those sufficiently complex, nuanced events that easily surpasses the average wingnut’s intelligence and fixation on “OBAMA = BAD”. Even if Ronald Reagan returned from the dead and told the nutbase to chill, they’d still be fuming about it for months. I’m talking about you, Jennifer Rubin.

    McCain sounded like he walked up three flights of stairs.

    A little off topic. Haven’t yet seen Lincoln, but I’ve already read wingnut comments castigating the Democrats of that time, and praising the Republicans for how they emancipated the slaves. This is all further proof to the wingnut mind that Democrats are depraved and have only destroyed the black race, and of course Republicans are, and continue to be, the virtuous angels. Of course these people don’t have a clue about history, about how the parties have switched positions over time. So, be ready to give a history lesson, should you run across this. I’d like to send a complaint to Steven Spielberg about this.

  14. McCain sounded like he walked up three flights of stairs.

    🙂 My thought also.. Johnny is about ready for the old soldiers home. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was wearing depends already. I guess hanging out in Washington beats his staying home and verbally abusing Cindy.

  16. They can’t generate a decent scandal out of this administration. “Fast and Furious” Holder just squeezed 4 billion out of BP. I doubt Bush– or a hypotherical Romney administration– would have been able — or even WILLING to do the same.

  17. I just wish the wingnuts who are so amped up on Benghazi and how Susan Rice and Obama “lied to the American people” were one-tenth as dogged and enraged about that whole “mushroom cloud” Iraqi fiasco, or the vial of anthrax stunt, or even just one of the many actual lies told with intent to manipulate the public during the run-up to invasion. Hey, remember that aluminum tubes one? Those were the days, huh?

    When NPR aired a particularly annoying story this morning about how the “controversy” was continuing, I made the mistake of commenting on their website, and attracted the attention of a couple of their resident wingnuts. Let’s just say they don’t get high marks for reading comprehension or logical thought. Oy. To them it is more plausible that Obama lied to boost his reelection chances (how I don’t get really) than to think that classified information might have been withheld for legitimate reasons, like protecting other American lives, or sources in Libya. And they all seem to have decided that Rice said things she never actually said, in a way she never actually did.

    As I said there, why don’t we just go back to talking about Vince Foster if we’re going to be fighting over imaginary cover-ups?

  19. Pingback: Mike’s Blog Round Up | Liberal Media Books

  22. Moonbat, those’ill be collectors items in about 100 yrs. or so; great stocking stuffers for this Christmas!

  23. McCain sounds like he is breathing out and not breathing in. This happens when people are under pressure to perform in front of audiences, or trying not to let their breath sounds be heard in the microphone. It happened to me recently when I was dubbing a little video I made. Just my thought.

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