Let me stipulate up front that [mc_name name=’Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)’ chamber=’house’ mcid=’M001165′ ]’s remarks about the Benghazi committee were remarkably ill-advised, and that I hope that someone other than McCarthy ultimately prevails in the Speaker’s race. In fact, I think he might turn out to be even worse than Boehner, if elected.
That having been said, the Democrats really need to spare us all their outrage at the idea that the Benghazi committee’s work has damaged Hillary politically, as though that’s somehow improper or something they would never participate in. The basic gist of their current attack is that the facts the committee uncovered about Hillary’s reckless (and probably illegal) use of a private, insecure email server are somehow inadmissible because they came from an (allegedly) not totally impartial investigation.
Funny, the Democrats don’t seem to have this view whenever a Republican is brought down as a result of some minor misstep during the course of a politically motivated Democrat witch hunt. The list of said victims of Democrat perfidy is longer than my arm and almost impossible to compile in its entirety but for starters, consider the following:
- Former Republican Congressman Michael Grimm was initially subject to a politically motivated investigation into his fundraising practices in 2010, which uncovered no wrongdoing on Grimm’s part, but which subsequently branched out to virtually every aspect of his personal and business life. When Grimm was ultimately caught in 2014 for having legitimately evaded taxes for his private restaurant and resigned, Democrats (for some reason) didn’t think it relevant that the original investigation had turned up no wrongdoing at all, or that the expanding scope of the investigation was likely politically motivated. Instead, they had laser-like focus on the fact that tax evasion had actually occurred.
- Scooter Libby was a target of one of the most transparently partisan witch hunts of the last generation, which found no substantive violations of law at all. When Libby was convicted of lying about his recollections about a previous interview, the Democrats didn’t treat this as illegitimate because the substantive investigation didn’t turn up wrongdoing (with respect to the “outing” of Valerie Plame). Rather, they perversely treated it as vindication of their entire time-wasting escapade.
- Democrats were all too happy to reap the political benefits of a completely meritless (and corrupt) prosecution of Ted Stevens by politically motivated liberal prosecutors who knowingly allowed their star witness to perjure himself on the stand – a prosecution which just happened to coincide with Stevens’ re-election campaign.
- The Democrats waged a blatantly transparent war against Newt Gingrich throughout the 1990s by filing an astonishing 84 ethics complaints against him, all but one of which (for “claiming tax-exempt status for a college course run for political purposes” of all things) was ultimately dismissed. Even the one ethics charge that was upheld was ultimately found to be meritless by Clinton’s IRS. Democrats (most of whom are still in office and currently decrying the Benghazi hearings) nonetheless gleefully rode the wave of bad publicity to Gingrich’s resignation.
- Per his responsibilities under Article 2 of the Constitution, the President is solely responsible for enforcing the law, and thus Federal District Attorneys serve entirely at the pleasure of the President. Nevertheless, when Democrats believed that Bush had dismissed some some DAs for political reasons (which he would be entirely within his rights to do), they nonetheless staged months of show hearings, dragging Alberto Gonzalez and his underlings repeatedly before Congress, including numerous subsequent hearings that had nothing to do with whether the DAs were “improperly” terminated, but rather whether they could find any inconsistent statements with prior hearings.
The list of Republicans who have been brought down politically by spurious investigations – or investigations that were meritless in their initial allegations but branched out to completely unrelated areas is extensive and at least arguably includes Tom DeLay, Ernie Fletcher, and untold numbers of Republicans in 1992 as a result of the October Suprise Task Force.
There are a lot of good reasons for Republicans to want someone other than [mc_name name=’Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)’ chamber=’house’ mcid=’M001165′ ] as Speaker of the House. And definitely the fact that he was apparently unaware of how the Democrats and their willing dupes in the media would spin these comments is one of those reasons. But on the merits, the Democrats who are pretending to freak out about McCarthy’s comments as though they represent something other than the normal way Democrats do business in Washington are just plain laughable.