Kevin McCarthy is the House majority leader and the likely person to replace John Boehner as Speaker of the House. He was interviewed on Fox News last night, and when pressed by Sean Hannity to list what McCarthy would fight for in the GOP-led House, he made a gaffe:
What you’re going to see is a conservative Speaker, that takes a conservative Congress, that puts a strategy to fight and win. And let me give you one example. Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?
“But we put together a Benghazi special committee. A select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known that any of that had happened had we not fought to make that happen.
The Benghazi panel is the longest running Congressional investigation in the history of the US (longer than Watergate), and that doesn’t include the investigations by seven other congressional committees that went before it. But it hasn’t actually come up with any results or recommendations to help prevent any future terrorist attacks. Instead McCarthy is using it as an example of a successful Republican strategy because it fulfilled a partisan goal: to lower Clinton’s poll numbers.
Is this the new McCarthy witch hunt?
UPDATE: The chairwoman of the House Republican Conference was booed and hissed at a public forum when she defended the Benghazi committee, saying its work “is very important”. She further claimed that “We’ve not yet had important questions answered.” However, prior to the current Benghazi hearing there have also been 13 hearings, 25,000 pages of documents, and 50 briefings. But the only question that the hasn’t been answered is the only one important to the Republicans, which is “how can we find something incriminating about Hillary Clinton.”
Special Bonus Update: Stephen Colbert talks about honesty:
3 Comments
I’ve thought this for a long time. It’s the Select Committee to Discredit Hillary Clinton.
Can anyone remember when the Republicans in Congress had any interest in actually governing? As best I can recall, it might have been in the 80’s or early 90’s, but I’m not sure. Newt’s “Contract On America” (I think he had another name for it) was somewhere in there.
Seriously? Does anyone really doubt that this has been the objective all along?
The GOP is not about governing, but about “winning.”