Is It Really The Iraq War?

With the 10 year anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq there have been a number of conservatives and Republicans who think the war has tarnished the GOP brand.  I referenced Daniel McCarthy's piece in The American Conservative yesterday and Doug Mataconis has some thoughts on a few more today starting off with Ross Douthat's opinion piece today.   The Republican's predicament is being compared to the Democrat's problems post Vietnam War.  I am old enough to have been an adult in both situations.  While I can see parallels I'm not convinced it's entirely the parallels they are seeing.
First let's take a look at the Democrats post Vietnam.  I think there are 2 factors that led to the Democrat's woes after the war, one related to the war, one not so much and both were somewhat related to each other.

• The first was the emergence of the radical left - the hippies if you will.  The radical left movement was certainly a result of the war but it scared the hell out of people and their association with the Democratic Party hurt the Democrats.  The voters simply did not trust them to govern.
• The second was the Civil Rights Act.  Do you really think the South went from blue to red because of the Vietnam war.

It was a case of a majority of the population seeing the image of America changing.  The old morality and social order was dissolving before their eyes and they were afraid.
Now let's fast forward to the post Iraq war world.  Lee Atwater and Richard Nixon's "silent majority" has become the very loud minority. The country has moved on when it comes to civil rights, women's rights, gay rights etc.  So like the Democrats in the early 70s the Republicans no longer represent the majority of the American citizens.  While the Vietnam war was responsible for the emergence of the radical left it was the election of a black Democratic president that was responsible for the emergence of the radical right - the Tea Party.  Both were out of touch with the times.
Sorry Republicans, while the Iraq war was a mistake and mismanaged that's not your problem anymore than the Vietnam War was the Democrats real problem in the 70s.

Iraq War 10 Years Latter - Saturday Reads

As we all know it was 10 years ago that the Iraq war began.  I did a post last week but I wanted to see what others were saying.

John B. Judis recalls what it was like to oppose the Iraq war. He makes this observation at the end:

My own experience after Powell’s speech bears out the tremendous power that an administration, bent on deception, can have over public opinion, especially when it comes to foreign policy. And when the dissenters in the CIA, military, and State Department are silenced, the public—not to mention, journalists—has little recourse in deciding whether to support what the administration wants to do. Those months before the Iraq war testify to the importance of letting the public have full access to information before making decisions about war and peace. And that lesson should be heeded before we rush into still another war in the Middle East.

Noah Millman agrees with Judis for the most part but thinks he underestimates the dissenting voices.

But the dissenters weren’t “silenced” so much as ignored – and not only by the Administration. They were ignored when they testified before Congress. They were ignored by the press. They were ignored by ordinary people – like myself – in personal conversation. I remember vividly having an argument with an intelligent, non-ideological friend who opposed the war simply because he saw that the case for it was absurdly threadbare. When I couldn’t actually refute his arguments, I changed them in my own mind to easier-to-defeat straw men, the better to preserve my already-settled opinion. Yes, we were deceived about any number of matters – but we, official Washingtonians and ignorant college students, wanted to be deceived. Because we wanted to go to war.

Daniel Larison writes about the Unlearned Lessons of the Iraq War.  One of the lessons that hasn't been learned is that those who want war will engage in fear mongering and threat inflation.

Following the end of the Cold War, American hawks have felt compelled to build up every minor threat as a new global menace to replace the vanished Soviet Union. That has inevitably required grossly exaggerating the danger to the U.S. and the rest of the world from third- or fourth-tier states. The fear-mongering about Hussein’s Iraq in 2002-03 was one of the more extreme and absurd examples of this since there were few states in the world that posed less of a threat to America than a broken-down, disarmed, impoverished, and internationally isolated dictatorship. The idea that the U.S. was being “forced” to go to war was preposterous at the time, and in hindsight it appears even more so. 

We are seeing something similar now from those who want to attack Iran and get us involved in Syria.
Over at The Moderate Voice Dorian De Wind discusses the numbers of the Iraq war.

Daniel McCarthy thinks that Iraq will become The GOP's Vietnam:

The Republican Party may not be able to escape its McGovern phase, even if Democrats screw up (as they will) and we briefly get a Republican Carter. The party and the ideology soaked into it have lost their reputation for competence, and they’ve lost the emotional resonances that come with being the party of America: victory, prosperity, normality. Instead the resonances that come from the War on Terror are of a party and an era marked by resentment, recession, and insecurity. Although the party still sees Ronald Reagan when it looks in the mirror, what the rest of the country sees is George W. Bush—much as post-Vietnam Democrats continued to think of themselves as the party of Franklin Roosevelt when in the minds of most Americans they had become the party of Johnson and McGovern.
Until the Republican Party can come to grips with its failure, the Democrats will be the party Americans trust to govern.

Republicans blame selves in 2012 poll 'post-mortem'

Republicans blame selves in 2012 poll 'post-mortem' (via AFP)

Alex Wong/Getty Images/AFP/FileFormer Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney delivers remarks March 15, 2013 in National Harbor, Maryland.US Republicans released a scathing report Monday on their disappointment in November's presidential vote, urging their party…

What CPAC teaches us about the Republican worldview

What CPAC teaches us about the Republican worldview (via GlobalPost)

Analysis: The conservative gathering projects a strictly America-centric view of the world. Jean MacKenzie BUZZARDS BAY, Mass. — “We don’t need a new idea,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida. “The idea is called America, and it still works.” Rubio was one of…

Sequestration-Day One

The sequestration is here.  It's going to be painful and yes, as Obama says it is a stupid way to do things.  But it better than any alternative we are likely to get?  Matt Yglesias thinks it is.

But on the merits it seems to me that while sequestration is hardly optimal budget policy, it really isn't all that bad in the scheme of things, and really going through with it would be better than repealing it. The key reason is that fully half the cuts are cuts to "defense" spending, and yet nobody from either party is seriously trying to maintain that America will be left defenseless in the wake of this reduced military spending. The specific sequestration mechanism is clearly awkward and clumsy, but again nobody's saying the Mexican army is going to come swarming over the border to reconquer Santa Fe, that the Taliban is now going to be able to outspend the Pentagon, or that America's NATO allies are now left unable to fend off a Russian invasion. That's half the cuts with basically zeroreal public policy harm.
So then you look at the domestic side. Your basic transfer payments to poor people are spared, your transfer payments to the elderly are basically spared, and then everything else gets cut willy-nilly. That leads to some real policy harms. Valuable research grants are going to not happen. We'll see some real bottlenecks at regulatory agencies. But obviously there's some waste and fat in this domestic discretionary spending.

I think this is about right. I applaud the defense cuts but realize the domestic cuts will be painful but any replacement plan is likely to include cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

As originally designed in 2011, the deficit-reduction sequester splits cuts between defense and domestic spending, and explicitly exempted programs like Social Security and Medicaid. But no one in Washington believes the sequester cuts will be permanent, and liberals worry the deal Congress eventually reaches to replace it will slash funding to those programs — as Republicans and some Democrats have advocated.
"There's a broader concern about the fact that entitlements may get ensnared when we go to an alternative fix, [that] they won't escape," Rep. Jerry Nadler, a progressive Democrat from New York, told BuzzFeed. "I have heard that concern."
"Not only do we have the sequester, but we have to be thinking about the deal that replaces it as well," said Melissa Boteach, a director at the Center for American Progress. "Republicans have already begin to push hard for benefit cuts."

 With sequestration a realty Yglesias wonders why Obama struck a deal in January to avoid going over the fiscal cliff.

Now imagine an alternate universe in which everyone woke up on January 3 to discover sequestration in effect and the Bush tax cuts fully expired. Republicans would have wanted a giant tax cut, and a big increase in defense spending. Obama would have wanted a smaller-but-still-large tax cut, a smaller increase in defense spending, and a substantial increase in non-military spending. It seems like cutting a deal to cut taxes and increase both military and non-military spending could have been struck relatively easily. Yes, the country would have suffered from a week or two or maybe even five of excessive fiscal drag. But with everyone agreeing that taxes are too high and military spending too low, working something out where we raise non-military spending a bit more than Republicans want and in exchange cut taxes a bit more than Democrats want doesn't seem too hard.

Tilting At Windmills

George W Bush speech writer Michael Gerson takes to the pages of the Washington Post to make his second attempt to explain to the Republican Party what they have to do to become relevant again.  He thinks the Republican party is stuck in the 1980s:

This stunning reversal of electoral fortunes has taken place for a variety of reasons: changing demographics; the end of a GOP foreign policy advantage during the Cold War; a serious gap in candidate quality; the declining relevance of economic policies that seem better suited to the 1980s; and an occasionally deserved reputation for being judgmental and censorious.

And this:

At the national level, Republicans have a winning message for a nation that no longer exists. 

In his Op Ed at Commentary he and Peter Wehner had this to say:

First, and most important, is focusing on the economic concerns of working-and middle-class Americans, many of whom now regard the Republican Party as beholden to “millionaires and billionaires” and as wholly out of touch with ordinary Americans. This is a durable impression—witness Bill Clinton’s effective deployment of it more than 20 years ago and its continued resonance during the 2012 campaign when Team Obama portrayed Mitt Romney as a plutocrat who delighted in shutting down factories and moving jobs overseas. Sure enough, in November exit polls, 81 percent of voters said that Barack Obama “cared for people like me”; a mere 18 percent said the same of Romney. They also showed that a majority of Americans (53 percent) said Governor Romney’s policies would generally favor the rich, versus only 34 percent who said he would favor the middle class.

Daniel Larison points out that Foreign Policy has also become a problem for the Republicans that is not really addressed in Gerson and Wehner's Commentary piece:

At most, Gerson and Wehner acknowledge that the GOP’s advantage on foreign policy and national security has vanished, but they still rely on the assumption that Republicans should normally have an advantage that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have not bolstered. A proper reckoning of the state of the party’s reputation on these issues would admit up front that it has suffered enormous damage, and the party’s new disadvantage on these issues has existed since 2006. Republicans need to recognize that the Iraq war was a debacle, but they also need to understand why it was and then learn to avoid making similar errors in the future.
There would need to be an end to constant threat-hyping and threat inflation, which contributed greatly to the paranoia and fear that warped the debate over Iraq in 2002-03. There should also be a repudiation of preventive war. Ideally, it would be rejected because it is illegal and wrong, but it would be good enough if Republicans rejected it because it is an imprudent, reckless abuse of U.S. power. No less important, Republicans need to learn to be much warier of executive power when one of their own is in power. That is probably the hardest thing to learn, since many partisans tend to tolerate awful behavior from “their” presidents that they would otherwise condemn, but it would be essential to Republicans’ resistance to new wars in the future.

But for the foreseeable future Gerson, Wehner and Larison are simply tipping their hats at windmills. The lunatics have taken over the asylum and thanks to the conservative media machine it's not about to change.   
 

The Republican Base Problem

Cliff Owen/Associated Press

The Republican Party has a base problem that may have already cost them control of the Senate.  There was Todd Akin and Richard Murdoch in 2012 - Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell in 2010 who were able to win primaries but unable to win general elections because they were just well crazy.  Establishment Republicans are trying to stop the bleeding but they have a problem in Iowa.

The Republican Party may be dealt another far-right candidate in a potentially competitive U.S. Senate race if a poll released Tuesday is any indication.
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) is the favorite among Iowa Republicans to run in next year’s contest to replace retiring Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), according to the latest survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling. The poll showed 41 percent of usual GOP primary voters in the state identifying King as their preferred candidate over three other Republicans. Rep. Tom Latham (R-IA) was a distant second with 22 percent support among Hawkeye State Republicans. Neither King nor Latham so far has declared an intention to run.
Some conservatives, including a new group backed by political operative Karl Rove, have warned recently that nominating King would put Republicans in the same bind they found themselves in the previous two cycles, when the party squandered prime pick-up opportunities in Senate races by fielding candidates who turned out to be too extreme for voters.

Doug Mataconis:

The problem for the GOP is two fold. First, Iowa’s Congressional Primary’s are closed, which means that the electorate will be restricted to a Republican electorate that tends to be more conservative than the state as a whole. Additionally, King’s popularity among Christian and Tea Party groups is likely to be a boon to him in a primary race where voter turnout is likely to be low. Second, of all the potential GOP Senate candidates in 2014, King is clearly the furthest to the right and the one most likely to commit an unforced error like the ones committed by Todd Akin and Richard.

 This is a problem created by the Republican Party but to a greater extent  the conservative media machine - think FOX news and talkers like Limbaugh.  They encouraged the paranoia of the already paranoid and suddenly the lunatics had taken over the asylum.

'We are not a deadbeat nation': Obama on debt limit

'We are not a deadbeat nation': Obama on debt limit (via AFP)

President Barack Obama sent a stern warning to Republican lawmakers Monday against using the debt ceiling as a "bargaining chip," saying a failure to raise the borrowing limit would sew financial chaos and send markets into a tailspin. "To even entertain the idea of this happening, of the United States…

Hagel And The Republicans

In the early 70s the Scoop Jackson Foreign Policy interventionalist wing of the Democrat party was purged from the Democratic Party after the debacle in Vietnam.  They found a new home in the Republican Party and became neoconservatives.  Over time they took over the military/foreign policy ideology of the Republican Party pushing aside the pragmatic realists.  James Joyner thinks the Republican's critique of Chuck Hagel embodies all that is wrong with the neoconservative driven foreign policy. 

Lindsey Graham notwithstanding, Hagel's views on most foreign policy issues of the day are well in the mainstream of the professional foreign policy establishment. It's why so many legends of the business -- Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell, Zbigniew Brzesinski, Robert Gates, Jim Jones, and so many more -- have lauded his nomination.
Problematically, while Scowcroft, Powell, and Eisenhower are admired by professionals in their field, their party's leadership views them as Republicans in Name Only -- if not outright apostates. It's a status they share with Richard Lugar, George H.W. Bush, Jon Huntsman, and, yes, Chuck Hagel.
Either the Republican Party has to re-embrace its traditional foreign policy agenda, or those of us who have been left on the outside looking in will have to conclude that it's no longer our party.
While the transition has been remarkably fast, today's Republican Party is simply not the party of Dwight Eisenhower or even Ronald Reagan. Scowcroft advised Presidents Nixon, Ford and George H.W. Bush. Hagel and Huntsman both served in the Reagan administration. But, just as the Tea Party is now the de facto domestic policy face of the GOP, the neocons are its foreign policy face.
Unless there's a course correction and soon, those of us who describe ourselves as "Eisenhower Republicans," "Chuck Hagel Republicans," or "Jon Huntsman Republicans" will have to face up to the fact that the modifier negates the noun.

Daniel Larison agrees:

The predicament James describes is one that has been at least 10-15 years in the making. Obviously, it became much worse during the Bush years, but instead of abating once Bush left office it continued to intensify. Moderates and realists might be partly forgiven for thinking that the second Bush term hinted at the possibility that the GOP was slowly returning to its senses, but that gave Bush’s second term too much credit and underestimated the extent to which many self-described realists inside the administration contributed to its disastrous record. Except for Powell, almost all of the self-described realists that served in the Bush administration remain firmly in the Republican orbit and are in no danger of leaving the party. Indeed, many of them served as advisers in some capacity on the Romney campaign, but clearly had little or no influence on the candidate’s policies. Some Republican realists went out of their way during the campaign to find hints of prudent thinking in Romney’s camp that were notable for being so rare and isolated. If party leaders are going to take seriously the possibility that they are in danger of losing current supporters, Republican realists and conservative voters have to stop making excuses for deeply flawed, hawkish candidates and refuse to support future nominees that hold reckless and aggressive foreign policy views.
It’s understandable that the party couldn’t suddenly switch so quickly from Bush-era foreign policy between the repudiation in 2006 and the next presidential election, but it would have been a normal and healthy reaction to the failures of the Bush years to make some significant changes by the next presidential election. That didn’t happen. Worse than that, the eventual nominee was so desperate for shore up his partisan support that he seemed to revert to the rhetoric and many of the ideas of the first Bush term as if Bush’s failures had never happened or had already been forgotten. The party has a chance in the next few years to start recovering from these mistakes, but that recovery won’t be possible as long as the energy, activism, and organization remain on the side of Republican hard-liners.

Now I don't disagree with anything James or Daniel are saying but they are missing an important factor here - the tail that's waging the dog.  Tune into FOX news on any given day and you will see the John Boltons, Charles Krauthammers, Bill Kristols etc spouting the same ideology that proved so disastrous during the Bush administration.  What you will not see is any critique of that foreign policy or any Republican realists.  Rupert Murdoch and FOX news are are setting the Republican Military/ Foreign policy.  The politicians know that the base gets all of it's "information" from FOX  so they must go along.  As long as the tail continues to wag the dog I don't see how anything can change.

Republican challenges Obama on US debt ceiling

Republican challenges Obama on US debt ceiling (via AFP)

The top Republican in the US Senate warned President Barack Obama on Sunday that he is willing to use the debt ceiling as "leverage" to end the administration's "massive spending addiction." Mitch McConnell's remarks set the stage for another round of high-stakes political brinksmanship over the US…

Doubling Down On Stupid

Well the 112th Congress is history and the 113th Congress is busy.  What was the first bill offered up? If you guessed repeal of Obama Care you would be right.

The 112th Congress gaveled to a close on Thursday afternoon without passing a relief package for victims of Hurricane Sandy or reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, but Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) isn’t too concerned about finishing what Republicans had left undone. Instead, at 12:00 PM she introduced the very first piece of legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which states are now busily implementing.
House Republicans have unsuccessfully voted 33 times in the last two years to eliminate health care reform and wasted at least 88 hours and $50 million, while failing to pass a single piece of job creation legislation in the last session of Congress.

New Congress just like the old Congress.

Cut But Don't Cut My Stuff

Nothing new here but...
There's Not A Single Spending Cut That Republican Voters Support

We have seen this in every poll - Republicans say they want to cut government spending but there isn't anything they actually want to cut.

A look at what Republicans oppose:

• By 47-37, letting the Obama payroll tax cut expire.

• By 68-26, cutting spending for Medicare.

• By 61-33, cutting spending for Medicaid.

• By 66-28, eliminating the tax deduction for home mortgage interest.

• By 72-25, eliminating the charitable tax deduction. 

• By 56-44, raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67.

Republicans don't favor much in any potential deal — they also, of course, are opposed to allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire on any income bracket. Pollster Lee M. Miringoff warns that they might be unhappy with whatever happens.
“There’s no clear statement of what Republican voters want to happen. There’s opposition to everything,” Miringoff said.

 Of course the bloated Defense budget is off the table.  This is a sign of American exceptionalism - an exceptionally broken country.

Republicans open spending front in 'cliff' row

Republicans open spending front in 'cliff' row (via AFP)

US President Barack Obama and Republicans waged a new spat over spending cuts Tuesday, as time ran short and little progress was evident towards ending a vexing year-end austerity and tax crisis. After days dueling over Obama's demand for higher taxes on the rich, each side accused the other of failing…

Scarborough on talk radio ‘bullies’: Republicans should ‘punch them in the face’

Scarborough on talk radio ‘bullies’: Republicans should ‘punch them in the face’ (via Raw Story )

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough is calling on Republicans to push back against talk radio “bullies” like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh by punching them “in the face.” The conservative host on Monday noted that some on the “far right” had realized that “our stupidity was not rewarded on election…

Boehner: Obama must step up to resolve fiscal cliff

Boehner: Obama must step up to resolve fiscal cliff (via AFP)

Republicans warned President Barack Obama on Wednesday that he must take the lead on negotiations over the so-called fiscal cliff and present a solution that could pass both the House and Senate. Speaker of the House John Boehner told his Republican caucus in a closed-door meeting that Obama "has a…

The Dangers Of Trying To Create An Alternate Reality

It started during the administration of George W. Bush - the idea that Republicans/conservatives could create  their own reality. In this alternate reality Mitt Romney was going to win the election and the Republicans were going to regain control of the Senate. That didn't work out too well but as Matt Lewis points out they are still trying.

On the fiscal cliff, Republicans are so screwed

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see how Republicans have anything but bad options regarding the fiscal cliff. At least, not in the short term.
Even if Republicans negotiate the best bipartisan deal possible (something akin to the Corker plan), anyone who votes for it would be accused of selling out.
This would cause the base to either become demoralized or (more likely) angry — angry enough to primary the “read my lips” traitors. Either way, it’s not a good thing.
On the other hand, if no deal is reached, Republicans will surely be blamed (this is always a safe assumption and a smart default position — for a variety of reasons.)
This hasn’t stopped some conservative pundits from acting as if Republicans hold all the cards. But the notion that Republicans have leverage is silly. It’s the same kind of happy thinking that led some to boldly predict a Romney victory.

Indeed, they seem to have learned nothing.  Doug Mataconis:

The GOP is coming off an election where they completely misjudged the mood of the public, and paid the price for that at the poling place. Now, they’re stuck in a showdown with a re-elected, and clearly confident, President over issues where they are out of step with the public mood. In the midst of this, they’ve got people like Grover Norquist and Rush Limbaugh telling them to hold the line on taxes and not give an inch to the President. And they’re starting to believe it. The longer they hold on to this delusion, the more likely it is that they’ll find themselves on the losing end up of yet another political argument in a month or so.

I would add that unless the Republicans give up their alternate reality they will not only lose anther political argument in a month or so but end up on the losing side of a few more elections.

US worst-case scenario: going over fiscal cliff

US worst-case scenario: going over fiscal cliff (via AFP)

Letting the US economy go over the fiscal cliff would push the United States, and probably other countries, into a new crisis that political leaders now say they are determined to avoid. The fiscal cliff, a combination of mandated tax increases and spending cuts, will occur in January unless President…

Always a blame game

Romney lost so let the blame game begin.  Conservatives just can't believe they are out of touch with the American people so some are blaming Romney.

Conservative leaders on Wednesday lashed out at Mitt Romney, saying his attempts to paint himself as a centrist and hide his principles cost him the presidency.
They vowed to wage a war to put the Tea Party in charge of the Republican Party by the time it nominates its next presidential candidate.
“The battle to take over the Republican Party begins today and the failed Republican leadership should resign,” said Richard Viguerie, a top activist and chairman of ConservativeHQ.com.
He said the lesson on Romney’s loss to President Obama on Tuesday is that the GOP must “never again” nominate a “a big government established conservative for president.”
Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots said Romney failed to make the kind of strong case for conservatism that would have won the election.

 Of course it's the Tea Party that probably cost the Republicans the Senate for the second election in a row.

Some are blaming Chris Christie because he was well, doing his job.  Doug Mataconis:

It was inevitable that conservative activists and advocates would find someone other than Mitt Romney and the Republican Party to blame for the fact that Mitt Romney lost the election and succeeded in winning only two of the states that Barack Obama had won in 2008. After all, we can’t admit that the Republican Party is slowly but surely losing touch with a large segment of the American public, including its fastest growing minority group. We can’t say that four years of opposing the President at every turn while failing to offer a coherent alternative contributed to the GOP’s problem. Nobody’s going to admit that the fact that GOP still hasn’t come to terms with the legacy of the Bush years, or that it spent the better part of the winter and spring of 2012 alienating women, contributed to its electoral troubles. And, surely, it can’t be because the polls were right all along and the American people actually wanted to re-elect the President. No, a scapegoat must be found and, at least in this initial 24 hours after Election Night, that scapegoat appears to be the Governor of New Jersey.

 If the Republican Party is going to survive it must come to recognize that their problem is their ideology.  It's simply not very popular.  I was watching FOX News today and Shepard Smith left the ranch again.  He was talking to some Republican hack who was talking about not increasing tax rates but eliminating deductions.  Smith went ballistic and said that everyone is in favor of eliminating deductions as long as they are not their deductions.  Once again poor Shep is telling truth to power - something Roger Ailes is not real happy about I would guess.  Republican economics is always based on unicorns and fairy dust.

In 2008 I thought that Obama would be a one term President because there was no way he could fix the economy.  What I didn't count on was the Republicans would only be able to come up with a hapless field to challenge him.  If Mitt Romney is the best the party can come up with the party is in big trouble.

This says it all!

How do you spell hypocrisy?  REPUBLICAN.
via Sick of the Slant  

Darrell Issa Scumbag and Partisan Hack

David Ignatius reports that CIA documents support the story that Susan Rice presented on the Sunday shows after the Benghazi attacks.

The Romney campaign may have misfired with its suggestion that statements by President Obama and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice about the Benghazi attack last month weren’t supported by intelligence, according to documents provided by a senior U.S. intelligence official.
“Talking points” prepared by the CIA on Sept. 15, the same day that Rice taped three television appearances, support her description of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate as a reaction to Arab anger about an anti-Muslim video prepared in the United States. According to the CIA account, “The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate and subsequently its annex. There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.”

But it gets even worse. At The Cable Josh Rogin says the documents Issa released exposed the names of several Libyans that were working with the US creating a threat to their lives.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) compromised the identities of several Libyans working with the U.S. government and placed their lives in danger when he released reams of State Department communications Friday, according to Obama administration officials.
Issa posted 166 pages of sensitive but unclassified State Department communications related to Libya on the committee's website afternoon as part of his effort to investigate security failures and expose contradictions in the administration's statements regarding the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi that resulted in the death of Amb. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

But there is still more, emptywheel looked at the documents and found that a large CIA presence was also exposed.

PDF 1: In December, Jeffrey Feltman asked Patrick Kennedy to approve “a combined footprint of 35 U.S. government personnel in Benghazi.” That would include 10 people identified as State: 8 State Department and USAID, and 2 temporary duty personnel.
Which leaves 25 people unaccounted for.
As it happens, the Libyans say there were 29 people they hadn’t expected when they came to evacuate the Americans. They complained afterwards that the Americans hadn’t told them about all the spooks they’d have onsite.
Well, now, Issa just confirmed they were not State or even USAID personnel. He has confirmed the Libyans’ claims–that they were spooks.

I agree with BoMan that Issa should step down from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee if not the Congress.  Darrell Issa is nothing but a vile political hack and has headed up one witch hunt after another and this time he has endangered lives.