THE GAFFE BY McCARTHY WORKS LIKE THE ENERGIZER BUNNY

….The new anticipated House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)

 

McCarthy’s comments will just keep going, and going, and going!

 

Even though the anticipated new House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) once again produced a political gaffe, I am looking at his screw-up from a different point-of-view.

 

Yes, McCarthy actually admitted to Sean Hannity in an interview on Fox that the over $4 million dollars spent on the latest,  9^th Benghazi investigation, it was only established for lowering Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers.  When I heard that, I was at least glad that he not only admitted that the investigation had been established and strung out just for that purpose, but  that he was proud that his party had used tax payers money for such a partisan boondoggle.  You go Kevin…..

 

What really sealed the deal on this screw-up was when McCarthy actually said the bogus investigation committee was part of an election “strategy to fight and win.”

 

You know, I really appreciate hearing such rare honesty like that from the Republican leadership.

 

It really takes either major stupidity, or some large cojones, to admit that you have drawn-out an expensive, tax-payer paid investigation that was previously investigated by 7 bipartisan groups, and one independent group, where no improper behavior was found and that the reason for doing another investigation was totally partisan.

 

Now when I say “drawn-out”, that is no exaggeration.  As of this week, at 72 weeks, the current bipartisan select committee to investigate Benghazi, chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), is now going longer than the Hurricane Katrina Investigation; the CIA Waterboarding investigation; and it’s longer than the longest ever investigation: that being Watergate.

 

But even though it’s been well over 1 year, and there is not one new morsel of new evidence, the Benghazi panel shows no signs of letting up anytime soon.  Rob Garver of the Fiscal Times has estimated that the select committee “will likely spend some $6 million by next year.”   So, the “committee” will do whatever they can to keep drawing the investigation out into the middle of the 2016 election campaign.

 

What’s unfortunate is that even though no new evidence of wrong-doing was found, Hillary Clinton has not handled the single outcome of the investigation very well.  All that the investigation has highlighted to date is that Hillary had her own personal e-mail server in her home while she was the Secretary of State. 

 

Hillary has acknowledged that she should have instead used a government server, and that she was not breaking any rules at the time she was using her private e-mail system.  But virtually no one in her own party believes that she has properly handled the ensuing controversy.  Hillary should have put all the info on the table at the very beginning, but she instead has had to recalibrated her response more than once.  In recent weeks, she finally accepted that she needed to answer all the questions and meet all of the challenges from both the journalists and her political foes alike.  But it’s been too little, too late.

 

However, the good news for Hillary and the Democrats is that it’s finally out there that this investigation was never on the level.

 

Multiple members of the Democratic party have now publically scolded the Republicans and stated that the investigation should be stopped.  The previous 8 investigations have already proven that there’s no “there”, there.

 

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the ranking Democrat on the current select committee stated, “This stunning concession from Rep. McCarthy reveals the truth that Republicans never dared admit in public, [that] the core Republican goal in establishing the Benghazi committee was always to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and never to conduct an evenhanded search for the facts.””

 

There are at least a couple of good things that are going to come from Rep. McCarthy’s gaffe.

 

First, this event will allow a portion of the weight that Hillary brought on herself in miss-handling the e-mail issue to go away.  It is obvious that the bogus investigation was developed just for bringing down Hillary’s poll numbers, and that nothing of interest has come from the e-mails that were recovered from Hillary’s private server.

 

But McCarthy’s statement is also something that everyone has now heard and it will continually be brought up to show that all tax payer money was being spent by the Republicans for partisan wrong doing.

 

It will also continue to show that McCarthy’s statement will require that the political media pay attention to the current behavior of the GOP and not the past behavior of the accused.

 

What’s that old saying about a politician making a gaffe:  “Sometimes, politicians make serious gaffes…that occurs when they accidentally tell the truth.”  So true in Kevin McCarthy’s case.

 

I think that the real reason that McCarthy made his mistake, was that in his new role as the anticipated House Speaker, McCarthy forgot who his audience was…?  When he was talking to Sean Hannity on Fox News, he was so used to talking out-loud to his own partisan team in the House, he forgot that this was on national TV.  He had forgotten that there were more than just his Republicans (his usual House audience) that were listening.  The end result was this monumental political screw-up. 

 

Basically, this new novice political celebrity was attempting to tell his GOP co-harts that “we’ve not only been partisans, we've been very effective partisans.”.

 

Hillary couldn’t have asked for a better present from the opposition.  A present that operates just like the “Energizer Bunny”, it just “keeps, going, and going, and going……”

 

Copyright G.Ater  2015