Benghazi Wednesday, Chapter One (Charles Pierce)

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Benghazi_In_The_Senate?src=soc_twtr

...the Republican party has become something extraordinarily unserious. If its domestic policies, laid out clearly in the last election, were fairly well rejected, its notions in the area of foreign policy reside in a spot somewhere between threadbare and obsolete. They are lingering in a fairly brutal hangover between having gone all in on the Bush administrations's grandiose schemes for imperial reconstruction and having yielded the real power in the party to people with all the gravitas of your drunk uncle who watches Fox all day and sends chain e-mails to the family.

Consider: Senator Richard Lugar may have been older than a Giant Cypress, and he may have had all the personality thereof, but he was a serious, experience hand at foreign relations. He could have led the minority questioning to day with dignity and with an element of intelligence. But, of course, the Republicans in Indiana chose to turf Lugar out in favor of nutball Richard Mourdock and, thus, in part, did we have the collection of Senate Republicans punching way above their weight class with no apparent leadership to explain to them that, no, the primary goal of American foreign policy is not to get your silly ass on Hannity's show next week.
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Not content with putting (Ron) Johnson on a committee where he is less qualified to appear than he would be pitching long relief for the Brewers, the Republicans also gave a seat to Senator Aqua Buddha, who demonstrated the essential gravitas that has marked his entire career. Young Rand said that he would have fired the Secretary had he been president because this was the "worst tragedy since 9/11." Senators whose committee chairs no longer have training-wheels pointed out that the meretricious case for war in Iraq was pretty damned tragic, too. Paul, of course, is a second-generation charlatan whose stated purpose in life is to defund large portions of the national government, most definitely including the State Department. Perhaps the Secretary should have told him that, henceforward, we will rely on the power of the Free Market to guard our embassies. Or, conversely, she could have called him a pipsqueak and told him to run for president on his own time.

And, to cap it off, John McCain took the opportunity to walk down to the banks of the Potomac and throw even more of what's left of his alleged foreign-policy reputation to the turtles.

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Read more: Benghazi Wednesday, Chapter One - Esquire http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Benghazi_In_The_Senate#ixzz2Iq1wxTfI