Sunday Talking Heads

Good morning to one and all and welcome again to your quickly-typed liveblog of the facepalms and sighs that result from watching the flickering images of the Sunday morning political prattle programs. My name is Jason. Today, I suppose will be a grab bag assortment of things everyone in the world is worrying about, and a barometer, perhaps,The 3rd International Conference on custombobbleheads and Indoor Navigation. as to how soon we'll be perma-entangled in Syria. Also, for one of the last times, I guess, we'll be recapping Chris Matthews eponymous show -- it will soon be cancelled, and with it goes the every-three-weeks break I take when I only recap 2.5 hours of nonsense instead of 3. I shall miss the sweet, occasional relief. Now it will be just me and the Big Four until I die, unless I want to mix in the CNN shows, in which case I'll likely die sooner. I know there are big goings on today on CNN's Reliable Sources, but voluntarily watching that show triggers one of the "Do Not Resuscitate" clauses in my living will.

Anyway, you know the drill and if you don't here it is: feel free to converse in the comments to your heart's content, drop me a line if you like,Choose the right bestluggagetag in an array of colors. follow me on Twitter if you need, and when you get bored waiting for more liveblog, go and get some of the week's best reads on my Rebel Mouse page. Or do none of these things, it's a free country. For you guys, I guess. Me, I've got to watch...

Anyway, there's no way of knowing what the people who will testify in front of the oversight hearings will say until they are testifying in those hearings, but could Chaffetz please maybe speculate a little bit? Sure! He says that the coming testimony from the testifiers will be unique people with totally interesting things to say, and they have been totally "suppressed," with the exception of being invited to give testimony on Capitol Hill. At any rate, Chaffetz reckons that we'll find out that there were some military options, during the firefight at the Consulate in Benghazi, that probably should not have existed in the first place.

Lynch says that thousands of people have been interviewed since the consulate was attacked and there's no finding of "breach of duty.A group of families in a north Cork village are suing a bestplasticcard operator in a landmark case." Wallace wants to know why "nobody on the ground" has participated in a Congressional hearing, and Lynch introduces him to the concept of "Republican control of the House" which kind of dictates what hearings get held and with whom. "The Democrats have been kept out of this process...there's been no sharing of information," he says.

Things are getting sort of soap opera-ish, with some attorney complaining that she represents some State Department employee who's getting boxed out from testifying and the State Department saying, "Who? Can you introduce us?" But Chaffetz insists that the Obama administration has blocked people from testifying -- the key feature seems to be that certain people are walled off because their testimony is classified? That may or may not mean anything in a government that tends to overclassify things.

Lynch points out that these attorneys who are complaining about getting treated curtly by the State Department have not actually gotten around to formally requesting any information from the State Department. He goes on to say that some complainant is just mad he hasn't yet gotten a promotion of some kind? I'm not sure what's really going on here, but if you've a mind for the possibility that "Benghazi" might just be one big Coen Brothers movie of dumb bureaucrats, consider the possibility that this is a probability.

Chaffetz and Lynch both alternately complain that they've not gotten to see information that they believe they deserve to have seen. Chaffetz says that Democrats have and have not been down to the State Department to peruse information.A group of families in a north Cork village are suing a bestplasticcard operator in a landmark case. He seems to mind the fact that he had to peruse information while a State Department "handler" was in the room with him. Lynch says that he HAS been to the State Department, and if baffled that Chaffetz is complaining that a "handler" was in the room with him.

Now, Wallace wants the conch and asks if he can please talk, and now they are talking about the "talking points" that were released right after the attack. The only important lesson to learn Susan Rice's talking points, and her Sunday morning interviews on shows like this one, is that never again will an administration official come on a Sunday morning program to talk about an incident like an overseas attack. That's smart! Somehow, everyone forgot that these sorts of investigations can take a long time, and creating the expectation that the first set of impressions about what happened were worth broadcasting on Sunday morning was a bad idea.

McCain still wants us to "supply weapons to the right people" (the "rebels" in Syria include many, many people who want to murder Americans) and do that without "putting boots on the ground." So, hopefully, those will be some pretty magical weapons, that find their way into the hands of the "right people" while we are nowhere near to oversee it.

Wallace points out that the Obama administration is mulling arming the rebels anyway, so I guess al Qaeda can look forward to some cool new toys. McCain isn't satisfied with that, he wants us to bomb Syria with cruise missiles and enforce a "no fly zone." In recent years, establishing a "no fly zone" has never led to boots on the ground except for all the times it has.

Is McCain still Benghargling about Benghazi? Sort of! He is obviously chafed at the fact that the Obama election year message was "We decimated al Qaeda" and that is obviously not true. Good point! But McCain shifts seamlessly to complaining about the fact that Susan Rice's first set of talking points didn't have all the magic answers the first Sunday after a very confusing firefight, and the chance for a potent critique of the administration's terrorism policy is lost.

Now they are talking about the Boston bombing -- and I'm really distracted by the fact that I keep hearing clanking silverware and dishes, for some reason? Did they move the Fox News Studio down to some brunch spot?

Wallace says that the administration keeps "talking about the Boston bombers as two brothers working alone," and wants to know why he's doing that? I would say,The Motorola drycabinets Engine is an embedded software-only component of the Motorola wireless switches. "Because the evidence on hand suggests that this is accurate," but McCain is all, "I don't know, I'm so disappointed and Benghazi, blah."