Bill Clinton ‘Felt Bad’ For GOP Leader Who Spoke Benghazi Committee ‘Truth’

Former President Bill Clint speaks in Portland, Ore., Thursday, May 5, 2016, while campaigning for his wife, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. (AP Photo/Don Ryan)
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Former President Bill Clinton sympathized with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on the campaign trail Friday, saying the Republican lost his chance to be House speaker because he spoke the “truth” about the chamber’s Benghazi probe.

“They had a special committee with a special purpose, and poor Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader from California, said that the most outstanding achievement of the Republican Congress in 2015 was their special committee which drove Hillary’s numbers down,” Clinton said while campaigning in South Dakota, as quoted by Politico.

Clinton said McCarthy, who was widely favored to succeed John Boehner, “couldn’t be elected speaker anymore ’cause he told the truth.”

“I felt bad about it. I mean, I’d hate to be part of a political party where you lost your chance to be a leader just by telling the self-evident truth,” he said, as quoted by Politico. “It wasn’t like everybody didn’t know it anyway.”

McCarthy infamously bragged in a September 2015 Fox News interview that the House Select Committee on Benghazi, tasked with investigating the 2012 attacks, tanked the Democratic presidential frontrunner’s poll numbers. Hillary Clinton’s supporters seized on the comments as proof of the House probe being a partisan witchhunt.

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  1. It’s an occupational hazard. Politics ain’t beanbag. A momentary lapse of concentration and answering a chance question truthfully can result in your political downfall. In politics, any false step can become a faux pas.

  2. He forgot to add: “bless his heart”.

    If he’s that dumb to tell the truth about what his party of shitheads is up to, I guess he doesn’t deserve to be in any leadership position.

  3. Big Dog on GOP: “I’d hate to be part of a political party where you lost your chance to be a leader just by telling the self-evident truth.”

    Every so often, I re-read Shirer’s timeless memoir. One of its more-relevant passages springs to mind:

    “[A] steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression…in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard [in the media]…Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but [if one did] one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what [party leaders], with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.” – Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (pp. 247-248).

    With all due respect to Godwin, has anyone ever written a more fitting description of today’s Fox-seduced Republican?

  4. Kevin McCarthy was not passed over for telling the truth about the Benghazi as the lame stream media would like you to believe. My recollection is that the Tea Party was annoyed about Kevin McCarthy banging Renee Ellmers as part of his official duties.

    For a conservative, Kevin McCarthy is almost as smart as blued eyed and ripped Princess Elsa Paul Ryan and George Bush the Dumb Torturer.

    Quoting a report (TPM, I think) McCarthy, called for “an effective politically strategy to match the military strategy,” and he lamented that “we have isolated Israel while bolding places like Iran.”

    McCarthy blamed President Obama’s White House for “putting us in tough decisions for the future,” but he voiced hope that a “safe zone would create a stem the flow of refugees.” And he scolded the Department of Veterans Affairs for failing to assist returning servicemen “who fought to the death in Ramadi.”

  5. That’s really eerie.

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