| Morning Jolt – December 20, 2012 By Jim Geraghty Today I'm off to Dallas once again to tape an appearance with Glenn Beck and the good folks down at The Blaze. Here's your Thursday Morning Jolt. Enjoy. Jim Finally, Some Government Employees Depart Their Jobs over Their Benghazi Decisions So, more than three months and a presidential election later, we are starting to see some government officials held accountable for what happened in Benghazi: Three State Department officials resigned under pressure on Wednesday following a report that detailed "grossly inadequate" security measures at the United States Mission in Benghazi, Libya, on the night assailants besieged it in September, leaving four Americans dead, The Associated Press reported. The A.P., quoting an unidentified administration official, said Eric Boswell, the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, and Charlene Lamb, the deputy assistant secretary responsible for embassy security, had resigned. The third person, who was not identified, was an official with the department's Bureau of Near East Affairs, The A.P. said. The report, by a panel called an accountability review board, investigated the attack on the diplomatic mission and the C.I.A. annex in Benghazi on Sept. 11, which led to the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. It criticized those State Department officials for ignoring requests from the American Embassy in Tripoli for more guards for the mission and for failing to make sufficient safety upgrades. "We did conclude that certain State Department bureau-level senior officials in critical positions of authority and responsibility in Washington demonstrated a lack of leadership and management ability," Adm. Mike Mullen, a panel member who is a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at a news conference on Wednesday. The unclassified version of the report didn't name any names, leaving us with only a frustrating and bland declaration that "certain senior State Department officials within two bureaus in critical positions of authority and responsibility in Washington demonstrated a lack of proactive leadership and management ability appropriate for the State Department's senior ranks in their responses to security concerns posed by Special Mission Benghazi." As seen so frequently in Washington, "broad, systemic failures" take the blame, diverting scrutiny from any individual or individuals. The declaration of "it's everybody's fault" is almost always a code meant to hide the functional conclusion that it's really nobody's fault. Eli Lake gets some congressional reaction: Jason Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah who chairs a House committee writing its own report on Benghazi, said "people should be held accountable. If you are going to make a change you have to specifically identify who made wrong decisions and why that happened. This report doesn't do that." Chaffetz also said a lack of money doesn't appear to have contributed to the security deficit in Benghazi. Deputy assistant secretary for state Lamb told Chaffetz's committee in October that requests to extend the stay of a diplomatic security team headed by a reservist for the U.S. Army's Green Berets were not denied because of budgetary concerns.
According to testimony last month from Michael J. Courts, a Government Accountability Office auditor, funding for diplomatic security was $200 million annually in 1998, the year al Qaeda bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In 2008, the U.S. government spent $1.8 billion on diplomatic security. The size of the workforce more than doubled to more than 2,000, between 1998 and 2009. Courts said this massive expansion has occurred without the State Department conducting a strategic review of its diplomatic security needs. Doug Powers points out that this report only covers half the story: "Even though no individuals were named in the report, the fact that Susan Rice was the point-person in the 'blame the video' effort makes it even clearer why she either removed herself or was removed from the list of potential secretary of state nominees. The report may provide officials with insight as to why the attack happened and how to prevent something like it from happening again, but it doesn't explain the reason(s) for the administration's baffling and ever-evolving narrative." I hate to throw another Yule Log on our national bonfire of cynicism, but I look at this poll result and conclude nearly half of Americans are gullible saps: A slight majority of Americans are giving the White House low marks for how it has handled the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, according to a new national survey. But a CNN/ORC International poll released Wednesday also indicates that a more solid majority of the public doesn't believe the Obama administration intentionally tried to mislead Americans on the September attack that left the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans dead. Only four in ten Americans believe that the inaccurate statements by administration officials in the days following the Benghazi attack were intended to deliberately mislead the public, with 56% saying those statements reflected what the Obama administration believed at the time had occurred in Libya. I'll leave Richard Grenell with the final word: "How can Hillary Clinton declare she has evaluated and accepts the report's 29 recommendations if she has a concussion?" Don't Scoff at Boehner's 'Plan B', Mr. President. He Has a Whole Alphabet He Can Use Speaker Boehner, in a press conference that lasted under one minute: "Boehner had stated that the 'Plan B' proposal, which would extend the Bush-era income tax rates on income under $1 million, will pass the House tomorrow. 'Then the president will have a decision to make,' Boehner told reporters. 'He can call on the Senate Democrats to pass that bill or he can be responsible for the largest tax increase in American history.' The president has vowed to veto the bill if it comes to his desk." Robert Bork, R.I.P. I think it was Roger Kimball who first broke the news of Robert Bork's passing. Judge Robert H. Bork, one of the greatest jurists this country has ever produced, died early this morning from heart complications in a Virginia hospital near his home. He was 85. Bork's celebrity was only partly conferred upon him by brilliant legal work and his service as solicitor general and then acting attorney general in the tumultuous Watergate years of the Nixon administration. (Andrew McCarthy wrote an excellent summary of Judge Bork's work in The New Criterion a few years ago: "Robert H. Bork on Law and Life.") But by far the most important fuel for fame was the riveting, not to say obscene, attack upon his candidacy for the Supreme Court in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. The vicious campaign waged against Judge Bork set a new low—possibly never exceeded—in the exhibition of unbridled leftist venom, indeed hate. Reporters combed through the Borks trash hoping to find compromising tidbits; they inspected his movie rentals, and were disgusted to find the films of John Wayne liberally represented. So hysterical was the campaign against Judge Bork that a new transitive verb entered our political vocabulary: "To Bork," scruple at nothing in order to discredit and defeat a political figure. Monsieur Guillotine gave his name to that means of execution; "progressives," those leftists haters of America who have so disfigured our national life since the 1960s, gave us the this new form of character assassination. The so-called "Lion of the Senate," Ted Kennedy, surely one of the most despicable men ever to hold high public office in the United States (yes, that's saying something), stood on the Senate floor and emitted a serious of calumnious lies designed not simply to prevent Judge Bork from being appointed to the Supreme Court but to soil his character irretrievably. William Jacobson once summarized: Borking is the complete politicization of the judicial nomination process, in which bad motives are imputed to purely legal positions. So if a judicial nominee believes that a particular issue is beyond the reach of the federal judiciary and properly for the political process, that nominee will have the worst motives imputed to him or her, including an imputed desire for bad results. Thus, taking the position that there is no federal constitutional right for [insert claimed right here] allows people like Ted Kennedy to claim that the nominee wants [insert horrific result here]. This tendency to treat judicial restraint as inherently negative, and to insist that the judiciary take on a super-political role, is why borking works so much better against conservatives. He cited Joe Nocera, a rare liberal voice who is willing to honestly discuss his own side's moral failings, and who correctly identified the turning point that Bork's treatment presented: The Bork fight, in some ways, was the beginning of the end of civil discourse in politics. For years afterward, conservatives seethed at the "systematic demonization" of Bork, recalls Clint Bolick, a longtime conservative legal activist. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution coined the angry verb "to bork," which meant to destroy a nominee by whatever means necessary. When Republicans borked the Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright less than two years later, there wasn't a trace of remorse, not after what the Democrats had done to Bork. The anger between Democrats and Republicans, the unwillingness to work together, the profound mistrust — the line from Bork to today's ugly politics is a straight one. The character assassination began the day Bork was nominated, when Ted Kennedy gave a fiery speech describing "Robert Bork's America" as a place "in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters," and so on. It continued until the day the nomination was voted down; one ad, for instance, claimed, absurdly, that Bork wanted to give "women workers the choice between sterilization and their job." Conservatives were stunned by the relentlessness — and the essential unfairness — of the attacks. But the truth is that many of the liberals fighting the nomination also knew they were unfair. That same Advocacy Institute memo noted that, "Like it or not, Bork falls (perhaps barely) at the borderline of respectability." It didn't matter. He had to be portrayed "as an extreme ideological activist." The ends were used to justify some truly despicable means. And that gets us to where we are today, where an unwillingness to assent to a liberal's unspecified legislative agenda is cited as ipso facto evidence that you support the mass murder of children, as Drew M. showcases. No wonder most Americans don't pay attention to politics. They think it's an insane asylum of the obnoxious, self-righteous, hateful, and unhinged. E. M. Zanotti, once a law student of Bork's, offers a glimpse of the man the cameras never got to see: Like most modern geniuses, he also had his quirks, which being a professor in a school of barely 300 will bring to light rather quickly. Robert Bork had a morning ritual, on days his wife Mary Ellen (or Saint Mary Ellen, as everyone came to know her, because she really is one of the nicest and most tolerant women alive) stayed in DC, was to walk down the hall from his office with a cigarette in one hand and a frosted doughnut in the other. Occasionally, he sported trucker hats with his suit. Not like the kind you buy in gas stations, but the kind of Ashton Kutcher-style trucker hats that have the mesh in back, like the kind you get for free when you buy your first John Deere tractor for mowing the back 40. And one time, at a picnic to celebrate the law school's Fifth Anniversary, Robert Bork noticed a pile of fried chicken I assume that he figured his wife wouldn't let him have. So he opened the sewn-shut pockets of his suit jacket and stuffed wads of greasy drumsticks inside. For later. Or at least until Mary Ellen noticed the grease stains near his waistline. Looks like that fried chicken didn't keep him from reaching 85. R.I.P., Judge Bork. ADDENDUM: Josh Trevino: "If my life depended on a member of the national media understanding basics about guns or economics, I'm not sure which I'd choose." To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com Save 75% . . . Subscribe to National Review magazine today and get 75% off the newsstand price. Click here for print-edition information. Click here for digital-edition information. And National Review makes a great gift. Click here to send a full-year gift to NR Digital, and here to send a full-year subscription to the print edition. Conservatives – stay healthy! Get plenty of Vitamin Sea on the next National Review cruise. Visit www.nrcruise.com for complete information about our next trip. National Review, Inc. | 
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