Rep Wolf did his part: he stuck it out when so many others turned a blind eye; others who were ill-equipped, intellectually it seemed, to deal with the complexities and potential nightmare scenarios that digging deep into any issue sometimes unearths. But that's life in the real world and we do not elect and pay our Representatives to live well in austerity and do nothing - we pay them to handle the political dirt of our country while dressed in tailored suits and to do so diligently and without whine or complaint. Period.
Wolf, a generally quiet man, self-effacing and terrifically honorable - an example to everyone, really - kept the light alive when everyone, including essentially all Democrats and many Republicans, were prepared to forget about Benghazi and move on. As he nears the end of his final term before self-imposed retirement, we wish him well, here, and will continue to honor him on this site as he nears the moment when he walks down the steps of The Capital Building for the last time as an active member of Congress, though he will always be Representative Frank Wolf to us.
Gowdy is now the man in the center of the action for a Benghazi Select Committee, as he is the Chairman, and we are delighted at the choice. This is no small thing for us as you can imagine - we/TPFA worked every single day for 17 months campaigning on Twitter and to a lesser extent in other media to see the Benghazi Select Committee happen, despite stonewall opposition from RINO House Speaker John Boehner. If you are a regular reader here, you know the drill. If not, click on each image for the larger version to read these thank you letters to us from Congressman Wolf .
Now we really love Rep Gowdy. He has the no-nonsense, surgical precision of exactly what he was before joining Congress: a highly skilled southern prosecutor who never lost a case. This is not Ken Starr redux. Don't ever worry about Gowdy not eating the opposition alive - you might as well hand him the toothpick before he starts. Gowdy is the right man for Benghazi, and this country is damn lucky to have him, because he is unique among Congressmen as a prosecutor at his level of success.
But there has been an omission from his statements which has TPFA deeply concerned: while he mentions Hillary Clinton and all the attention-getting star witnesses whose very appearance before Congress will be a reality-show drama of catfights and gossip - just what the American entertainment audience loves, and so their inclusion serves an additional purpose to call attention to the murders in Benghazi - Gowdy has thus far failed to mention the importance, first and foremost, of getting the names of the Benghazi Survivor Witnesses and having them testify. We are not alone in this concern: 3,000-plus retweets on Twitter is no small thing for an otherwise seemingly forgotten political issue, and the same person cannot just click retweet over and over, every retweet represents a unique individual. This one has over 3,000 retweets for a sum total of a minimum estimate of 14 million views:
Hillary will make a show. Others will range from comical to somber. The media, in an effort to protect Obama, will make the whole thing look like a tax-wasting political witch hunt designed to bolster GOP chances in the upcoming November midterm elections and unless the American people get a hard and rattling dose of reality the media will be successful.
There is only one thing that will sober up the minds of the American people to this horror called Benghazi: the testimony of the people who were there and saw it all. And it is high time that the average citizens - coddled into a false sense of security about the Obama administration by a protective media and an endless stream of childish diversions from reality shows which are as staged as any drama to cute kitten videos on the internet - got a rattling dose of reality.
Obama clearly does not want these people, who should have been the first to testify in the last hearings. The witnesses should have been the first to be called, well before Hillary "I fhew down ann hurd my widdoo head" - "What difference does it make?" Clinton. Since Clinton tied things up for months recuperating from a terrible concussion while she carefully and methodically compiled a dictionary-sized list of pre-written responses from which she was allowed to read in lieu of legitimate courtroom-style testimony, there was plenty of time for all 33 survivor witnesses to testify. Repeatedly. They were never even called to say a word, which is an absolute mind-blower.
Here's the problem: it appears that no one knows - including Congress - after almost two years who they are or even if they are still alive, and the most unnerving thing is that it appears that that is exactly the way Obama wants it.
We have told you here before that the "33" number of witnesses has been repeated by congress - Hillary testified that there were at least 25 rescued from the Annex in Benghazi - and that according to Rep Jason Chaffetz, Congress is usually apprised of the identities of such people within 48 hours. The mystery of the identities of the Benghazi Survivor Witnesses - and what they saw - which should have been resolved within 48 hours is now nearing 48 months.
The worst part of all is that it Obama's Administration has said that the Benghazi Witnesses have been ordered to sign non-disclosure agreements, been given identities and moved around the country. Just like that - to give up their friends and live a lie of an identity, they and their families - spouses and kids - for the rest of their lives.
WAIT A MINUTE! IN AMERICA?! That's what they did in the old Soviet Union to shut up witnesses. That's what they often said, anyway, when later documents would prove that in most cases the witnesses, their families and associates were murdered to shut them up.
It is impossible to think that after 2 years not a single one of the witnesses wanted the truth to be known. or a book deal. or an ex-spouse, or mother or father or brother or sister or friends, ex-worked - someone - would say, here is so-and-so. And what of those kids who were presumably yanked from their schools and friends and told, "Your name is now such and such, this is your history, memorize it and tell everyone this is who you are or you are in big trouble, young man - our lives depend on it." I don't believe it, and if that's what happened, it's a the worse free-speech nightmare ever known in the country that prides itself, most of all, on freedom. these people were free citizens of the United States. This cannot happen, and that is so far the best scenario, which has been offered by the Obama Administration, itself.
Not to mention that it is truly absurd to think you can have a murder investigation without calling in the witnesses to testify. Let's get real about this, come down to earth and simply remember the common-sense mindset of our own culture in this regard:
We bring this up because Congress seems lost in all the high-minded political confusion. Oh, these poor souls, an election looming, media saying this and that, campaign rides, "Did I just kiss a baby with hepatitis B?" You can see where they might lose track of the fact that YOU CANNOT CONDUCT A MURDER INVESTIGATION WITHOUT THE TESTIMONY OF THE WITNESSES IF WITNESSES EXIST, AND THEY DO.... OR AT LEAST, THEY DID, AND IF THEY DO NOT, WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM MUST BE IMMEDIATELY DETERMINED ASAP AND MADE PUBLIC TO THE PEOPLE WHOSE MONEY PAYS FOR ALL THIS.
The other road in which to go is much darker and we don't like it. Were the witnesses killed to shut them up? That sounds like the kind of thing LSD-filled leftists were saying about Nixon in 1972. The problem is, as you saw in the video clip of Fox News, the Obama Administration seems to have admitted that they gave them new names and moved them around. However, that is how you protect witnesses up until the point that they testify - you don't demand people take on new lives, their spouses and children say goodbye to friends and live under the burden of a fictional identity for the rest of their lives. That has never happened in the United States except to the occasional compromised agent, and these people were civilians whose only involvement was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is no joke. This is the real deal.
Such a "terrible" thing might seem impossible to the American mind. But America has been living on borrowed time statistically when it comes to unpleasant things happening at the top. The rest of the world - every single major player - has had to deal with the fact that in its history books are people and acts millions of times worse than this, for perspective:
Germany, a fine country of no-nonsense realists - had Hitler, who during just a few years in the mid-20th-century murdered 6 million German Jews; Russia - steeped in old-world splendor - had several murderers who soil their grade-school history books (or should), including Ivan The Terrible as well as the Communist Stalin in the 20th century, the latter of which murdered 40 million of his own people in the purges; England, from which this nation sprung initially, had Richard the Third, who murdered his way up to the throne and Henry the Eighth, while known mainly for his six wives, had created spy/execution network believed to have murdered 70,000 people, including two of his own wives, and also had Oliver Cromwell, whose aggressions against Catholics in Scotland and Ireland are generally described historically a genocidal; France's history books have Napoleon, whose idea of a stable peace was aggression in pursuit of global domination with himself master of the world, and Maximilien Robespierre, who killed approximately 40,000 French citizens in his famous "Reign of Terror" from which the expression sprang; Japan had 20th-century Prime Ministers Tojo and Hirota, found guilty of war crimes during WWII and both executed by hanging; 20th-century Italy had Mussolini, who is reported to have murdered 300,000 of his own countrymen; Spain's 20th century had Franco, who killed thousands, made catholicism the only accepted religion and confessed to having 26,000 political prisoners under lock and key; 20th-century Mexico had Diaz,who imprisoned his political opponent, declared himself de facto winner of the election and dissolved all localized power, making himself the supreme authority, with many corpses face-down along the way; and topping the democide list is China's 20th-century Communist Chairman Mao who is generally regarded as being responsible for a positively nauseating 70-million deaths of his own countrymen in peacetime due mostly to concentration camps and purge executions. Add to this essentially every single significant player country in the world and many more insignificant had their own murderers at the top, from Pol Pot to Saddam Hussein.
This is what kids learn, more or less, from their history books growing up in other countries. We never had that and as a consequence refuse the unhappiness of being a little more wary about that which unpleasant politicians are capable.
Now don't get us wrong - we're in no way suggesting that Obama murdered or ordered to be murdered anyone to silence them. But given the history of the world and the fact that the United States appears to now be living on statistical borrowed time in this regard, one thing is for sure:
THE BENGHAZI SELECT COMMITTEE HAD BETTER SUBPOENA OBAMA FOR THE BENGHAZI SURVIVOR WITNESSES AND THAT BETTER BE THE FIRST THING THEY DO, BECAUSE AWARENESS OF THOSE MISSING WITNESSES IS GROWING, IT'S NOT GOING AWAY.
CHAIRMAN GOWDY, FIND THEM FAST AND ANNOUNCE YOU HAVE A RELATE THEIR TESTIMONY TO THE PEOPLE, OR MAKE AMERICA AWARE THAT OBAMA HAD DONE SOMETHING TO OR WITH THEM, BECAUSE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE - THE MEDIA, ESPECIALLY - WILL CALL YOU COMPLICIT TO BALANCE THE POLITICAL FALLOUT FOR THE LEFT IF THE TRUTH COMES OUT AND FINDING THEM IS NOT THE FIRST THING YOU CAN SAY YOU TRIED TO DO AFTER TELLING IT TO AMERICA.