Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) made an impassioned plea yesterday for Republicans to stop denying the science of climate change — so, like clockwork, the right wing blogs and media are attacking him in fake-outraged unison today.

The Daily Caller’s Jeff Poor (last seen at LGF when he was busily counting the number of times Rachel Maddow used the word “vagina”) is the source for the latest right wing frenzy: Democratic Sen. Whitehouse Blames Republicans for Tornado.

And of course, the headline is distorted; Whitehouse did not “blame Republicans for the tornado.” Here are the quotes from Poor’s absurdly biased article — and I agree with every single word Sen. Whitehouse said. He’s right.

“So, you may have a question for me,” Whitehouse said. “Why do you care? Why do you, Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, care if we Republicans run off the climate cliff like a bunch of proverbial lemmings and disgrace ourselves? I’ll tell you why. We’re stuck in this together. We are stuck in this together. When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn’t just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms. It hits Oregon with acidified seas, it hits Montana with dying forests. So, like it or not, we’re in this together.”

Whitehouse went on to condemn the current Republican position on global warming, citing economic, environmental and diplomatic damages.

“You drag America with you to your fate,” he continued. “So, I want this future: I want a Republican Party that has returned to its senses and is strong and a worthy adversary in a strong America that has done right by its people and the world. That’s what I want. I don’t want this future. I don’t want a Republican Party disgraced, that let its extremists run off the cliff, and an America suffering from grave economic and environmental and diplomatic damage because we failed, because we didn’t wake up and do our duty to our people, and because we didn’t lead the world. I do not want that future. But that’s where we’re headed. So I will keep reaching out and calling out, ever hopeful that you will wake up before it is too late.”

No wonder the wingnut parrot squad is so worked up. That’s gotta sting.

SCOTT PELLEY: Also at his news conference today the president called for tighter security for U.S. diplomatic facilities to prevent an attack like the one in Benghazi, Libya, last year that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Of course, Benghazi has become a political controversy. Republicans claim that the Administration watered down the facts in talking points that were given to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for television appearances while Mr. Obama was running for reelection. Republicans on Capitol Hill claim that they had found proof of this in White House e-mails that they leaked to reporters last week. Well, it turns out some of the quotes in those e-mails were wrong. Major Garrett is at the White House for us tonight. Major?

MAJOR GARRETT: Scott, Republicans have claimed that the State Department under Hillary Clinton was trying to protect itself from criticism. The White House released the real e-mails late yesterday and here’s what we found when we compared them to the quotes that had been provided by Republicans. One e-mail was written by Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes. On Friday, Republicans leaked what they said was a quote from Rhodes. “We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation.” But it turns out, in the actual e-mail Rhodes did not mention the State Department. It read “We need to resolve this in a way that respects all the relevant equities, particularly the investigation.” Republicans also provided what they said was a quote from an e-mail written by State Department Spokesman Victoria Nuland. The Republican version notes Nuland discussing: “The penultimate point is a paragraph talking about all the previous warnings provided by the Agency (CIA) about al-Qaeda’s presence and activities of al-Qaeda.” The actual e-mail from Nuland says: the “…penultimate point could be abused by Members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings…” The C.I.A. agreed with the concerns raised by the State Department and revised the talking points to make them less specific than the C.I.A.’s original version, eliminating references to al-Qaeda and affiliates and earlier security warnings. There is no evidence, Scott, the White House orchestrated these changes.

More: Wow, This Is Pretty Epic

Also see:
WH Benghazi Emails Have Different Quotes Than Earlier Reported

Former Ambassador Thomas Pickering and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, who oversaw the Accountability Review Board that reviewed the government’s response to the Benghazi attack, are clearly unhappy with Republican hitman Darrell Issa and his distorted characterizations of their work: Pickering, Mullen Challenge Issa to Let Them Testify in Public.

The dispute between Issa and the co-chairmen came to a head after neither Pickering nor Mullen attended a May 8 House Oversight Committee hearing on the attacks, sparking a heated back and forth about who was invited and when. The rhetoric intensified Sunday during a highly contentious joint appearance with Issa and Pickering on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in which Issa maintained the two “refused to come before our committee.” Pickering insisted that he was not invited despite expressing a willingness to testify.

“Chairman Issa sent word back that he might want to take me up some time in the future” Pickering said.

Issa also suggested on the program that Pickering and Mullen meet with the committee behind closed doors so as not to create “some sort of stage show.” But the two assert in their letter that a public hearing is a “more appropriate forum” and accuse Issa of changing his “position on the terms of our appearance.”

By demanding that the hearing be open to the public, it’s clear that Pickering and Mullen simply don’t trust the blatantly partisan Issa to tell the truth — and they shouldn’t.

[Live event concluded.]

The acting commissioner of the IRS has resigned, and new safeguards will be put in place.

In other news, the White House has released 100 pages of emails and notes on the Benghazi attack.

BREAKING: White House releases 100 pages of emails and notes on Benghazi attacks.

— The Associated Press (@AP) May 15, 2013

Amid all the scandals and freak-outs this week, Republicans are curiously silent about the Justice Department’s raid on Associated Press records.

Republican senators who have long been critics of Attorney General Eric Holder were noticeably muted on Tuesday when asked to respond to the news of the Justice Department seizing reporters’ records as part of a broader probe into national security leaks.

“Well, I think we need to see how this plays out,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), one of Holder’s biggest critics and who last year demanded that the attorney general resign amid the Fast and Furious gun-running probe. “I have questions about it, but I’m wiling to wait and see how this plays out, whether it was narrowly targeted or whether it was a net that was too broadly cast,” Cornyn said.

“I want to see the details — what was their rationale, why did they do it — before offering an opinion,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who earlier this week accused the administration of engaging in a “cover-up” in Benghazi. “For me, to rush to a judgment without knowing all the facts is just not appropriate.”

Republicans who are reluctant to rush to judgment? Has the Apocalypse arrived?

The political calculation’s pretty obvious here; the Republican Party and the right wing media have spent the last couple of decades demonizing the mainstream media, with special vitriol being directed at the AP. It’s not going to work for GOP politicians to suddenly flip and start defending the Associated Press now, after all that — the right wing Tea Party base would break out the tar and feathers and RINO signs.

Those “leaked” emails about Benghazi talking points first reported by the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, then picked up and trumpeted to the world by ABC News, were apparently distorted and mischaracterized to smear the State Department and the White House.

Imagine my surprise.

ABC News reported that Rhodes wrote: “We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation. We thus will work through the talking points tomorrow morning at the Deputies Committee meeting.” The Weekly Standard reported that Rhodes “responded to the group, explaining that Nuland had raised valid concerns and advising that the issues would be resolved at a meeting of the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee the following morning.”

Whoever provided those quotes seemingly invented the notion that Rhodes wanted the concerns of the State Department specifically addressed. While Nuland, particularly, had expressed a desire to remove mentions of specific terrorist groups and CIA warnings about the increasingly dangerous assignment, Rhodes put no emphasis at all in his email on the State Department’s concerns.

Previous reporting also misquoted Rhodes as saying the group would work through the talking points at the deputies meeting on Saturday, September 15, when the talking points to Congress were finalized. While the previously written subject line of the email mentions talking points, Rhodes only addresses misinformation in a general sense.

So whoever leaked the inaccurate information earlier this month did so in a way that made it appear that the White House - specifically Rhodes - was more interested in the State Department’s concerns, and more focused on the talking points, that the email actually stated.

Also see:
Jake Tapper Blows a Hole in Benghazi `scandal’

Pat Buchanan has a plan to win more white voters for the GOP.

In an article published by the website World Net Daily last week, Buchanan describes increased black voter turnout and Latino demographic growth as a “crisis for the Grand Old Party.” To combat it, the conservative pundit implies that the Republican Party should adopt a new version of the “Southern Strategy” revolving around immigration.

The Southern Strategy, first adopted by Richard Nixon, aimed to cultivate the support of Southern voters in part by appealing to racial tensions while avoiding overt racism. The strategy played a key role in alienating African-American voters from the GOP.

But Buchanan thinks it’s gotten a bad rap. It did, after all, play well in the electoral college:

After Richard Nixon cobbled together his New Majority, the GOP carried 49 states in 1972 and 1984, 44 states in 1980 and 40 in 1988. In four elections - 1972, 1984, 1988 and 2004 - the Republican Party swept all 11 states of FDR’s “Solid South.”

Such were the fruits of that evil Southern Strategy.

More: Pat Buchanan Calls for ‘Southern Strategy’ Against Latinos, Immigrants

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a Bush appointee, said today on Face the Nation that some of the critics of the Obama administration’s response to the Benghazi attack have a “cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces.”

“Frankly, had I been in the job at the time, I think my decisions would have been just as theirs were,” said Gates, now the chancellor of the College of William and Mary.

“We don’t have a ready force standing by in the Middle East, and so getting somebody there in a timely way would have been very difficult, if not impossible.” he explained.

Suggestions that we could have flown a fighter jet over the attackers to “scare them with the noise or something,” Gates said, ignored the “number of surface to air missiles that have disappeared from [former Libyan leader] Qaddafi’s arsenals.”

“I would not have approved sending an aircraft, a single aircraft, over Benghazi under those circumstances,” he said.

Another suggestion posed by some critics of the administration, to, as Gates said, “send some small number of special forces or other troops in without knowing what the environment is, without knowing what the threat is, without having any intelligence in terms of what is actually going on on the ground, would have been very dangerous.”

“It’s sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces,” he said. “The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm’s way, and there just wasn’t time to do that.”

Well said. A cartoonish impression of military capabilities goes along with a cartoonish world view.

Also see:
A Look at the Republican Benghazi Talking Points as They’ve Been Laid Out So Far - the Maddow Blog

ABC News jumps into the shark tank and panders to the right wing base (hey, eyeballs are eyeballs) with an overheated report on the Benghazi talking points that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the CIA’s outpost: Exclusive: Benghazi Talking Points Underwent 12 Revisions, Scrubbed of Terror Reference.

ABC’s “exclusive” appears to be the mind-blowing fact that government talking points aren’t written off the cuff. That they are often subject to revisions, and sometimes inter-agency politics comes into play.

Does anyone seriously think this is news?

But the detail that’s spurring the right wing blogosphere to new heights of hysteria and conspiracy-mongering: a reference to Al Qaeda was removed. In the feverish wingnut imagination this is proof of …. something nefarious by that Obama guy.

Like the final version used by Ambassador Rice on the Sunday shows, the CIA’s first drafts said the attack appeared to have been “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo” but the CIA version went on to say, “That being said, we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.” The draft went on to specifically name the al Qaeda-affiliated group named Ansar al-Sharia.

Once again, Nuland objected to naming the terrorist groups because “we don’t want to prejudice the investigation.”

Of course, wingnut world knows better than to believe this flimsy excuse.

Breitbart psycho hack John Nolte is yelling about a “red-hot smoking gun,” but he does that all the time.

Greg Sargent’s piece hits the nail on the head; what these revisions actually do is confirm that Susan Rice simply echoed the assessment of the intelligence community.

Ben Armbruster makes another great point:

… Absent in ABC’s report is the key point that Obama and various members of his administration referred to the Benghazi assault as a terror attack on numerous occasions shortly after the incident (thereby negating the need to “scrub” any references in the talking points) and that then-CIA Director David Petraeus said the terrorist references were taken out to, as the New York Times reported, “avoid tipping off the groups” that may have been involved.

Moreover, an update the ABC report undermines the notion that Nuland’s motives were campaign related or political:

A source familiar with the White House emails on the Benghazi talking point revisions say that State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland was raising two concerns about the CIA’s first version of talking points, which were going to be sent to Congress: 1) The talking points went further than what she was allowed to say about the attack during her state department briefings; and, 2) she believed the CIA was attempting to exonerate itself at the State Department’s expense by suggesting CIA warnings about the security situation were ignored.

In other words, ABC’s “exclusive” reveals a turf battle, not some cover-up.

Yup. Another bombshell turns out to be a dud.