I cannot speak for others, but (IMHO) you're not "the bad guy". I'm a bit of an existentialist and there is no a priori bad and good. You are what you are and what you choose to be. Judgements of good and bad don't come into it.
Wow, talk about damning with faint praise. Or perhaps praising with faint damn. 16.5 is doing a yeoman's job of keeping us up-to-date on the Benghazi investigation and on Hillary's email scandal. If people don't want to read about that stuff, all they have to do is ignore the threads. It's not like he's polluting other threads with it. He is quite diligent about confining all things Benghazi and email related to their proper threads. If I were a partisan Democrat, I would feel grateful for 16.5's efforts, since I could be confident of seeing the best the Republicans have to throw at Hillary and be ready to respond. Know your enemy and all that, and, in particular, know what he knows.
As for why he has decided to shoulder this burden, I have no idea. I find the topics interesting, and they're made more interesting by the fact that many in the mainstream media do their level best to ignore them, but I don't have nearly the level of interest that 16.5 does. We all have our pet projects though. For the life of me, I can't figure out why people want to argue with 9/11 truthers or the assorted woo-ists spread around this forum, but I suppose it is a kind of sport that keeps your writing biting and your wits sharp. Of course, from my perspective, the abuse that 16.5 receives for pursuing a legitimate line of inquiry is fascinating in its own right.
What you are, quite apparent to anyone who can read, is an ideological partisan. This is a mini-version of the Bubba hearings. Get a special prosecutor, start down one trail and hit a dead-end. Go down a new trail and hit another dead end. Keep going down trails until you find something totally unrelated to the aegis under which the investigation was set-up and find something, anything, to pin on the person being investigated.
No, this analogy doesn't hold water. The various Benghazi investigations have all been focused on the actual incident and the responses to it by the various branches of government. This is not something that has spread its tentacles in various directions. If it seems like it is dragging on and on, it is only because the investigation has been willfully obstructed. There is really no denying that, given that the various investigating committees had been told by the State Department that there were no Hillary Clinton emails that were responsive to their subpoenas. This truly is an example of a lie by omission, by the way, since the only reasonable assumption was that the State Department had possession of all of Hillary Clinton's work-related emails.
In no other quasi-judicial/prosecutorial system in the USA is this tolerated. If the local police in even, say, New Orleans (picking my home town, noted for police corruption) went to the staunchest law and order judge in the city and said "I just know Chaz Lafontaine out on Bayou Lafouche is up to something. Can I have a warrant to go through everything he's ever said and done and written in the past twenty years to see if I can find something to pin on him?".... The judge would toss him out of his office.
Well, I suspect you're wrong about that since my last thread is about prosecutors in Wisconsin doing that very thing and then some, and Louisiana is hardly better than Wisconsin in that regard. In any case, the Benghazi investigations are nothing like that. Just because an investigation is persistent about obtaining documents that it is entitled to review doesn't mean that it is a witch hunt.
How are Hillary's emails on foundation business remotely related to the original scope of Gowdy's committee? They're not. Nor are her discussions with a potential newhire. They're just casting the net in the Bubba mode and hoping they find an intern on her hands and knees. That's why I mentioned that the "email" thread is a Godsend. It can cover any topic in Hillary's entire life. Does anyone think for a second that if Hillary mentioned in a personal email to Chelsea that she actually thought Marco Rubio was kinda hawt, that Gowdy and friends wouldn't find a way to introduce that or leak it?
As 16.5 has pointed out, this had nothing to do with Gowdy's committee. The story was about a question asked by a reporter at a GE shareholder meeting. Is now the media conducting a witch hunt because it is trying to find information about Clinton Foundation donations?
And, as to this "partisan" issue.... I'm not a Hillary supporter. Never have been. If she's what the Dems have running, I'll probably support her because the GOP hasn't got a candidate remotely resembling someone I'd vote for. But I'd take any number of hypothetical candidates over Hillary. My posts are not in defense of Hillary. They are related to the concern for the blatant partisanship of this and the Benghazi thread. It was no better when the left did it to Dubya, by the way. People aren't going after "Issues" that concern them. They are going after people whose very existence they question and then looking for issues.
I think your claim to be concerned about "blatant" partisanship in those threads is itself a "tell" about your own partisan bias. A non-partisan wouldn't be concerned. He would either be interested or he would skip over it. In any case, I've got similar news to report. I wouldn't even mind Hillary as President very much. I think her and her husband's world views, to the extent they can be disentangled from any current political expediency, align with mine to a large extent, particularly on foreign policy. I think Bill would provide good advice and generally be both a positive force in the White House and a source of comedic gold as he turned the East Wing into a kind of Playboy Mansion. I am not going to deny that I have a partisan bias though.
