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Jon Stewart ripped into Fox "News" and their continued hyping of the trumped up Benghazi "scandal" which they've been promising over and over is about to "have the lid blown off a giant coverup" at any moment now since the attacks first happened.

Stewart took his viewers back through some of Fox's coverage for the last few months now, whether it was the Greta hyping the Petraeus testimony, or Hannity ranting about the Clinton testimony, to Lindsey Graham promising that the hearing this week was "going to make you mad" and if not, well, they'll just keep having more of them until you are.

Stewart reminded his viewers that this Congress has had nine full hearings on Benghazi, but during the Bush administration there were fifty four attacks on diplomatic targets that killed thirteen Americans, but Congress only held three hearings total on embassy security back then with zero of the outrage we're seeing from Republicans now.

After asking what made things different this time around, Stewart went through the recent list of items that the wingnuts on the right believe are "worse than Watergate" and crazy GOP Rep. Steve King's remarks that Benghazi is "Watergate and Iran Contra together" and "multiplied by ten." Stewart put into perspective just what King was comparing the so-called Benghazi "coverup" to and asked, just what did President Obama do that Republicans believe is worse than some of Nixon and Reagan's worst scandals combined.

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This ain't ever going away as long as the Republicans think there's a snowball's chance in hell that Hillary Clinton is going to run for president. Sen. John McCain appeared on Neil Cavuto's show this Wednesday, after calling for a select committee on Benghazi, because lord knows they haven't quite beaten this horse to death yet: GOP senators want Obama to release Benghazi names:

A trio of Republican senators are calling on President Obama to release the names of Benghazi survivors to Congress after the White House said it was unaware anyone was blocked from testifying.

Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) wrote to Obama on Wednesday asking that names be released of the survivors of last year’s attack at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, for interviews with Congress.

“In light of your comments yesterday about the Benghazi attacks, we again request your administration immediately provide the names of the Benghazi survivors to Congress so we can conduct interviews to gain a clearer understanding of what happened before, during, and after the attack,” the senators wrote. [...]

The Obama administration has pushed back this week against allegations that a State Department employee has been prevented from testifying about the terrorist attack, in which four Americans were killed.

Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official and one-time Republican counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Fox News earlier this week that a State Department employee she represented was threatened by superiors if he cooperated with the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into Benghazi.

If anyone thinks those names sound familiar, here's a reminder of who they are from Media Matters: Who Are The Right-Wing Media's Benghazi Lawyers Victoria Toensing And Joseph diGenova?.

And I highly recommend reading both Digby and Charlie Pierce's take on this debacle, which you can read here:

What's really going on with this Benghazi obsession?

and here:

Getting The Band Back Together and I'll share a bit from Pierce's article:

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Following months on end of watching the likes of Sen. Lindsey Graham and his BFF Sen. John McCain do their best to beat the war drums for the United States to be injecting ourselves into Syria's two year long civil war, the Daily Show's Jon Stewart took the lot of them to task for their push to intervene in that country with very little thought involved as to what happens next if we would decide to go in there.

Jon Stewart: Republicans think ‘freedom magic’ is key to U.S. adventure in Syria:

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) has insisted the United States needs to intervene because the country had never sat back and allowed innocent civilians to be killed by dictatorial regimes.

“Thank you,” Stewart said sarcastically. “Well, obviously except for, you know, Rwanda, and Darfur, and Bosnia, and Cambodia — point taken. We as America have never let something like that happen before — in Syria with this particular Assad.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-KY) has called on the United States to provide arms to the Syrian rebels. But he warned the United States should only arm the “right” rebels and not extremists.

“Maybe we can do background checks,” Stewart joked, poking fun at the senator’s stubborn opposition to the gun law.

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South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham can't seem to make up his mind on whether the United States ought to be sending ground troops into Syria, since he just contradicted himself from the statements he made to Foreign Policy last month during an interview with Bob Schieffer on CBS this Sunday. He has, however, been consistent with beating the war drums and giving dire warnings about the consequences of the United States failing to insert ourselves into the middle of their civil war.

Graham continued the fearmongering on this Sunday's Face the Nation, telling the audience they should be concerned about everything from more terrorist attacks in the United States, to extremists taking over the country and getting a hold of weapons of mass destruction.

Graham also claimed he's really worried about "all hell breaking loose" in the region if the United States fails to intervene. I hate to break it to you Lindsey, but you're a whole lot of years and a dollar short on that one. That ship sailed a long time ago.

I've got a proposal for Graham and his fellow warmongering buddy John McCain -- you first. If the two of you want to lead the charge inserting yourselves into another country's civil war without the support of the international community, you go lead the troops over there and take a spot on the front lines of the battlefield. Let us know how that works out for you.

Full transcript below the fold via CBS.

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In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, Sen. Lindsey Graham told Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer that “We need to revisit our laws" and potentially give the FBI more power to track terrorism suspects, because lord knows we haven't shredded quite enough of our civil rights already.

No amount of deaths are ever enough for Graham to want to infringe on the Constitutional rights of gun owning Americans, but as soon as the word terrorism is involved, all bets are out the window.

Graham warns intel agencies ‘going back to pre-9/11 stove-piping’:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said “information sharing failed” ahead of the Boston Marathon bombings and warned that stove-piping between intelligence agencies remained a problem.

“This is a failure to share information and missing obvious warning signs,” said Graham Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “We are going back to pre-9/11 stove-piping,” he warned.

Graham called for a “post-mortem” to examine the intelligence failures and see if such missteps could be prevented in the future, citing reports that the FBI failed to interview suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev after a trip to Russia, where authorities believe he was partly radicalized and the failure of the agency to notify agents in Boston to watch him more closely.

“How could you miss that the guy you were informed about by a foreign intelligence service, you got a radical in your midst, we can’t track him to Russia, we lose him going to Russia and coming back,” asked Graham. “And when he goes on the internet for the whole world to see, to interact with a radical Islamic websites how do we miss that?

“We’re going to have to up our game,” said the South Carolina senator. [...]

Graham’s comments are the latest from GOP lawmakers frustrated that intelligence system reforms made after the September 11, 2001 attacks have failed to work. Lawmakers fear that the same intelligence sharing issues before that incident are again playing a role in the Boston attack.

Graham last week suggested that the FBI may need more powers to track terror suspects.

“We need to revisit our laws,” he said.

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Jason Easley over at Politicususa pegged this one exactly right when it comes to what to expect next from Republicans, given what we heard from a number of them on the Sunday bobblehead shows this weekend complaining about how the FBI handled the investigation of Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011.

As Easley noted, "If you thought the Republican behavior after Benghazi was bad, their desperate fishing expedition on Boston could be even worse." Sadly, we probably haven't seen the worst of Sen. Lindsey Graham getting a chronic case of the vapors during a Congressional hearing just yet.

Republicans Launch Their Campaign to Blame Obama for Boston By Attacking the FBI:

Republicans took to the Sunday morning shows to attack the FBI, and to lay the groundwork for blaming President Obama for the Boston bombings. [...]

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see where Graham and King are going with this. Soon they will call for hearings on how the FBI handled the intelligence they had before the events in Boston. Their purpose is twofold. They are looking for something to use to revive the Bush era war on terror policies, and they are searching for some way to blame President Obama for the attacks.

There is a difference between saying that the FBI needs to review how they handled any information they may have had before the attacks, and using politically loaded language like "the FBI dropped the ball." King and Graham are trying to set up a narrative that will tie any “failures” that they find to President Obama. That is where this is heading.

I'm sure it won't take too long to find out if he's right or not, and in the meantime, I wouldn't bet against the prediction.

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How bad are things when former Rep. Jane Harman is sounding like the voice of reason when it comes to our treatment of terrorism suspects? From this week's Fox News Sunday, she and Bloody Bill Kristol sparred over whether the suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing should be treated as an enemy combatant or read his rights and tried in civilian court.

I'm not sure what good Kristol thinks it's going to do to try to interrogate someone who apparently has been shot in the throat and can't communicate right now if they wanted to, but the right does seem to love stomping all over our Constitutional rights (unless it's guns, of course) at every given opportunity.

Steve Benen made some of the same points as Harman during her back and forth with Kristol in a post he wrote yesterday which described what a dangerous game these Republicans are playing: The legal process ahead for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev:

The broader question -- I'm reluctant to call it a "debate" since the path seems so obvious -- is what happens after that. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have some thoughts on the matter.

Two powerful GOP senators are calling on the Obama administration to treat the captured suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings as an "enemy combatant" and deny him counsel even though he is reportedly an American citizen. [...]

Regardless his citizenship status, McCain and Graham say Dzhokhar Tsarnaev gave up his rights to a criminal trial when he allegedly participated in the bombings.

"Under the Law of War we can hold this suspect as a potential enemy combatant not entitled to Miranda warnings or the appointment of counsel," McCain and Graham said.

McCain and Graham are playing a dangerous game here. In case anyone's forgotten, we're talking about an American citizen, captured on American soil, accused of committing a crime in America. These Republican senators are arguing, in effect, that none of this matters anymore.

The same week in which Senate Republicans insisted that the Second Amendment is sacrosanct, McCain and Graham are arguing that the Fourth Amendment is a nicety that the nation must no longer take seriously.

By all accounts, the Obama administration is prepared to ignore the senators' suggestion. [...]

That's encouraging. Even for those on the right who are indifferent to civil liberties, the fact remains that civilian trials for terrorist suspects have proven to be an effective method of trying, convicting, and sentencing criminals, including accused terrorists. Military commissions, meanwhile, have proven to be an ineffective method.

When it comes to national security, foreign policy, and counter-terrorism, McCain and Graham have a track record of being remarkably wrong with incredible consistency. The more the Obama administration ignores their advice, the better.

Double that for Bill Kristol. And note to Chris Wallace in regard to the clip above, please quit calling the United States "the homeland." It's creeping me out.

Transcript via Fox below the fold.

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It seems we've got at least one Republican who is not on board with Sen. Lindsey Graham and crew and their talking points on whether the FBI did their job in investigating Tamerlan Tsarnaev prior to the Boston Marathon bombing and on whether his brother ought to be treated as an enemy combatant.

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday that when Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombing suspect killed Friday in a shootout with police, travelled to Russia in 2012, he may have done so under an alias.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s six-month stay in Russia last year “becomes extremely important” as a key to the investigation of the Boston bombings, Rogers told NBC’s David Gregory. His visit to Russia “would lead one to believe that that’s probably where he got that final radicalization to push him to commit acts of violence and where he may have received training” in terrorist techniques. Rogers, a former FBI agent, said the FBI had questioned Tamerlan Tsarnaev after being given information from a foreign intelligence service “that they were concerned about his possible radicalization.” [...]

The FBI, Rogers said, “did their due diligence and did a very thorough job” of investigating Tamerlan Tsarnaev, but when the FBI asked for more help from that foreign intelligence service, it got no further cooperation. [...]

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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Sunday declared that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was at fault for failing to prevent last week's bombing in Boston.

In an interview on CNN's State of the Union, host Candy Crowley noted that the FBI had interviewed deceased bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011, but wondered if it was fair to blame the agency for not anticipating something that happened two years later.

"The ball was dropped in one of two ways," Graham opined. "The FBI missed a lot of things is one potential answer or our laws do not allow the FBI to follow up in a sound, solid way. There was a lot to be learned from this guy. He was on websites talking about killing Americans."

"This was a mistake," he added. "I don't know if our laws are insufficient or the FBI failed, but we're at war with radical Islamists and we need to up our game."

House Intelligence Committee Mike Rogers (R-MI), however, on Sunday insisted that the FBI was not to blame, arguing that the bureau "did their due diligence and did a very thorough job."

Crowley also pressed the Graham on his assertion that surviving Boston bombing suspect Dzokhar Tsarnaev should be treated as an enemy combatant and should be interrogated without being informed of his Miranda rights.

"This man should be designated as a potential enemy combatant and we should be allowed to question him for intelligence gathering purposes to find out about future attacks and terrorist organizations that may exist that he has knowledge of and that evidence cannot be used against him in trial," the senior South Carolina senator argued. "Anytime we question him about his guilt or innocence, he is entitled to his Miranda rights and a lawyer."

"But we have the right under our law -- I've been a military lawyer for 30 years -- to gather intelligence from enemy combatants. And a citizen can be an enemy combatant."

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Bill Maher's New Rules segment from this Friday evening and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed hearing him rip John McCain for his endless appearances on the Sunday morning bobblehead shows.

MAHER: New Rule. John McCain has to try spending a Sunday Morning with his family. Look, Senator, I'm with you. Anything to avoid church, but come one. It's Sunday morning. There's got to be an easier way to tell Lindsey Graham you don't want to cuddle.