Today, Hillary Clinton is testifying before the House Select Committee on Benghazi. It’s an amazing display. It’s such a joke. They’ve been beating this drum for three years now. They’ve found nothing. All they’ve managed to do is convince those in the right wing echo chamber that there must be fire, because if there is one thing the Republican Party is good at, it is creating smoke. But if that weren’t enough, we had Kevin McCarthy putting the hearings in the context of how it damaged Clinton’s approval rating. And over the weekend, we learned, Republican Chairman Of Benghazi Committee Caught Making Bogus Accusation Against Hillary Clinton.

It all involves Trey Gowdy. Earlier this month, he sent out a letter claiming that Clinton had revealed the name of a CIA source in some of her private email. Gowdy wrote, “This information, the name of a human source, is some of the most protected information in our intelligence community, the release of which could jeopardize not only national security but human lives.” On Sunday, the ranking Democrat, Representative Elijah Cummings hit back. Hard. It’s worth quoting at length:

It turns out that the information is not classified. But before releasing it to the press, Gowdy redacted the name of the CIA source, adding “redacted due to sources and methods.” This was certainly all done to make Clinton look bad. And as Cummings noted in his letter, “Predictably, commentators began repeating your accusations in even more extreme terms…” Of course they did! Just the same, you would think after the same thing happens again and again (as it has with selective leaks from various Benghazi committees), the the press would wise up.

What’s perhaps most important, is that a day after this story broke — showing malfeasance on the part of Trey Cowdy — Google News had nothing about it among its top news items. In fact, if you did a search on “Benghazi,” the first thing that came up was a Fox News article, “Ambassador Sought Security Staffing Before Benghazi Attack, Cable Shows.” It’s understandable that for the last 40 years, the Republicans have been looking for something to redeem them for Nixon and the Watergate scandal. They look for scandals everywhere, even while they find them nowhere. (Unless marital infidelity is as important as running a crime syndicate out of the White House.)

I hope Brian Beutler was right earlier this week, The Benghazi Witch-Hunt Against Hillary Is Backfiring Just Like Bill Clinton’s Impeachment. But is it really? I question that. It seems to me that the press is only waking up to the fact that there is nothing to all this Benghazi thing. The Republicans have had more than 13 hearings on it. That ought to be enough to come to that conclusion. Instead, it takes clear acts of malfeasance to make the press figure there is nothing to see. Of course, there is something to see. If the Democrats acted like the Republicans have, it would be a huge thing. Instead, given that this is simply what the Republicans have become, it is ignored. The Republicans are just awful, so there is no story.

Bill McBride has a question about, Ornithology: What is a “deficit hawk”? It might seem easy: a deficit hawk is someone who cares a great deal about the deficit and is willing to make a lot of compromises to get rid of it. But is that really what a deficit hawk is? McBride has noticed what I have: deficit hawks don’t seem to care much about the deficit; they just seem to care about using the deficit to push other things they actually do care about.

How else do you explain the fact that almost all the prominent deficit hawks are for lowering taxes? Yes, they claim that this will create growth that will decrease the deficit. But as McBride noted, “All data and research shows that at the current marginal rates, tax cuts do not pay for themselves and lead to much larger deficits.” Speaking of economic growth, these are the same people who don’t want to do anything to head off recession. And how do you explain that they are generally for budget-busting wars? The only “sacrifice” that these deficit hawks seem to be willing to make is cuts in spending on the poor and middle classes.

I think the answer really comes back to one of my favorite analogies: Matt Yglesias’ Quaker budget hawks:

But somehow, in our society, rich people must be given the benefit of the doubt — regardless of how absurd that becomes. My favorite example doesn’t even come from the United States. Back in 2013, France was being forced to do austerity — because balancing the budget is so important in a recession. (Note: sarcasm!) But when France met its budgetary target through tax increases rather than spending cuts, European Commissioner Olli Rehn was upset. He said, “Budgetary discipline must come from a reduction in public spending and not from new taxes.” And why is that? It certainly isn’t because the economics dictates this. In fact, the economics probably point in the opposite direction. It’s just that Rehn’s conservative ideology dictates it, but like almost all of the deficit hawks, he doesn’t actually care about deficits.

I should be clear: I don’t care about deficits. In a booming economy, they are a problem, of course. But when was the last time we had a booming economy? For two years at the end of the 1990s? And that was such an aberration that people still talk about. It was also a time when the deficit was gone because of the boom. But I’m willing to talk about deficits if we can get a political system that shows it is actually interested in creating jobs and not just more income for the very richest among us.

But what’s clear is that those who want to use the deficit as an excuse for their conservative ideology are not honest brokers. We can’t deal with them because they won’t say what they want. And we know why that is: what they want is truly unpopular. It sounds so much better to say that we must screw the poor in order to help the poor. And somehow, that’s an argument that has worked for four decades now — even as the poor are doing worse than ever.