I just read a remarkable article over at Rolling Stone, The Endless Trial of Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi Committee. It is written by Andy Kroll, who clearly looks at Gowdy was a jaundiced eye, but wants to be super fair to this man who heads the latest and biggest investigation on just what happened in Benghazi three and a half years ago. No, wait. That’s not what they are looking into. They are looking into what happened afterwards, because exactly what Susan Rice said on Sunday talk shows is really important! In the end, the entire Benghazi investigation has come down to whether the Obama administration was spinning the attack for political advantage. So even if everything Gowdy and company says is true, it is a witch hunt.
But reading the article, you get the impression that Trey Gowdy is the true victim here. He used to be a prosecutor, and by all accounts a great prosecutor. And now he is so upset because it is all so partisan and unfair. He has to wait forever to get documents. And then Hillary Clinton would only testify in public, as if a closed door testimony would have disclosed something important. (Let’s face it: the public testimony just showed that the worst things we thought about the hearings and Trey Gowdy were exactly right.) Oh, how the Benghazi chairman wishes he had stayed a prosecutor!
I don’t doubt that he does. Nowhere in the article is the most important fact here: prosecutors are by far the most powerful members of the legal system. Everything is set up to their advantage. After OJ Simpson was found not guilty, a lot of people claimed that it was unfair that he was able to spend millions on his defense. So what?! The state spent millions prosecuting him. The state can spend as much money as it likes on any given case. So I’m sure that Trey Gowdy is indeed very unhappy that he now finds himself a fair fight where he doesn’t battle against people who have no real weapons.
The amount of whining that he does in this article is amazing. In fact, it is whining from beginning to end. Listening to him, you would think that he was a babe in the woods — totally unaware of just how nasty politics was. And there he is, like a real life Superman standing up for Truth, Justice, and the American Way! It’s just the media and the Democrats who politicized this. He just wanted “to run a serious, document-centric, fact-centric investigation.” And that’s why again and again he leaked information to damage Democrats in general, and Clinton in particular. In fact, this is doubtless why he wanted a private testimony with Clinton — so he could leak selective bits that made her look bad.
But according to Trey Gowdy, the Benghazi hearings were a success. He said, “We have interviewed this number of witnesses nobody else interviewed, including eyewitnesses, [accessed] these documents from these agencies that nobody else accessed, and, oh, by the way, we have the correspondence from the two people who, one knew the most about Libya being the ambassador, and the other arguably knew more about our policy in Libya than anyone else.” So this hearing — the eighth that Congress had — was all about fact finding. So he found some new facts. And they told us squat. Because there is no there there.
But we are supposed to feel sorry for poor old Trey Gowdy because he was just doing the prosecutor’s job of getting to the facts. Of course, we know that Gowdy was just acting as a hit man and that he was willing to lie to do so. This is the problem that prosecutors face when they have to get a real job: they show themselves to be incompetent and immoral. Rolling Stone shouldn’t have given him space to make his case. It was far more fair than Gowdy has ever been to Hillary Clinton or anyone in the Obama administration.
On this day in 1605, 
I spent almost all of yesterday on the road and so I don’t have much time to go looking for things to write about. But there has been something on my mind for a good long time that I would like to related to you: how we gain knowledge by giving it away. But I’ll be honest: I may have written about this before. By the end of this month, Frankly Curious will have published 7,000 articles — the vast majority of them being by me. And I don’t know what I’ve written. The funny thing is that I often find that things I had thought I had written about — obvious things — I hadn’t.
Shakezula is a very smart guy, but I think he was wrong yesterday, 
When I was young, my favorite guitarist (by far) was David Gilmour. That was probably because he is one of the few lead guitar players who thinks in terms of melody. Most guitarists get too lost in scales and not much more. I believe after Roger Waters used his inner pain to banish all other songwriters from Pink Floyd, Gilmour was still given songwriting credit based purely on the basis of his guitar solos. See, for example, “Dogs” off a fairly unlovable album, 
On this day in 1974, 
Oh my! 
I have to admit to being at a loss about the Republican presidential nomination. It does seem hard to believe that Donald Trump would be the nominee. But why do I think that? In a lot of ways, he is the Ross Perot of his day. I don’t mean that they are the same. Perot was an actual issue candidate. That issue — the budget deficit — was wrong; but it was something that intelligent people could disagree about. But they both appealed to people in much the same way: they were self financing and seemed like the kind of people who were willing to tell the people “the truth.” It’s a kind of affinity fraud, or as it is know, “identity politics.”
Matt Bruenig wrote an interesting article related to this, 
But as Brian Beutler noted, the 
Exactly ten years ago, the 
I want to show you the process of editing with an example I recently went through in getting an IG created. When the whole thing is posted, I will see about putting a link in here. But it doesn’t much matter. What does matter is that one small part of this very large infographic was about Mansa Musa, the great 14th century ruler of Mali. On his pilgrimage of Mecca, he spent so much gold that he caused its value to plummet and set off a years long depression in the Middle East. I often use this as an example to explain to gold bugs that inflation greatly effects gold based economies.
I responded to the image, “This is clever, but will be seen as racist in America. And the sign doesn’t make much sense. How about a larger sign that reads, ‘Will work for food — but not gold!'” The artist responded to my editing suggestion with the graphic on the left.
What I got back was just what I asked for. And I’m afraid that it made it worse. I really hate this situation, because I’ve found myself on the other side of it many times. People ask for changes but they are unclear or don’t even know what they want.
So the artist, realizing that they were working with an idiot client just changed graphic as you can see on the right. The inforgraphic lost what I thought was a nice joke. But this entirely new graphic is actually a better representation of what we are talking about. And it is beautifully rendered.
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