by Steve Timmer

Oct 19, 2015, 5:30 PM

Howdy Gowdy

See the update below —

The latest bit of shenanigans in the opera buffa Benghazi! (Never Forget!) has been all over the news today; it hardly need elucidation from me.

I just wanted to use that hed and the photo of Trey Gowdy, the apparently epically-inbred cracker-Congressman from South Carolina, who was appointed by John Boehner — in an act of impressive ineptitude, even for Boehner — to chair a select committee to “investigate,” well, I’m not sure what, exactly. And Howdy Gowdy isn’t, either.

@tbogg When will Trey break out his banjo pic.twitter.com/DMnYhNwRRX

— Samuel Bronkowitz (@SamBronkowitz) October 22, 2015

It was obvious that the purpose of the committee from the beginning was to gin up smears of Hillary Clinton as she runs for president. Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy admitted as much — causing his immediate defenestration as a candidate to replace Boehner — and a couple of Republican congressmen and staffers on the committee have come out, too.

But the cherry on this banana split came this past weekend:

House Benghazi Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy appears to have accidentally released the name of a CIA source in the midst of a back-and-forth with Democrats about how sensitive the information was and whether its presence in former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email account constituted a security breach.

Hillary Clinton’s mail server was a lot more secure that Howdy Gowdy’s big mouth. If the House Republicans have a brain among them, they’ll stick a fork in Howdy Goudy, and his whole committee, too.

Update (10/20):

Howdy Gowdy seems more like Chucky all the time. He altered emails from Clinton’s server to make information in them appear to be classified, but it wasn’t. From the link:

Gowdy and the republican Benghazi committee have been attacking by using a variety of government documents which have been heavily redacted to the point that it’s never been entirely clear just what context they would be in if not for all of the redactions and blackouts. After democrats asked the CIA to declassify the documents so that the public could see what was really being presented, the CIA responded by stating that it had never asked for anything to be redacted. When questioned under pressure, Gowdy admitted that he himself decided to redact large portions of the documents based on his own personal judgment of what information he did or didn’t want the public to know.

This comes after months of allowing the public to believe that the redacted portions were the work of the CIA. Legally, no one in congress has the authority to deem any information to be classified. This latest revelation, that the republicans altered the documents without telling anyone to essentially try to frame Hillary Clinton with misleading evidence – comes just days before Clinton is set to testify before Trey Gowdy’s committee – and gives her additional ammunition for discrediting the proceedings.

Clinton testifies before Howdy’s committee on 10/22. I expect that she will come out spitting rocks. She had better. Clinton has been criticized as being defensive about this whole witch hunt. Here’s her chance to prove her critics wrong, and to leave a smoking crater where Howdy was sitting.