On Hillary Clinton’s assertion that the State Department followed proper procedures:
Incidentally, that statement by the secretary of state was pathetic: “It’s not me, [it’s] somebody else.”
And who cares if procedures were followed? If a father walks in and says my son is with al-Qaeda in Yemen, and the State Department, which handles the visas, doesn’t react — you’ve got a problem.
But it’s not about procedures. It’s about people hearing evidence. And this is essentially what the president said today, it’s about hearing stuff and not giving it the weight and importance it obviously had at the time. And we now know it could have killed a lot of people.
The president was rather interesting today. For the first time that he’s spoken publicly about this, this is now a third time, he showed a pulse. That’s interpreted as anger because that’s as much as he gets in terms of anger.
The way he presented the failures indicates that I think somebody has to go. And in the next few days, I would imagine somebody will resign. He talked about this is unacceptable, and [when] you use those harsh words, and words like accountable, you have to have a head roll. And I suspect that will happen.
I commend him on two items — number one, the stopping of the transfer of Yemenis out of Guantanamo. It’s an obvious step, but for this administration it’s an important step.
And the second is what was instituted yesterday, which was this directive that people from 16 countries, I think it is, will now get special screening, pat-downs, etc. It’s the beginning of a process of actually focusing on the terrorist and not on the weapon.
The way the Israelis do it: The Israelis look for a terrorist, we look for tweezers. And that’s why the Israelis haven’t had a seizure [of an airplane] since the 1960s. It’s [the new policy] the beginning of a process that even the Bush administration would not accept — looking at the nature of the person and not looking for a weapon.
On the House-Senate conference negotiations over Obamacare:
The reason this is all going to happen in closed session is … for the same reason the Senate bill was written in secret: because it’s a stitching together of corrupt compromises. …
But this is with a pattern. The Obama administration also had promised not only that it would be open but that it would be grassroots government. The special interests would be driven out of the temple.
Well, this bill is a stitching together of compromises and deals with hospitals, doctors, drug companies, manufacturers of all kinds. It is a special-interest bill, and that’s why it’s so incoherent.