If it wasn’t a ransom payment, why did Obama keep it secret?

From Jonah Goldberg at The New York Post via H/T at Lucianne:

One of my all-time favorite lines is from Henry Thoreau: “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

It came to mind this week when the White House and State Department insisted that the charge the US paid a ransom to get back American hostages was purely circumstantial. Sometimes, a $400 million payoff in laundered money, delivered in the dead of night in an unmarked cargo plane, isn’t what it looks like.
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The $400 million wasn’t a ransom; it was simply the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement of that dispute. “We would not, we have not, we will not pay ransom to secure the release of US citizens,” top White House flack Josh Earnest insisted. That the money was delivered to coincide with the release of our hostages is little more than a funny coincidence.

And shame on you for thinking otherwise, Earnest seemed to be saying Wednesday. The $400 million dropoff was actually a great success for smart diplomacy, because it saved taxpayers “potentially billions” more if the arbitration over the matter hadn’t gone our way.

Still, one wonders why, if it was such a laudable and innocent money-saving maneuver, they kept it all secret from the American people.

Because there is a trout in the milk.

Quote of the Day II

From Jonah Goldberg at National Review:

Oh, and let’s return to the fact that Bill needed to humanize Hillary Clinton. The woman has been in public life for three decades and the highest best use of her former president husband is to spend an entire convention speech trying to convince voters that she’s human.

That's a bridge too far, for even Bill.

If Obama Really Wants to Reduce ‘Meanness,’ Now Is His Chance

From Jonah Goldberg at National Review:

In Springfield, Ill., last week, President Obama commemorated the ninth anniversary of his bid for the White House. He admitted that one of his “few regrets” was his inability “to reduce the polarization and the meanness in our politics.”

To conservative ears, Obama’s comments fell somewhere between risible and infuriating. Obama has always done his best to demonize and marginalize his opponents. Either the president honestly cannot see that, or he’s cynically pretending that the fault lies entirely with his critics. If only there were some way to figure out whether he’s sincere.
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Chances Obama will go this route? Zero. Instead he’ll pick a liberal whom he’ll call a moderate and insist on an up-or-down vote. He’ll also probably pick a minority, making it that much easier for supporters such as Staples to paint opposition as bigotry.

The Dear Leader is about as sincere and truthful as a Clinton.

Eight Thoughts On Scalia

From Jonah Goldberg at National Review via H/t at Instapundit:

3. The double-standard for Republicans is not shocking but it remains galling. As Jim Geraghty notes in today’s Jolt, Chuck Schumer took exactly the same position on any further Bush appointments in 2007. I don’t seem to recall the shock and outrage we’re seeing today.

4. On that note, Ruth Marcus — an often independent-minded liberal — offers some classic concern trolling of the GOP today in her column. She writes:

Finally, a Senate work stoppage would, in fact, be bad for Republicans. In the nation’s capital these days, everything is political, every institution politicized. That may be inevitable and irreparable, yet tables here have a way of turning. One party’s obstructionism ends up hurting it down the road.

Marcus is surely right that tables can turn. What she leaves out is the simple, glaring, fact that the tables are turning on Democrats who’ve been playing outrageous games with appointment process for a quarter century. When Robert Bork was defenestrated by Joe Biden, despite having said he would have no choice but to vote for someone so well-qualified, he was setting the tables for payback. When Harry Reid pulled the trigger on the nuclear option (on lower court appointments) he was warned that this would come back to haunt him. When Democrats disgustingly blocked Miguel Estrada from the bench solely because he was a Hispanic, they set the table to be turned. When Barack Obama voted to filibuster Alito, he set the table to be turned.

Cry me no tears now that Republicans are finally putting their shoulders to the table.

And note this: “If Scalia’s interpretation of the Constitution held sway in the land, the Court and the government would have much less power over our lives. And that, more than anything else, explains why the left hated him so much.”

Read the whole thing.

Jane Mayer Condemns the Koch Brothers for Not Being Progressive

From Jonah Goldberg at National Review:

Liberals are constantly talking about how we need an “honest conversation” about race or guns or this or that. But what they invariably mean is, they want everyone who disagrees to shut up. (That’s why they hate Fox News, too.)

The best working definition of “right wing” today has almost nothing to do with the ideological content of what right-wingers say or do. A right-winger is someone who disagrees with the liberal narrative, has the temerity to say so, and dares to actually try to change the conversation.

Liberals are always talking about free speech, until you disagree with them. Just at they always speak about a woman's right to choose, unless she chooses life. etc, etc, etc.

What Proof Is Obama Waiting For?

From Jonah Goldberg at National Review via H/T at Instapundit:

As has been noted many, many, times — because it’s happened many, many, times — the president hates conceding the obvious when it comes to terrorism. At this point, it’s clear this is a deliberate strategy. By denying or delaying recognition of terror attacks and the terror threat he thinks he can ride out the news cycle and American attention spans and switch to another topic, say, gun control or climate change. One can’t deny that it’s worked for him. It just doesn’t speak well of him.

Nope

He just can't admit that Islam is responsible for all these attacks. I don't think he's a closet muslim and I don't think he's a Christian either. I think he's agnostic at best, possibly an atheist. He's a classic progressive. He believes in the power of Government. That may be his religion.

Update: President Weak Horse

I see the proposal to try to keep guns out of the hands of “dangerous people,” but what’s the proposal for keeping the ideas that make them dangerous out of their heads? We “need to work together to prevent people from falling victim to these hateful ideologies,” but what does this work consist of and how on earth could we do it “together”?

And what’s with the passivity — the idea that these murderers “were radicalized” and that people “fall victim” to the ideologies they come to believe? It almost sounds as though Obama invites us to empathize with the terrorists, to see them as victims of their own thinking processes. A more Obama-friendly way to put that is to say that our focus should be on the larger enterprise that is winning converts. And yet it doesn’t seem aimed at that larger enterprise, because he says “need to work together to prevent people from falling victim,” as if he’s envisioning us reaching out to the potential terrorists among us, enfolding them in neighborly love.

He's a delusional narcissistic, who thinks he's the answer to the world's problems.

When Power Fades, Turn Up the Volume

From Jonah Goldberg at National Review:

Similarly, while very, very, very few people outside the Times’ offices — and media nerds like me — could care less about what is essentially a P.R. gimmick, the Times thinks this is a Very Big Deal. For the staid grey lady this amounts to shouting “Unleash the Kraken!” It shows you how desperate and frustrated the editors — and liberals generally — are with the fact that this country doesn’t agree with them on guns. It also shows that the “national conversation” most Americans want has more to do with Islamist terrorism and less to do with the alleged “gun show loophole.” This alone doesn’t make The Times’ views or their arguments illegitimate or invalid. But it does illustrate how unpersuasive they are to much of the public.

The same can be said for the disgustingly hypocritical new fad of calling Wayne LaPierre a “terrorist.” This from the same crowd who insisted Sarah Palin had blood on her hands because of some cross-hairs on a congressional district map and that Michelle Bachmann should be put in the dock for her “eliminationist rhetoric.” I have no problem with criticizing LaPierre, but the double standard is just so appalling. I mean, seriously, to Hell with these people.

What’s true for lawyers is also true for newspapers: When you’re shouting and pounding the table, it’s probably because you’re losing the argument.

The NYT and the Obama Regime have been smashing tables for several months. The are both irrelevant.

The Deeper Significance of Hillary’s ‘Enemies’ Gaffe

From Jonah Goldberg at National Review:

This should properly be considered a Kinsley gaffe in that she accidentally told the truth. For much of the night, she stuck to her focus-grouped talking points, boasting about how she knows how to build consensus and work the system in Washington “to get things done.” And then, in a spontaneous slip, she revealed that she considers Republicans — altogether — not only her enemy, but the enemy she is most proud of. It would have been nice if Anderson Cooper, Jim Webb or one of the pushovers on stage had seized that point and asked, “How can you talk about building consensus when you’ve just boasted that you consider all Republicans your enemy?” Clinton is much more of a Manichean than she usually lets on. That’s one reason she keeps Sid Blumenthal on retainer as a Wormtongue. He says the things about Republican conspirators she wants to hear and believe.

Bingo! How can you claim to be able to get a consensus ,when you view the opposition as your biggest enemy?

For Obama, Gun Control Is about the Issue Not the Solution

From Jonah Goldberg at National Review:

But ultimately Obama was just paying lip service to an ideal he does not live by. He’s not about to try building consensus on gun policy among people of good faith. He’ll take the same approach he’s taken throughout his presidency: He’ll delegitimize opponents of his sweeping agenda as irrational, self-interested enemies of decency and progress.

As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York recently noted, Obama has a long history of trying to shut down disagreement by accusing his critics of politicization. ...............

The common denominator in all of these cases is Obama’s unimpeachable certainty that he has a monopoly on all the good arguments and all the best motives. Now he even claims the exclusive right to politicize issues when it suits him.

This is the very definition of the Dear Leader's Regime. Not do anything substantial, but make sweep generalizations bout doing SOMETHING, anything. Then, demagogue anyone who disagrees with him.

In his remarks Thursday, he insisted that all he wants are common-sense reforms that would stop mass shootings, as if the people who disagree with him are in favor of such slaughter.
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“We know that other countries, in response to one mass shooting, have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings,” Obama said. “Friends of ours, allies of ours — Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours. So we know there are ways to prevent it.”

The disingenuousness was breathtaking.

One can forgive the average American, not to mention the typical White House correspondent, for not knowing how Britain and Australia dealt with gun violence. But Obama knows. Both countries employed massive gun-confiscation programs (programs that depend on national gun registries so the government can find them). The British in effect banned handguns. Obama may consider that a reasonable, common-sense approach, but he knows full well that millions of Americans don’t.
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After the Sandy Hook slaughter, there was a bipartisan consensus that more needed to be done on the mental-health side. But Obama, fresh off reelection, rejected a piecemeal approach, largely preferring to go for a “comprehensive” solution. He ended up with nothing.

That’s because Obama prefers politicizing to actual politics.

Notice, he make no specific proposals, other than a vague reference to confiscation, but does not make an argument for it.

Is there any wonder why Putin just laughs him off?

The Benghazi Hearings Confirm Yet Again What a Brazen Liar Hillary Is

From Jonah Goldberg at National Review:

Lot’s of people are saying Hillary is now assured to be the Democratic nominee — and even president — because of these clarifying events of the last ten days or so. I don’t think any of that is nearly so clear. Bernie Sanders may still win in both New Hampshire and Iowa. And I continue to have trouble believing such an event wouldn’t reshuffle the race and draw someone else to the rescue.

But something else was made clear this week: Hillary Clinton is a committed and unapologetic liar. Of course, this wasn’t actually a revelation any more than testimony from the Secretary of the Interior that, after extensive study, he can confirm that bears do, in fact s*** in the woods.

But, to Hillary supporters, sorry democrats, it won't make a difference. Which is truly sad, but not unexpected.

Who Cares if Hillary Apologized?

From Jonah Goldberg at National Review:

I don't want an apology, I want an indictment.

“So Hillary Clinton mumbled some kind of apology yesterday. . . . This raises the question: Who gives a rat’s ass? Were you demanding an apology from Hillary Clinton? I wasn’t. I wanted the facts. And those are still in short supply.”

An indictment is a starting point.

Perp Walk!

There’s a Whole Arsenal of Smoking Guns in the Clinton E-mail Scandal

From Jonah Goldberg at The National Review:

The very existence of her illicit server means she broke the rules.

Every time the State Department pulls out a new fistful of Hillary Clinton e-mails like Richard Dreyfuss yanking a license plate out of a shark’s belly in Jaws, someone declares that there’s “no smoking gun!”
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But here’s the thing. There is a smoking gun. In fact, there’s a whole smoking arsenal. The problem is that the standards for what counts as a smoking gun keep changing.

Nearly everything Clinton has said in her defense regarding her secret server has been a lie. Among the minor lies: her claim that she set up the server so she could use a single device. (She had two.) Her claim that the State Department was saving her e-mails to staff. (It wasn’t until 2010.) Her claim that she erased tens of thousands of e-mails because they included, among other things, her e-mail correspondence with her husband. (Bill Clinton doesn’t use e-mail.)

Hillary Clinton said she never solicited e-mail from her lugubrious political hatchet man, Sidney Blumenthal. The latest e-mails show that she was in near-constant contact with him, encouraging him to keep his various reports coming. Blumenthal was barred from getting a job at the White House, so Clinton set him up at her charity–cum–super PAC, the Clinton Foundation. The more important lie: She said she never received or sent classified information. “I did not e-mail any classified material to anyone on my e-mail. There is no classified material.”

Fire, fire, pantsuit on fire!

[T]he fact that the whole point of the secret server was that it was hidden from the officials whose job is to designate documents as classified (and to keep it all hidden from Freedom of Information Act requests and congressional oversight). It’s like setting up an illegal still and then claiming none of the moonshine you sold was marked “illegal.”

She should be convicted for conspiracy to violate FOIA laws. This should be enough to disqualify her for the Presidency alone.

Contra Media Spin, It’s Hillary Who’s Being Investigated, Not Her Server

From Jonah Goldberg at National Review:

The reason the intelligence community’s IG referred the case to the Justice Department stems from the apparent fact that Clinton mishandled classified information, which she denied.

An investigation into a random sample of just 40 e-mails from a batch of more than 30,000 revealed that four contained classified information and at least two were “top secret.”

So now that the FBI and the Justice Department, both run by Obama appointees, are on the case, attacking the motives of inconvenient people no longer works. So the Clinton campaign has invoked a little-known codicil to the first rule of Clintonism: Blame an inanimate object.

The amazing thing is that this spin isn’t coming directly from the campaign but from the reporters covering it.

I'm shocked!

I’ve talked to several lawyers who assure me that the FBI doesn’t conduct criminal probes into anthropomorphized IT equipment. The Bureau does investigate criminal abuses of them — by people.

Fortunately, most of the FBI is filled with career civil servant who investigates crimes, regardless of party. It's the upper management at the DOJ that's corrupt.

If the information is quashed, it will leak out.

Drip, drip, drip.

Liberals’ Hobby Lobby Doublethink

From Jonah Goldberg of National Review:

If birth control is “not your boss’s business,” why do you expect him to pay for it?

Abortion-rights protesters gathered outside the Supreme Court building on Monday holding signs that read “Birth Control: Not My Boss’s Business.”

Much to their chagrin, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito agreed in his ruling in the Hobby Lobby case.

Of course, that’s not how supporters of the government’s contraception mandate see it. They actually believe that birth control is their boss’s business, and they want the federal government to force employers to agree.

More on that later, but it’s first worth noting how we got here.

First, contrary to a lot of lazy punditry, there is no Obamacare contraception mandate. As my National Review colleague Ramesh Ponnuru notes, even President Obama’s liberal rubber-stamp Congress of 2009–10 never addressed — or even debated — the question of whether companies can be forced to provide contraceptive coverage. Department of Health and Human Services bureaucrats simply asserted that they could impose such a requirement.
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Moreover, Hobby Lobby never objected to covering birth control per se. It already covers 16 kinds of birth control for its employees. But it objected to paying for what it considers to be abortifacients, which don’t prevent a pregnancy but terminate one. The pro-abortion-rights lobby can argue that “abortion” and “birth control” are synonymous terms, but that doesn’t make it true.

One lesson here is that overreaching can have unintended consequences.

As has been said before, but not by the activists, the Hobby Lobby case was never about denying women ACCESSS to birth control, it was about who was going to PAY for it.

Obama, quit crying 'crisis'

From Jonah Goldberg in USA Today via Instapundit:

Politicians and journalists have a common interest in crises. When there’s a crisis, people buy newspapers and turn on the news to learn how our political leaders will fix the problem. Indeed, crises give politicians more power, which is why so many politicians are fond of the phrase “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

President Obama has been particularly fond of fomenting a sense of crisis — environmental, economic and social — because he thinks doing so will advance his agenda. But every now and then, the truth comes out.
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Indeed, at times it seems as if there’s an inverse relationship between the scope of a problem and the hysteria around it. For instance, today, college campuses are in a panic about a “rape epidemic.” Meanwhile, forcible rapes are down 80% in the U.S. since 1973.

Another source of anxiety these days is “white supremacy.” No doubt there is still racism in America — both structural and intentional — but can anyone outside the hothouse of racial paranoia at MSNBC really dispute that there is less today than there was at any other period in American history? And let’s not even dwell on a “war on women” that is largely defined as opposition to unnecessarily subsidized birth control.

Rahm Emanuel; current Mayor of of Chicago, former Obama Chief of Staff; once say to never let a crisis go to waste.

Of the Bureaucrats, by the Bureaucrats, for the Bureaucrats

From Jonah Goldberg of National Review:

For understandable reasons, the IRS scandal has largely focused on the political question of whether the White House deliberately targeted its opponents. To date there’s no evidence that it did. That’s good for the president, but it may not be good for the country, because if the administration didn’t target opponents, that would mean the IRS has become corrupt all on its own.
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The Democratic party today is, quite simply, the party of government and the natural home of the managerial class. It is no accident, as the Marxists say, that the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents the IRS, gave 94 percent of its political donations during the 2012 election cycle to Democratic candidates openly at war with the Tea Party — the same group singled out by Lois Lerner. The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents the VA, gave 97 percent of its donations to Democrats at the national level and 100 percent to Democrats at the state level.

Self appointed guardians of the Democratic Party, that attacked the opposition with constant encouragement from the Party they overwhelmingly support, who no oversight.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The Real Story of the IRS Scandal

From Jonah Goldberg at National Review:

Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency’s tea-party controversy.”

That’s the opening sentence of the Associated Press story on the IRS’s claim that it lost an unknown number of e-mails over two years relating to the agency’s alleged targeting of political groups hostile to the president.

But note how the AP casts the story: The investigators — Republican lawmakers — are outraged.

Is it really so hard to imagine that if this were a Republican administration, the story wouldn’t be the frustration of partisan critics of the president? It would be all about that administration’s behavior. With the exception of National Journal’s Ron Fournier, who called for a special prosecutor to bypass the White House’s “stonewalling,” and former CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, it’s hard to find a non-conservative journalist who thinks this is a big deal.

Remember a guy named Nixon?

Benghazi Made Simple -- The White House’s political and ideological instincts overpowered everything else.

From Jonah Goldberg of National Review:

Deer Reader,

On Wednesday, Jay Carney explained — as if he was talking to a room full of children — that the Benghazi e-mail the White House refused to release until the White House was forced to release its Benghazi e-mails wasn’t in fact about Benghazi, even though the e-mail talks about Benghazi. This is Monty Pythonesque of “Dead Parrot” proportions. That’s not a Benghazi e-mail, it’s just an e-mail about Benghazi, in a folder marked “Benghazi” e-mails, idiot.

As I said on Fox yesterday, Jay Carney is a very strange creature for Washington. He’s an extremely confident liar — we’ve got a lot of those! — but he’s not very convincing. Usually, confidence = convincing. As George Costanza (and in his own way Bill Clinton) liked to say, it’s not a lie if you believe it when you tell it. But with Carney, he lies in a way that makes it seem not so much like he believes it but that you’re an idiot for not believing it. There’s a kind of the-joke’s-on-you feel to the way he talks that reminds me of that (X-rated and not safe for work) Onion article, “Why Do These Homosexuals Keep [Fellating Me]?”

Carney actually seems shocked and, well, disappointed to the point of contemptuousness, when reporters won’t believe him. It’s like no one told him he doesn’t have Jedi mind tricks at his disposal. .......

There is an enormous amount of theorizing about what the “real story” behind Benghazi really is. To me it’s always been obvious. The White House was caught off guard — for reasons stemming both from ideology and incompetence — on September 11, 2012. As they have after virtually every other (jihadist) terrorist attack on Americans, they acted as if it had absolutely nothing to do with them. As with the Times Square bomber, the Fort Hood shooter, and other Islamist assaults, there’s always some other reason for the bloodshed, some attempt to claim, at least for a while, that this was an “isolated incident” with no broader implications for the War on Terror or Obama’s foreign policy. Admittedly, even this White House understood that spinning the Benghazi attack as an isolated incident wasn’t going to work (such intense spinning could risk irreparable scrotal torsion). So they went with the story about the video.

It's politic before everything with this Regime.

Indicted Democrat State Senator Leland Yee, the Kochs, and the Press -- There’s no journalistic skepticism about the motives of those on the left.

From Jonah Goldberg of National Review:

Leland Yee, (an indicted) Democratic state senator and candidate for secretary of state in California, has been a longtime champion of gun control. This week he was arrested on numerous charges, including conspiracy to deal firearms without a license and conspiracy to illegally transport firearms. Yee, a prominent foe of assault weapons, allegedly took bribes to set up a meeting between an undercover agent and an international arms dealer to broker the sale of automatic weapons and shoulder-fired missiles. A lengthy FBI affidavit also describes Yee’s ties to a Chinese triad and his desire to help out Islamist militants.

In short, the story makes for what journalists call “good copy.”

And yet, so far no reporter has raised the possibility that Yee supported tighter restrictions on guns in order to keep gun prices high and his own services in demand. Economist Bruce Yandle popularized the idea of the “Bootleggers and Baptists” coalition. The apocryphal Baptists want to ban alcohol. Bootleggers don’t make much money when liquor can be bought legally at a grocery store or bar. So the bootleggers bankroll the Baptists’ effort to ban booze.

Now I sincerely doubt that Yee was that clever. The more likely explanation is that he believes in gun control and he’s a greedy hypocrite (and maybe not too bright either). The fact that gun-control policies are to his advantage is just a happy coincidence.

What’s interesting — and vexing — to me is that this sort of analysis is all the rage when it comes to conservatives and Republicans, and utterly incomprehensible to most journalists when it comes to liberals and Democrats.

Since he's from San Fransisco, I'm inclined to think he believes in Gun Control (for others) AND is a greedy hypocrite, i.e. a Democrat.

Consider the Koch brothers, the billionaire businessmen and philanthropists. The Democratic party raises vast sums off demonizing the Koch brothers. (Slate’s David Weigel reports that fundraising e-mails mentioning the Kochs raised roughly three times as much as those that didn’t mention them.) This explains why Senate majority leader Harry Reid calls the Kochs “un-American” and liars every chance he gets.

Meanwhile, many media outlets are all too willing to take their cues from Democratic talking points. For instance, the Washington Post recently ran a shockingly shabby story insinuating that the Kochs have a lot to gain from the Keystone pipeline. The story was utterly debunked by John Hinderaker of the website Powerline. (The Kochs have no stake in the pipeline, and even if they did, so what?) But the Post’s piece was typical of the media’s fascination with the idea that the Kochs’ political activities are simply cover for their desire to maximize profits. ......................

I have no problem with journalistic skepticism or the search for ulterior motives. I just object to the idea that only Republicans might have them.

Al Gore reportedly left government with a net worth of less than $2 million; he’s now worth more than $200 million, in part by profiting from climate policies he lobbies for. Gore surely believes in those policies, but why does he get the benefit of the doubt? GE spent millions on politics in exchange for “green energy” policies that generate billions in profits that wouldn’t exist in a free market. Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon recently chronicled how George Soros and new liberal golden-boy fat cat Tom Steyer have financial interests at stake in their own preferred public policies. And yet they get glowing treatment from the press as idealists sacrificing profit for principles.

The irony is that it’d be in the media’s business interest to report on the seedy underbelly of liberal politics, too. But they don’t, because they actually do put their liberal principles before profits.

Al Gore, another liberal Democratic hypocrite.

Hillary the Hyped

From Jonah Goldberg of National Review:

When you ask her diehard supporters what she did as secretary of state they start with, “She travelled a million miles! More than any secretary of state.”

Put aside the fact that the “more than any secretary of state” part isn’t actually true — Condi Rice flew more. When you ask, “Okay, what did she get for it?” you get a blank stare or you get some stuff about championing women’s rights. Two people have told me she did good work in Myanmar, but I’ve never really gotten to the bottom of that. I suppose I could look it up, but at the end of the day we’re still talking about Myanmar, which is not the locus of America’s most pressing international problems. (“That’s right, because Hillary prevented the Myanmarese hegemony,” someone at MSNBC just shrieked. “She stopped it cold.”) While the Wikipedia page on her tenure doesn’t even mention Myanmar, it does mention her championing of better cook stoves in the Third World. That’s good. And so is improving the plight of women in various countries where their status ranges between “Slightly More Important than the Village Mule” to “So Incredibly Delicate We Must Keep Them Covered with Burlap Sacks All Day Long Even Though It’s Like 115 Degrees in the Shade Today.”

But when I take out my handy pocket realpolitik calculator, I just can’t make all that add up to much. Particularly when you compare it with our worsening problems in the Middle East, Asia (minus Myanmar!), Europe, Russia, and South America. Those problems are by no means all her fault (nor are they all Obama’s fault). But Clinton was the second most important foreign-policy official. If you were, say, the assistant coach of the 1999 Cleveland Browns or the deputy spokesman for Baghdad Bob during the lead-up to the Iraq War, you might — just might — want to highlight other things on your résumé. So it is with Clinton. As our chief diplomat, she presided over a long slide into foreign-policy suckitude. On her watch, America’s standing got worse every place it matters (except Myanmar!), despite all of those sales calls.

And that leaves out the little issue of Benghazi. The Senate Intelligence Committee report is at once a fascinating and utterly banal artifact of Washington. It identifies a huge mistake. It denounces said mistake. It concludes that the mistake could have been prevented. But nobody is responsible for the mistake. The bureaucracy did it!

Okay, you ask, who was in charge of that bureaucracy?

Shut up, they explain.

Brit Hume's tweet about the Bipartisan Senate Intel Committee report:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein says Intel. Cmte. Benghazi report does not blame Hillary Clinton. It does blame State Dept. And the Secretary was...?
— Brit Hume (@brithume) January 16, 2014