An exasperated Hillary Rodham Clinton made Washington history yesterday at a Senate hearing when she spoke with naked honesty about a question she had no inclination to answer.
“What difference, at this point, does it make?” she actually hollered at Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) when he had the temerity to ask her repeatedly about the immediate causes of the Sept. 11 attack on our mission in Benghazi.
“With all due respect,” Secretary of State Clinton said, using the phrase that indicates the speaker is about to show the opposite of respect, “the fact is we had four dead Americans.” In a breathtaking display of chutzpah and brazen tastelessness, she used their bodies as a shield against criticisms of her and the administration.
So what if the purpose of the hearing was to examine and discuss the causes of the assault in which four Americans were killed, and the problems with the Obama administration’s response to it?
Mrs. Clinton couldn’t stand to hear Johnson’s questions, didn’t have a good answer for them, and so she let loose with her interior monologue: They’re dead, we all feel awful about it, so why do we have to go over this again and again?
Oh, here’s one reason why: It appears that several of those directly involved in the Benghazi attack — who’ve gone unpunished — moved on to Algeria, where they participated in the seizure of the natural-gas plant last week that resulted in the deaths of nearly 40 hostages. Including at least three Americans.
So the question is very pressing indeed “at this point,” Madame Secretary.
Yes, at this point, it boils down to this: Did the administration’s assertion that the Benghazi attack was a spontaneous outpouring of anger at the anti-Mohammed YouTube video “Innocence of Muslims” actually impede US efforts to capture the Benghazi ringleaders?
Since Clinton repeatedly said yesterday that the administration had been sincere in asserting that the video was to blame, how could its assertion not have affected efforts to capture those responsible for it?
After all, if there’d been a spontaneous demonstration, no one would have been responsible for it.
If it had been, as Clinton said, just some “guys out for a walk” who got extra frisky with the ultraviolence, then there’d have been no special urgency to ensure their capture.
But if this was a planned al Qaeda attack on a US facility 11 years after 9/11, a successful assault on the United States by an organization whose neutralization was one of the key talking points of the Obama campaign, then certainly time was of the essence, no?
This bombshell exchange at yesterday’s hearing was not properly addressed by Clinton or her Capitol Hill interlocutors, who once again proved that the terms “fact-finding” and “congressional hearing” are mutually exclusive.
Between the secretary’s diversionary tactics and the long-winded blathering of those who should’ve been asking her short and clear questions that she couldn’t evade, Clinton prevailed — if the question was, “Who won the day, Hillary or the GOP?”
But it doesn’t make what she said, or what the administration has done, any less of a scandal.