For the benefit of my Brit readers who may be less enthralled with the minutiae of American politics than me, I should explain that Ms. Maureen Dowd is well-known commentator for the New York Times. Needless then to add that she leans so far over to the Left that only a solid stack of Marxist tracts keeps her from falling over. Thus, it was with some trepidation that I read her take on the Benghazi attack and the hullabaloo that has steadily grown as the facts leak out. Actually, it was rather brave of me because I am incensed to a foam-flecked fury by, first, the American governments inaction as the attack took place and, second, its desperate, scrabbling action metaphorically to spray the corpses with scent and bury them quick lest any unseemly smells seep out. Bearing in mind that the considered opinion of the editors of the NYT was the age-old refrain you hear from coppers at any accident or crime scene, "Right, move along, nothing to see here" I was not expecting too much from Ms. Dowd except possibly my early death brought about by bursting gaskets! So, imagine my surprise when I read this:
The administration’s behavior before and during the attack in Benghazi, in which four Americans died, was unworthy of the greatest power on earth.
I don't quite know why she failed to add the word 'after' to the "before and during" because in the remainder of her article she hammers 'HillBilly' and her minions for their cover-up. But let me not quibble. Ms. Dowd set her political sympathies to one side and more or less told it the way it was, and that is quite remarkable
Needless to say, Mark Steyn, from the very opposite side of the road tells it even more pungently in the National Review:
Now we know that at 8 p.m. Eastern time on the last night of [Ambassador] Stevens’s life, his deputy in Libya spoke to Secretary Clinton and informed her of the attack in Benghazi and the fact that the ambassador was now missing. An hour later, Gregory Hicks received a call from the then–Libyan prime minister, Abdurrahim el-Keib, informing him that Stevens was dead. Hicks immediately called Washington. It was 9 p.m. Eastern time, or 3 a.m. in Libya. Remember the Clinton presidential team’s most famous campaign ad? About how Hillary would be ready to take that 3 a.m. call? Four years later, the phone rings, and Secretary Clinton’s not there. She doesn’t call Hicks back that evening. Or the following day.
In the middle of a campaign in which the President had claimed that Al Quaeda (AQ) was now a defeated force, his apparat twisted this way and that to avoid admitting that it was an AQ affiliate that had murdered four American public servants in Libya. Instead, despite knowing the facts directly from survivors in Tripoli, they pointed their Federal finger at Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, an Egyptian-born Christian Copt resident in teh States who had released a video on the internet which was fearfully rude about Islam and which had caused unrest in Cairo. The Federal law machine moved into action, this time with no hesitation, and Nakoula was arrested, charged with infringing his probation rules and is now in the slammer for a year. (Silly man, had he made a film denigrating Christ he might well have won an Oscar!) But worst was to come - and at this point you really do need to have a sick-bag to hand - both Obama and Clinton stood over the corpses of their own public servants and lied to them, and then went one further by appraoching the grieving families and lying some more:
As Mr. Hicks testified, his superiors in Washington knew early that night that a well-executed terrorist attack with the possible participation of al-Qaeda
elements was under way. Instead of responding, the most powerful figures in the
government decided that an unseen YouTube video better served their political
needs. And, in the most revealing glimpse of the administration’s depravity, the
president and secretary of state peddled the lie even in their mawkish eulogies
to their buddy “Chris” and three other dead Americans. They lied to the victims’
coffins and then strolled over to lie to the bereaved, Hillary telling the Woods
family that “we’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did
the video.” And she did. The government dispatched more firepower to arrest
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in Los Angeles than it did to protect its mission in
Benghazi.
Still, at least we know what should be carved into 'HillBilly's headstone, her very own words:
“What difference, at this point, does it make?”
