gracchusdixit

The big day has come and gone.  After months of almost feverish anticipation, Hillary Rodham Clinton, former Secretary of State and the leading contender for the Democratic Presidential nomination, appeared before a special committee of the House of Representatives that was convened to “get to the truth” regarding the deaths of four American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, three years ago.   The committee was convened only after a good deal of hemming and hawing by the leaders of the Republican majority in Congress, who feared that its members, like a gang of unruly children turned loose without adult supervision, might prove embarrassing.

As it turns out, Republican leaders were right.

To date, the Benghazi Committee has cost American taxpayers $5 million (closer to $20 million, when you add up all the time and paperwork various agencies of government have had to squander to meet its incessant demands).  Having spent all that money, after more than a year of “investigating,” after interrogating dozens of witnesses, mostly in secret and behind closed doors, the Benghazi Committee has produced…exactly nothing.

This shouldn’t really surprise us—for it was never clear why the Benghazi Committee was convened in the first place.  There are a few who still defend its mission with arguments that have never been anything but pathetically unconvincing.  Even so, the committee’s few remaining defenders can no longer pretend that its mission has the slightest chance of being achieved.

Seven prior investigations took place before the Benghazi Committee was convened.  All produced the same findings and the same basic recommendations—to wit, security in Libya could have been better and should be improved wherever American diplomatic personnel work in this increasingly perilous world.  Despite the fact that Republicans in Congress  have consistently refused to give the State Department sufficient funds to protect our embassies and consulates, Hillary Clinton accepted personal responsibility for the shortcomings in Benghazi and initiated improved security measures, the implementation of which has continued under her successor, John Kerry.  In a different, more civilized age, that should—and would—have been the end of it.

But we do not live in such an age.

No amount of civilized, rational or even factual discourse has been enough to satisfy the right-wing zealots in the Republican Party.  Against all evidence, violating every standard of common courtesy or professional respect, they grilled Hillary Clinton last week like a pack of rabid dogs slavering in some dark alley, searching for a scrap of meat.  They all but accused her of criminal negligence and a deliberate “conspiracy” to sacrifice the lives of four American diplomatics for the sake of her own political career.

One claimed that State Department “talking points” which surfaced in the immediate aftermath of the Benghazi attack, were duplicitous or politically motivated, or both.    Another charged that Hillary Clinton not only failed to send military help to the diplomats in Benghazi but, worse yet, actively vetoed plans to rescue them.  Still another claimed that, on the day of the attack, Secretary Clinton went home, caring not a fig for the fate of the four diplomats and leaving her staff at the State Department to pick up the dirty details of their demise.  The most bizarre and irresponsible asserted that Hillary Clinton (or President Obama himself) had instigated a plot to sneak weapons from Libya into Syria, via Turkey or Israel, to arm Islamic terrorists.

None of these farcical and fraudulent fabrications bears even the slightest resemblance to reality, and a lesser person than Hillary Clinton would have met them with the dismissive contempt or outrage they deserve.  Instead, she responded to those who slandered her in a fashion that must to them have been infuriating—with equanimity, reason, and poise.  That is why they are so afraid of her.