"Aboard Air Force One, former President Bush shows photos of his paintings to... First Lady Michelle Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton..."

"... Valerie Jarrett, National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice, Attorney General Eric Holder and former First Lady Laura Bush, Dec. 9, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)"

"Whatever Bill Clinton’s motives — Republicans say he is distancing his wife, Hillary Clinton, from the ObamaCare debacle in advance of a White House run..."

Says Jonathan Easley at The Hill in a piece titled "Obama is boxed in by Bill Clinton."

Do we really need Republicans to explain that Bill is out to help Hillary? How could anyone begin to analyze Bill Clinton's remarks about Obamacare without the assumption that he's positioning Hillary for 2016?

Now, Bill's main quote was: "I personally believe, even if it takes a change in the law, that the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they’ve got." And I think we know that it's not really possible to keep Obamacare and somehow force private insurance companies to re-activate all the plans that have been canceled. What Bill is really saying is Obama lied. Obama made promises he knew would be broken, because that's what it took to get the government's health-care machine going.

Hillarycare failed, but the up side of that is that Hillary isn't loaded with the political damage that had to happen in the process of dragging everyone into the machine. That's all on Obama. Millions feel the pain and the anger as the big machine grinds into motion and pulls them in. In retrospect, it's a benefit to Hillary that Obama got the win in '08 and that his name went on the "care" that's hurting so much.

Once Obamacare is in motion and everybody's in and the screaming at the intake point has given way to muffled groaning from inside the grinding machinery, a beneficent Hillary will sweep forward with plans for easing that pain. The competent one is here at last, now that you're all in there and can't complain to her about that nasty, deceitful intake process.

ADDED: Jonathan Cohn explains how "Bill Clinton Is Wrong" about "How Obamacare Works." But Cohn is assuming (or pretending) that Bill isn't smart, devious, and political (which I'm taking for granted).

"We spent so much damn time navel gazing, and that’s the tragedy of it" — it, being Syria.

A former senior White House official, quoted in a NYT piece navel-gazingly titled "Obama’s Uncertain Path Amid Syria Bloodshed."

This article marks the return to the topic of Syria, which had dropped out of public consciousness, like a lot of other things that are waiting to be rotated back in.

The article at the link is long and detailed. You should read the whole thing. Watch for Hillary Rodham Clinton arguing for the United States to get "skin in the game" and Samantha Power saying "if you had met the rebels as frequently as I have, you would be as passionate as I am." Obama, by contrast, comes across as brooding and indecisive.

IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan said:

Obama's Uncertain Path Amid Benghazi Attack

Obama's Uncertain Path Amid IRS Scandal

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I said:

Yeah... "uncertain path amid"... how hard did they need to think to come up with that?

It's such an all-purpose excuse for the President's failures. And so weird. "Path Amid Bloodshed"... that's one of these concrete images that don't really look right in the mind's eye. "Path" is metaphor, but what is a "path amid bloodshed"? We're asked to picture him — what? — walking around pools of blood?

"Amid" suggests standing still and being confused. "Path" suggests he's going somewhere.

The word "path" seems to give too much credit.

The word "amid" seems to suggest that he's not responsible for anything.

The NYT's uncertain path amid presidential failure.

Charles Ferguson bails out of the planned documentary on on Hillary Clinton because "nobody, and I mean nobody, was interested in helping me make this film."

"Not Democrats, not Republicans -- and certainly nobody who works with the Clintons, wants access to the Clintons, or dreams of a position in a Hillary Clinton administration."

Not even journalists who want access, which can easily be taken away. I even sensed potential difficulty in licensing archival footage from CBN (Pat Robertson) and from Fox. After approaching well over a hundred people, only two persons who had ever dealt with Mrs. Clinton would agree to an on-camera interview, and I suspected that even they would back out.

The most stunning passage in Ferguson's essay is his description of a private conversation with Bill Clinton:

I asked him about the financial crisis. He paused and then became even more soulful, thoughtful, passionate, and articulate. And then he proceeded to tell me the most amazing lies I've heard in quite a while....

Read the whole thing, but let me summarize: Ferguson pegs the Clintons as wealthy folks protecting their financial interests and nostalgizes about the 1990s, when the Clintons "attempted courageous reforms: allowing gays to serve in the military, a carbon tax, health care reform."

I can see where Ferguson wanted to go with his documentary — Good Clintons/Bad Clintons — and it's clear why neither Republicans nor Democrats trusted him to lay down the storyline in the run-up to the 2016 election. The Republicans were averse to Hillary hagiography. The Democrats were afraid of framing Hillary as good when she's skews left and bad when she's supportive of business and finance.

Ferguson was pleased with the full control and final cut authority he had over his film. He must understand that the Clintons don't want to cede any of their control over Hillary's campaign.

"One of the reasons the Daily Beast is struggling to attract readers has to be Troll City: the comments which mar the view of the last couple of paragraphs of every article."

"Your writing is pretty good, Beast, but the quality and intelligence of your comments is at the bottom. The nastiness spewing from these red-captioned paragraphs negatively colors your whole enterprise."

Says a comment to a Daily Beast article titled "Hillary for President...of the Universe," subtitled "Sure, Hillary Clinton could run for the White House. But where the world desperately needs a personality like hers is at the helm of a strong global governing body, says Sally Kohn."

"President Obama’s toughest Syria hurdle: The calendar."

Oh no! Our leader, assailed by the calendar!

Obama will sit Monday for interviews for six TV news programs, which will air within an hour of what had promised to be the week’s most highly anticipated Washington event: the NFL Redskins’ season opener against Philadelphia....

If Monday Night Football pushed Obama’s address to the nation on Syria to Tuesday, odds are low for the president to have the nation’s attention to himself the rest of the week either.

The Sept. 11 anniversary comes Wednesday, the same day the Senate could vote for cloture. Yom Kippur begins Friday night.

Oh! That pesky September 11th anniversary, randomly popping up as a "tough hurdle" on Obama's — what's the metaphor? — race toward war! And this year, it's not just the usual anniversary of the day the terrorists declared war on the United States, it's now the first anniversary of the attack in Benghazi. Oh, my lord! The double 9/11 and football.

Obama won’t even have Tuesday to himself. Hillary Clinton is due to deliver a speech that afternoon in Philadelphia. Voters in New York City will head to the polls for that city’s primary elections. And the new iPhone event scheduled for that day has become an annual media spectacle.

Fate has no mercy on this man, this once-golden savior of the world! The double 9/11, football, and Hillary gives a speech in Philadelphia. A speech! In Philadelphia! (I wonder if she'll talk about Benghazi? What difference at this point does it make?) The double 9/11, football, and Hillary gives a speech... and New York has a primary... and Apple has the audacity to do another one of its PR events.

Here's Bill Clinton's old press secretary Mike McCurry:

“How do you hold the attention of the American people when it is increasingly hard to do so with the distractions of the NFL season and religious holidays and back-to-school nights?” 

Increasingly? Is football new? Is going back to school new? Is Yom Kippur new?! (Note: Only 1.7% of Americans are Jewish.)

“This is the challenge of the presidency, the ability to gather the nation around a common campfire is just not there anymore. You have to go for the sporadic bursts of attention and deal with the perpetual A.D.D. that people have.”

And now we are to be blamed for A.D.D.! People are tired of 12 years of war. It's not A.D.D. to react with an instinctive "no" to another war, a war that should have been explained already.

Why would a normal person — with a normal attention span — believe that Obama will tell us something new on Tuesday? Why didn't he look us in the eye and explain everything clearly when he first proposed it or when he said he was submitting the question to Congress? It's not A.D.D., it's common sense to reflexively turn away.

Timing has worked against the White House from the very start. The Aug. 21 attack that prompted the administration to gear up for a Syria strike left Obama violating his predecessor’s key rule on selling the public on a war: Don’t do it in August.

Politico writes as if war is funny and the real issue is the little things that bug Obama.

"Is the New York Times being guest edited by Rush Limbaugh? Today it runs with a fascinating takedown of the Clinton Foundation..."

"... that vast vanity project that conservatives are wary of criticising for being seen to attack a body that tries to do good. But the liberal NYT has no such scruples. The killer quote is this:"

For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.

When Phillippe Reines — the man behind Hillary's "reset" button — said "fuck off" and "have a good life" to Michael Hastings — the reporter who died recently in a mysterious car crash.

In the comments to the "Snowden is like a hot meat pie in your hands" post — about what leaker Edward Snowden means to the Russians — David said "So much for reset. Apparently Obama and Clinton have not improved relations [with Russia] much." Which got me looking up articles about Hillary Clinton's foolish "reset" button. I found "Hillary’s Aide Really Half-Assed That ‘Reset’ Button Thing" from March 2009:

[F]ingers had to be pointed at someone, and, for the most part they were conveniently targeted at a guy everyone hated already anyway, Hillary's senior adviser Phillippe Reines, who was nearly fired during the presidential campaign for making a tactless comment about John McCain's torture experience. He's also been agitating some in the State Department press corps by restricting their access.

(I think the referenced comment about McCain is here.) Now, we talked about Reines last fall in connection with this story: "Hillary Clinton Aide Tells Reporter To 'Fuck Off' And 'Have A Good Life.'" And I'm surprised to see that the reporter is Michael Hastings, who died in a fiery single-car wreck on June 18th:

He had emailed a warning to colleagues on June 17 saying the "Feds" were interviewing his close friends and associates. He added: "I'm onto a big story, and need to go off the radat (sic) for a bit." BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith confirmed that he had received the email....

The circumstances and rumors surrounding the death led the FBI to issue a statement stating that Hastings was never under investigation.

In this light, you might want to read that Phillipe Reines/Michael Hastings email exchange again. Hastings was asking questions like "Why didn’t the State Department search the [Benghazi] consulate...?" and "What other potential valuable intelligence [besides Ambassador Stevens's diary] was left behind that could have been picked up by apparently anyone searching the grounds?" Reines became extremely defensive and abusive:

I now understand why the official investigation by the Department of the Defense as reported by The Army Times The Washington Post concluded beyond a doubt that you’re an unmitigated asshole.

How’s that for a non-bullshit response?

Now that we’ve gotten that out of our systems, have a good day.

And by good day, I mean Fuck Off.

ADDED: From 4 days ago: "Was Michael Hastings Murdered? Internet Conspiracy Theories Are Rife."

First, it's obvious that Hastings was working on a big story, though the exact subject is under debate. Considering the title of his email ["FBI Investigation, re:NSA"] and his last article on BuzzFeed, many (including the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald) think it may have been a piece on PRISM. The Huffington Post thinks he was writing about General Petraeus, while the Los Angeles Times stated that it was on a privacy lawsuit against the Department of Defense and the FBI. They are all big, government-related cases that many would prefer go unexamined.

Second, Hastings reached out to the legal team at Wikileaks for assistance, claiming that that FBI were investigating him. Wikileaks has also claimed that there is a "non-public complication" in Hastings' death, though they have not released more information.

Third, while is it ordinary protocol for police departments to issue a statement that there was no foul play (as the LAPD have done), the FBI hardly ever responds to media attention. However, in this case, they have made an exception. The FBI has released a statement denying that they were ever investigating Hastings, which is interesting considering that after years in his field, Hastings is well aware of what being investigated by the FBI looks like.

Fourth, the car accident itself was pretty bizarre. When the car hit the tree, the engine ejected and was later found over 100 feet away. That kind of ejection is pretty unusual, especially for a Mercedes, and it also meant that Hastings would have had to be driving close to 100 mph, which is much faster than that section of road permits.....

What accounts for this sudden and shocking spike in bigotry?

"A year and a half ago, even the president of the United States opposes gay marriage.  President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, signed DOMA into law.  Now all of a sudden, after Obama changes his mind, the whole country supports gay marriage, and those who don't are bigots."

What accounts for this sudden and shocking spike in bigotry?

It depends on what the meaning of bigotry is. (To paraphrase that humanitarian, Bill Clinton.)



But — to quote Marbury v. Madison — as quoted in the DOMA case, United States v. Windsor, "‘[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.’ ” Zivotofsky v. Clinton, 566 U. S. ___, ___ (2012) (slip op., at 7) (quoting Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803))." (I know, who quotes Marbury like that? And what the hell was Zivotofsky v. Clinton? Was there some insuperable urge to bring up Bill Clinton? The Clinton in Zivotofsky was Hillary Clinton, in her Secretary of State role, and this was the case about the State Department's refusal to list Israel as the place of birth on a U.S. passport for a person born in Jerusalem.)

So if it's the Court's duty to define the terms, and opposition to same-sex marriage is defined as nothing but bigotry, then its the Court's decision in Windsor that accounts for the sudden and shocking spike in bigotry.

But let's be clear about a few things.

1. The majority opinion in Windsor did not use the word "bigotry" (or "bigot"). That word appears in Chief Justice Roberts's dissenting opinion: "At least without some more convincing evidence that the Act’s principal purpose was to codify malice, and that it furthered no legitimate government interests, I would not tar the political branches with the brush of bigotry." Justice Alito also uses the word: "Acceptance of [Windsor's] argument would cast all those who cling to traditional beliefs about the nature of marriage in the role of bigots or superstitious fools."

2.  The majority's expression is "a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group," which might sound extreme, but it appears in the case law going back to the early 70s, and it's a stock phrase used to characterize the government's interest when the Court is applying minimal scrutiny and therefore needs to say that there is no legitimate governmental interest.

3. What that "bare... desire to harm" language really means is: We don't want to have to heighten scrutiny for this discriminated-against group — they don't want responsibility for what that would mean in future cases — but we do want to be able to strike this down while staying at the minimal scrutiny level.

4. This doctrinal maneuver produces the strange impression that the Court is calling Bill Clinton and the majority of the members of the 104th Congress a bunch of bigots.

5. Now lots of traditionalists have the raw material to whine and cry about being called bigots. I doubt if that will work out very well for them, but they've been stewing in their own juice for a long time, and they're going to find it hard to stop. Unfortunately, same-sex marriage was originally presented as a conservative idea, and traditionalists could have gotten out in front of liberals on this issue if they'd listened to the original argument and predicted the future better, and now they'll have to scramble to improve their image. If they think crying about being called bigots — when, again, the majority didn't even use that word — is going to help, I just have to laugh. You took the opportunity to oppress when it was there, and now that it's gone, you want to say you are oppressed. Man up, losers. You lost. And you deserved to lose. Now, stop acting like losers. If you can. (I bet you can't!)

Carey Mulligan turns down the role of Hillary Clinton in "Rodham."

But why? Care to speculate? Maybe a young actress who's been successful at playing glamorous when she's not clearly beautiful should refrain from having her image defined by a famous character who's only reasonably nice looking. This is quite different from the situation where the actress is undeniably beautiful and the character being played is actively homely — like Charlize Theron in the movie that won her an Oscar.

Bill Clinton acknowledges double entendre about Hillary having sex with Barack Obama.

From a montage of clips from recent graduation addresses, shown on today's "Fox News Sunday":

"One of the things that heartened me when President Obama asked Hillary to be secretary of state and she said yes, and they developed this -- not just working relationship -- this amazing friendship, which I just watched with great interest, is that they -- they had -- oh, come on, guys. Get a life here."

The "oh, come on, guys" reacted to the audience's reaction to "I just watched with great interest." I wish I had the video clip, because it was very clear from the manner of his laughter that he was acknowledging the double entendre and — I think — the idea that people associate him with sexuality.

ADDED: Here's the video:

"Reese Witherspoon, Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Chastain among the front-runners to play Hillary Clinton in 'Rodham.'"

"Rodham - about the younger years of the former First Lady and senator..."

"Rodham"... based on a true story. That reminds me: When I was a kid, I thought "Rodan" was based on a true story. Here's the 1957 trailer. I was 6 years old and could not discern the difference between that and the news:



"Nothing escapes this monstrous beast of evil."

Huma Abedin: "A Wife With Powerful Ties Is an Unexpected Architect of a New York Comeback."

That's a front-page article in the NYT, illustrated by a picture of Huma and Hillary that makes them look like a single 2-headed entity. The Times, citing unnamed sources, calls Abedin "a seasoned operative well versed in the politics of redemption" and "a main architect of her husband’s rehabilitative journey, shaping his calculated comeback," who is exploiting her status as a "surrogate daughter to Bill and Hillary Clinton."

This is very interesting to me, because when I watched this video, Weiner's first in his mayoral campaign....



... I thought Anthony Weiner did a great job, presenting himself in the context of New York City, seeming to really belong to the city and its people and to care about it and to be ready to serve. And then there's Huma. She appears in a speaking role at the very end, and there's just something off and unnatural about her. Weiner comes across as a regular guy — he's got the actor skills of a politician — but she — in her seeming fakeness — betrays the reality: This is a remorseless machine of a power couple. She's the woman behind the man, and I'm sure they think that bringing her on camera should boost him. She's beautiful — or so we've been told many times — and she stood by her man. If she accepts him after what he did, that should be enough. That should cancel out his sexual misdeeds. If we hold those misdeeds against him, we're punishing her, which would make the opposite of sense, given that the wife is the official victim when the husband sexually sins.

It's like Bill and Hillary all over again, except that — unlike Hillary — Huma doesn't have the actor skills of a politician. She's a behind the scenes person, and though she can look fabulous in stills, in the video, she can't convincingly embody the Warm, Loving Wife character that Americans generally expect to see with a political husband, and that Anthony Weiner in particular needs.

The NYT article reminds us that Abedin "faced scrutiny this month about an arrangement that allowed her to earn money as a private consultant while still working as a top adviser at the State Department." We're told Abedin "fully intends to continue her work with Mrs. Clinton’s transition team" and that  "several political aides have been tempted to sign onto a Weiner mayoral campaign" because they want a connection that might get them in on the Hillary '16 presidential campaign.

The article begins with a description of how Abedin seemingly hoodwinked Chelsea Clinton into appearing in Anthony Weiner's first post-disgrace photo op: "When Chelsea Clinton wanted to make a low-key visit to the hurricane-stricken Rockaways last fall, she arranged to take a trip with her close friend Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Hillary Rodham Clinton." Huma proceeded to exploit Chelsea's little trip for the re-introduction of Weiner. Now, I'm completely skeptical about whether Chelsea really wanted her visit to be low-key and whether she was surprised or tricked in any way by Anthony's horning in on the Female Empathy Tour of the Stricken. And I'd like to know the real truth of the interactions between the 2 power couples, Bill-and-Hillary and Huma-and-Anthony. I assume the Clintons know everything that's really going on, even as they want to look disconnected. It will be interesting to see what we will be able to figure out about all this, and I think Huma's lack of skill on video camera will be quite helpful in this regard. Bring on the Huma!

By the way, the NYT says "The couple live in a spacious Park Avenue apartment owned by a Clinton donor." But look at the kitchen in the background at the beginning of the video. Come on. That's not their kitchen, is it? I call bullshit.

On everything.

AND:  Rereading that headline... there's that word... that word that is the classic bullshit tell of our time: unexpected.

ALSO: I constantly mistype "Human" for "Huma." I can't tell you how many times I did that in the process of writing this post. But the one that I missed — and left up for 2 hours — was the one in the post title.  To err is human. To err in the post title is... superhuman.

Why is Chelsea Clinton leading a big new religion program at NYU?

"The former first daughter has tackled what the school calls a 'multifaith' role as co-founder and co-chair of its brand-new Of Many Institute. The program is described by the university as aiming to 'develop multifaith dialogue and train multifaith leaders.'"

Back in September, Clinton — who’s married to banker Marc Mezvinsky — told Time of her desire to study faith and education: “With all candor, because my husband is Jewish and I’m Christian, and we’re both practicing, it’s something that’s quite close to home,” she said.

A rep for NYU told us that the Of Many program is not academic, but is a part of the university’s Center for Spiritual Life. NYU’s Web site says the institute has developed a “minor degree in multifaith and spiritual leadership” shared with the Silver School of Social Work and the Wagner School.

I have never associated Chelsea Clinton with religion. She has a Master of Public Health degree from Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health and she's been teaching graduate level classes there.

But maybe the NYU "Of Many" concept of religion really is about "public health." Let's think about the interwoven nature of public health and religion — especially as the Clintons might understand it. When Hillary Clinton first emerged on the national scene, she was associated with religion. I remember a magazine cover — was it Tikkun? — depicting her as "St. Hillary" and lots of talk about "the politics of meaning," which was some politics-and-religion theme back in the 90s. And Hillary segued into public health in a way that we were supposed to understand, but didn't.

So here comes Hillary II, Chelsea Clinton merging health and religion. What does it all mean? How well will this lay the groundwork for a career in politics? I strongly prefer the separation of government and religion, and I don't want government to wield the powers of religion or powers over the human mind that are too much like the power of religion. And though government is going to have some role in public health, its growing and over-intrusive activity is disturbing. A politician who builds a career in health and religion should scare us. This is wedging very deeply into the realm of the individual — mind and body.

Here's some background reading: "All Politics is Cosmic," a 1996 article in The Atlantic by Lee Siegel, reviewing Michael Lerner's book "The Politics of Meaning." Excerpt:

In the beginning there was a hunger for vision. And then came a great need for rhetoric. Soon President and Mrs. Clinton sensed representative vibrations in the quasi-mystical-socio-politico-psychological coat of crazy colors that the author and activist Michael Lerner calls the "politics of meaning." They must have felt that Lerner, with his talk of a universal inner pain and "hunger" for connection, might help them administer verbal balm to an America collectively turning inward amid social and economic disruptions....

Lerner had come sprawling onto the public scene in 1986 with his magazine Tikkun . A licensed psychotherapist, he had spent the previous ten years in Oakland, California, treating patients at a clinic he co-founded called the Institute for Labor and Mental Health. 

Health!

(Lerner has claimed that his vision for America came to him through his encounters with patients.) But problems have beset Tikkun from the start. A former leader of Students for a Democratic Society and co-editor of the ultraleft magazine Ramparts, Lerner seemed to long for the old confrontational days. He began to confront himself. He began to march on his own magazine.

SDS!!

At its best Tikkun has tried to speak with a nonpartisan voice of common decency, outside the crumbling framework of left-right antitheses. But for Lerner, all politics is cosmic. And in his own offerings in the magazine, for page after page he has spluttered on like an old Volkswagen about "pain" and "healing," "misrecognition" of our true selves and "healing," "surplus powerlessness" and "healing," "healing" and . . . well, "healing."

Religion! Leftist politics! Health!

Rand Paul: "When I took Hillary Rodham Clinton to task in January for the mishandling of security in Benghazi, Libya..."

"... I told her that if I had been president at the time, I would have relieved her of her post. Some politicians and pundits took offense at my line of questioning.... Too many questions remain unanswered. Now, there are too many new questions. The evidence we had in January already suggested that Mrs. Clinton ignored repeated requests for more security in Benghazi. The new evidence we have today — and that continues to mount — suggests that at the very least, Mrs. Clinton should never hold high office again."

"ABC News, which acquired 12 different drafts of the [Benghazi] talking points, disclosed that the State Department requested that the CIA scrub references to an Al Qaeda-linked group, Ansar Al-Sharia."

"A State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, specifically asked the CIA to delete a paragraph citing warnings prior [to] attacks because that 'could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?' according to email reviewed by ABC. The paragraph was struck entirely."

Meanwhile, Elijah Cummings — the key Democrat in this week's committee hearings on Benghazi — said:

“I have not seen the e-mails... But I do know for a fact that our intelligence committee, [the] House Intelligence Committee, has seen every single one of the changes and they have concluded that there was no manipulation for political reasons.”

The political manipulations, he says, are on the other side — a premature attack on his party's presumptive 2016 candidate, Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, here's the ad the Republican National Committee made, exploiting the Benghazi story, to attack Obama before the election. Powerful, and you can say now — now that you know Mitt Romney lost — that it should have been used:



I think it's easy to see why this was not run. You can say with hindsight that you think it might have worked, now that you know that what was done did not work, but you need to picture the outcry from the Obama campaign — the ugliness, the damage to national security interests, Romney's unreadiness to play on the international stage, the disrespect for the dead and their mourning families, and — it worked against Hillary's original 3 a.m. ad — the dog-whistle racism.

"I said that death is a part of life, but so often we have to find a way to make life a part of death."

Yesterday at the Benghazi hearings, Elijah Cummings saw fit to quote something he'd said recently at a family funeral. Why was this member of Congress, sitting through a committing hearing going into what happened before, during, and after the Benghazi attacks, reminiscing about remarks he himself made the other day to help grieving people come to terms with a death in the family?

Is it that he admired his own words? That would take some strange self-regard, because the words  are no special wisdom, but the generic stuff of funerals. In the midst of life we are in death....

It must be that he equated the witnesses at the hearing to the mourners at a funeral, who experience the abrupt upheaval of a death in the family and need a way to pull themselves together and continue with their lives. A funeral is decidedly not the time to ask questions about why the death occurred. Leaders at a funeral set about tending to the emotional and spiritual lives of those who must keep living and who are at risk of becoming despondent or obsessed with questions about how it could have happened.

Cummings was on message with the Democratic Party talking point on Benghazi: It happened. Move on. Hillary Clinton chose an indignant, accusatory "What difference, at this point, does it make?" Cummings assumed the pose of the family elder, comforting the suffering, as if the witnesses emotionally were weak mourners who don't know how to let go of the painful memories and go forward to live productive lives.

The analogy is telling and quite outrageous.

IN THE COMMENTS ddh said: "Can someone explain to me how we can make life a part of death?" Ah, yes. My post is about the first part of Cummings's quote, a standard sentiment at funerals. The second part of his quote "life a part of death" is puzzling. Maybe at the funeral he talked about the afterlife. Maybe he talked about the fact that living people are spending some of their alive time in the company of a corpse. What that has to do with a congressional hearing... who knows? Maybe he's thinking: I'm alive and yet I must spend some of my precious time with this corpse of a political issue.

"The sense I got was that I needed to stop the line of questioning."

Gregory Hicks "was soon given a scathing review of his management style, he said, and was later 'effectively demoted' to desk officer at headquarters, in what he believes was retaliation for speaking up."

Mr. Hicks offered an unbecoming view of political supervision and intimidation inside the Obama administration. When Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, visited Libya after the attack, Mr. Hicks said his bosses told him not to talk to the congressman. When he did anyway, and a State Department lawyer was excluded from one meeting because he lacked the necessary security clearance, Mr. Hicks said he received an angry phone call from Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills.

"But did she drink Diet Dr. Pepper while chain-smoking? I need my villains made clear, though preferably without an Ouija board scene."

Matthew Sablan, exemplifying excellence in blog commenting, on a post this morning, satirizing Hillary and Washington Post journalism by appropriating material from yesterday's post about moviemaking and NYT journalism.

A perfect display of lameness at the Washington Post.

"Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News, a persistent voice of media skepticism on Benghazi" — The Washington Post puts that article under its "Style" heading — and teases it along with "Met Gala 2013 goes punk," "What to wear to a summer wedding," and "Wedding gift ideas."



This is the main front-paged story on Benghazi this morning in The Washington Post, inviting readers to admire a feisty female:

“I’m a political agnostic,” she says. “I don’t think about who’s good and who’s bad. I just go where the story leads.... People can say what they want about me, I don’t care. I just want to get the information out there.”

But Attkisson, who holds a third-degree black belt in taekwondo, takes a fighting stance when she feels she’s being stonewalled. Which is exactly what she thinks the White House has done to her on Benghazi. In particular, she is irked by the administration’s non-response to a petition for documents that she filed in November under the Freedom of Information Act.

The lady is irked! Irked! She stomps her well-shod foot and looks pretty when angry, I presume. What nonsense! Where was the WaPo's once-legendary investigative reporting? Why the hell are we looking at the Benghazi story today from the perspective of Sharyl Attkisson?

The story has made Attkisson — strong-willed, supremely confident and often controversial — a kind of Rorschach test among journalists.

Oh? She's a Rorschach test? Well, then let me unload my brain — my female and presumably wedding-fashion-gifts-ridden brain — on this WaPo article. I think they're saying hey, look at this lady so we won't look at that other lady: Hillary Clinton, whose actions in the Benghazi affair really do need looking into.

On the home page, WaPo does tease a second Benghazi-related story. It's tucked under the Sharyl Attkisson!!! thing and in fine print: "Republican probe of Benghazi attacks turns to Hillary Clinton."

To Democrats, the efforts amount to a baseless and less-than-subtle crusade to tarnish the credentials of Clinton, one of the country’s most popular political figures and the overwhelming favorite for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination....

Clinton also emerged largely unscathed in January when she testified before Congress about Benghazi.

“She was very smart — at some level because she’s been through so many of these kinds of situations in the past — not to say or do anything that was inaccurate or would in any way be inconsistent with the enormous credibility she earned as secretary of state,” Democratic strategist Chris Lehane said. “Because she protected her credibility, their ability to make a bigger issue out of it is very limited.”

Nothing to see here. Just those terrible Republicans being terrible again, trying to get the jump on 2016, and as for what happened in 2012, well, what difference, at this point, does it make? And take a look: Sharyl Attkisson!!!!