"The fact is that Obama is the only president we have."

"We can’t abdicate our position in the world for the next three years. So Republicans will have to resist the temptation to weaken him when the cost is weakening the country. A party that for at least two generations has held high the banner of American leadership and strength should not cast a vote that obviously risks a damaging erosion of this country’s stature and credibility abroad."

 From Bill Kristol's explanation of why "yes" is the correct answer for Republicans.

Some clarification about what the government does with the 3 billion phone records it collects every day.

I'm not saying the first guest on today's "Fox News Sunday," Rand Paul, wasn't sharp and interesting, but I really appreciated the knowledge and calm expertise that General Michael Hayden, who headed the NSA and the CIA (under Bush), brought to the table. (The boldface is mine.)

CHRIS WALLACE: General Hayden, let's talk first of all about the general reaction you have to Senator Paul. I'm going to get into specific issues with you. As a man who used to run these programs, how important and how effective have they been in keeping us safe and how do you feel when you hear Senator Paul talk about class action lawsuits to the Supreme Court, new congressional restrictions?

GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN, FORMER HEAD OF NSA AND CIA: Well, first of all, Chris, with regard to how effective they are, I think they're very effective. We had two presidents doing the same thing with regard to electronic surveillance. Now, that seems to me to suggest that these things do work. Now, with regard to what the senator said -- if I believed NSA was doing some of the things the senator fears they're doing, I would have been backstopping him during your first segment. He said we're trolling through millions of records. That's just simply not true. The government acquires records as business records from the telecom providers, but then doesn't go into that database without an arguable reason connected to terrorism to ask that database a question. If you don't have any link to that original predicate, terrorism, your phone records are never touched.

WALLACE: Well, let's get into that and let's talk a little bit -- and I know we're getting into kind of a sensitive area here about the tradecraft that you were involved with -- as especially the head of the NSA, but also the CIA. According to one estimate, the NSA is getting the phone records of 3 billion of our phone calls every day -- 3 billion phone calls every day. Two questions: one, how can you possibly process 3 billion records a day? And, secondly, why not just target, from the very beginning, the bad guys?

HAYDEN: Well -- well, first of all, you have to identify who are the bad guys. So, let's begin the acquisition. Three billions is a big number. Keep in mind, Chris, that our telecommunications providers do that every day on their own. So, it's not impossible to do. Now you've got the data stored. Here's the important part and this is the part that protects civil liberties and balances... security and our freedom.

You ask the database a question, but the question has to be related to terrorism. I'll give you a concrete example so this is very clear. So, you roll up something in Waziristan. You get a cell phone. It's the first time you've ever had that cell phone number. You know it's related to terrorism because of the pocket litter you've gotten in that operation. Here's how it works: you simply ask that database, hey, any of you phone numbers in there ever talked to this phone number in Waziristan? I mean, you're already going into the database with the predicate, with a probable cause, with an arguable reason why you're asking for the data.

WALLACE: I've been talking -- obviously, this has been the subject in Washington and across the country this week. People are concerned about this mountain of data that you have. OK. I mean, what you say sounds perfectly sensible. You know that there's a guy in Waziristan. You want to know who he's talking to in the United States. One, what do you do with all the records, the billions of records that you have on all of us law-abiding citizens and what's the potential for abuse with the fact that you have all of that stored in computers somewhere?

HAYDEN: First, to answer your question, what do we do with all of the other records? Nothing. All right?

WALLACE: You keep it, though.

HAYDEN: Of course, because -- I mean, you get the cell phone with that number six months from now you want to know the history of that number. When does the value of that information begin to age off? So, you do retain the information so that you can ask questions of it in the future. With regard to abuse, there are no records of abuse under President Bush, under President Obama.

Now, I was criticized because I theoretically didn't have enough oversight mechanisms, but no one accused us of abuse. President Obama has in some ways added incredible oversight mechanisms to this. Again, no abuse under either president.

WALLACE: ... Back in 2006, Senator Obama voted against your nomination to be CIA director because of your involvement in government programs. From what you know and I understand you've been on the outside, how much has he changed? He expanded, restricted these government surveillance programs that he inherited....

HAYDEN: Expanded in volume, changed the legal grounding for them a little bit, put it more under congressional authorization rather than the president's Article II powers and added a bit more oversight. But in terms of what NSA is doing, there is incredible continuity between the two presidents.

WALLACE: How do you mean he's expanded in volume?

HAYDEN: Well, it may just because we've gotten more of these records over time and with the amendment to the FISA Act in 2008, which Senator Obama finally voted for, NSA is actually empowered to do more things than I was empowered to do under President Bush's special authorization.

Now, obviously, there's worry about abuse, and the fact that we haven't seen "records of abuse" isn't that reassuring, especially when we're so aware of the abuse for political purposes within the IRS. That topic came up later in the show during the panel discussion:

WALLACE: Well, Bill, as someone who I suspect thinks that these surveillance programs are a necessary part of the war on terror, do you worry that all the leaks, all the disclosures this week are going to create some sort of backlash?

BILL KRISTOL, THE WEEKLY STANDARD: I do, particularly because they're coming into context of genuine abuses of government power, especially by the IRS. I think the big thing to remember is national security is different from internal management of the government. We're dealing with foreign terrorist threats here. And, secondly, apparently this program really does require court orders to go target particular individuals or groups. You can't just then migrate through the whole database and data mine and say this looks suspicious. You need to say this is a group in Waziristan. Let's see who they're talking to. And if they're talking to me, you then have to go back to the court and get an order for me. That is not what the IRS did, obviously. Lois Lerner on her own decided let's target people who have Tea Party in there...

WALLACE: But you would agree that when Rand Paul says what he says about, you know, let's have specific targeting and let's not just Hoover off, vacuum up all of this information on law-abiding citizens, that certainly has at least a political appeal.

KRISTOL: Maybe. But honestly, I think the concern is Republicans are making a huge mistake. A, I think it's mischaracterizing what's happening. They're getting a lot of data because they don't want to have to go to Verizon and AT&T and everyone else each time they get a phone number. But they're not allowed to go into that data until they have a particular warrant signed off on by a judge, with some cause to suspect a foreigner of terrorism -- that is totally different from the IRS abuses, which I think are very serious. And I think it's very important for conservatives and Republicans to make that distinction....

Why did the White House deceive us after the Benghazi attack?

Ask Bill Kristol and Peter Wehner in The Wall Street Journal:

Presumably for two reasons. The first is that the true account of events undercut the president's claim during the campaign that al Qaeda was severely weakened in the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden. The second is that a true account of what happened in Benghazi that night would have revealed that the president and his top national-security advisers did not treat a lethal attack by Islamic terrorists on Americans as a crisis. The commander in chief not only didn't convene a meeting in the Situation Room; he didn't even bother to call his Defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not a single presidential finger was lifted to help Americans under attack.

This is an embarrassment and a disgrace. Is it too much to hope that President Obama is privately ashamed of his inattention and passivity that night?  

I think he is ashamed. Here's what I've been assuming happened: It looked like our people were overwhelmed and doomed, so there was shock, sadness, and acceptance. But then the fight went on for 7 or 8 hours. The White House folk decided there was nothing to do but accept the inevitable, and then they witnessed a valiant fight which they had done nothing to support. It was always too late to help. It was too late after one hour, then too late after 2 hours, then too late after 3 hours.... When were these people going to die already? After that was all over, how do you explain what you did?

IN THE COMMENTS: CWJ said:

Althouse's surmised timeline if true is the ultimate in —

"What difference, at this point, would it make?"

Perhaps Hillary was telling us more than met the eye. 

Congressman Cotton was excellent on drones and Benghazi on "Fox News Sunday."

(Transcript. Video.) I had never heard of the guy, but he impressed the hell out of me, in part because the host Chris Wallace, introduced Cotton — a Republican from Arkansas — this way:

Congressman Cotton, for people who don't know you, you are kind of an interesting figure. You went to Harvard, you went to Harvard Law School, and then you spent five years on active duty, on the front lines, in Iraq and Afghanistan, so you have got a lot of credibility on this issue on both sides of the equation.

I'm not a complete pushover for credentials, but this made me want to pay attention when Wallace invited him to respond to Senator Dianne Feinstein's idea that we need, as Wallace put it, "a secret drone court, where the president would have to go to get approval before putting terror suspects on his kill list.... How do you feel about this idea? Before the president could target someone for assassination, especially an American citizen, he'd have to go get approval from a judge?"

COTTON: We don't need federal judges involved in sensitive and urgent national security matters, and it would be an unconstitutional infringement on the president's rights to keep America safe. So, if you take up arms against America and you fight in a terrorist training camp or on the front lines in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Yemen, you shouldn't be surprised if America reaches out and exacts justice against you.

A while later, there was a discussion of Leon Panetta's testimony about Benghazi. Co-panelist Bill Kristol went first and laid out the criticism of Obama pithily:

KRISTOL: I think it is genuinely shocking. The president -- Leon Panetta walked out of the Oval Office at 5:30 that night, after a previously scheduled meeting. The president never called -- he knew -- he briefed the president on what was happening in Benghazi and that the American ambassador was missing, and it was clear there could well be sustained and ongoing attacks, and the president never spoke to the secretary of defense or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the rest of that night, and, interestingly, Secretary Panetta said he never spoke to the White House later this night. So it's not as if he spoke to the national security adviser, Tom Donilon, or the chief of staff, Jack Lew, and said, and conveyed a message to or from the president.

So basically, the president seems to have checked out. He spent an hour that evening on the phone with the Israeli prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, because there has been that flap about Israel at the Democratic Convention the week before, and I think he wanted for political reasons to show that he was in touch with the Israelis. They did a readout of that call, the National Security Council spokesman did. So they're busy talking to the Israeli prime minister, doing the readout of the call for the press, and he is not talking to Panetta and, insofar as we -- and Donilon, apparently, is not talking to Panetta. And it is really, I think, a dereliction of duty on the part of the president and his senior staff, and I think they should be asked about it. I think Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, and Jack Lew, the White House chief of staff, should -- the president did not talk to anyone. Did they even talk to the secretary of defense, or did they just say, do what you can and then totally checked out for that evening, and then the next morning the president goes off to Las Vegas for a fund-raiser?

Cotton followed on, bringing in his military expertise:

COTTON: It is not just shocking, I would say it is outrageous as well, and it shows he has lack of preparation to be the commander in chief and lead troops when they are in combat. You know, you mentioned I was in the Army. At Fort Benning, where I spent a year, you learn the eight-step troop leading procedures. Step eight, the final step, is not issue an order. Step seven is issue the order. Step eight, which is the most important step, is supervise. He said in September that I issued a directive to take whatever steps are necessary to protect our troops and our assets. And then as Bill said, he never again followed up, he never asked, is my directive being executed? That is the essence of leadership, and this is a complete failure of leadership.

WALLACE: What about the argument, Congressman, and I don't know, and Bill raises a legitimate question, maybe he was doing this through his national security adviser.

COTTON: What General Dempsey and Secretary Panetta said, indicates there was no further contact from the White House, and the president showed no curiosity at all. He had a conversation with Prime Minister Netanyahu that was in the middle of [the] political season when he was receiving criticism for not being engaged with the prime minister, and then probably preparing to fly off to Las Vegas the next day for a fundraiser.

When you have troops in contact -- when I was in Afghanistan, we had troops in contact. I was right next to the radio, monitoring that at all times. When the president has troops in contact in an embassy that he knows is insecure, that has to be the very first priority.

Cotton also got my attention earlier in the show when Wallace asked whether the decision to have Marco Rubio deliver the GOP response to the SOTU makes him "the new face of the Republican Party on Capitol Hill."

COTTON: I wouldn't say that decision makes him. I think he has been an emerging leader on Capitol Hill for Republicans, and across the country for two years now. He's a generation of new leaders, not just Marco, but Paul Ryan and Scott Walker and so forth, who are emerging and who I think are going to be the leaders of our party going forward.

So, wanting to portray Rubio as not The One but part of "a generation of new leaders" and needing to name some names, Cotton comes up with Paul Ryan — the erstwhile VP nominee — and — of all the others — Scott Walker. I read that out loud and Meade deemed it time to play the Governor Walker anthem one more time: