Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s testimony before Senate and House committees yesterday on the Benghazi attacks was a performance worthy of the dystopian American future in which The Hunger Games is set. The theatrical drama of her indignant emotionalism was heightened by disconnected grandstanding of hapless Republican legislators who used their allotted five minutes to burnish their personal brands back in the “districts” rather than hold Secretary Clinton accountable.
It was highly skilled performance art, and a spectacle in which all the actors played their roles and followed their scripts. As Breitbart’s Joel Pollack pointed out, Secretary of State Clinton was shameless, and the Senate was spineless.
Only Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson (R-WI) managed to pose a serious question. Rather than provide a serious answer, Secretary Clinton called upon her inner thespian to deliver this dramatic response that cleverly deflected his entirely proper inquiry into her self-righteous outrage at his temerity:
Senator Johnson: We were misled that there were supposedly protests and that something sprang out of that, an assault sprang out of that. It was easily ascertained that was not the fact. The American people could have known that within days, and they didn’t know that.
Secretary Clinton: With all due respect the fact is that we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of some guys out for a walk one night who decided they would go kill some Americans.
Secretary Clinton then adroitly turned Senator Johnson’s question on its head. Her job, she told him, wasn’t to figure out why the four Americans had been killed and who was responsible for that failure. Instead, her job was to find who did it, bring them to justice, and make sure it never happened again.
Before Senator Johnson could pose a subsequent question, his time was up, and no other Senator followed his line of questioning.
Not a single Senator or Congressman asked this simple but very important question:
Madame Secretary, did you sign off on the State Department Rules of Engagement for Libya that prohibited the deployment of American Marines in that country?
The answer to that question would reveal that it was the very policies of Hillary Clinton’s State Department and the Obama administration that failed to prevent the Benghazi debacle and the deaths of four Americans. The buck stops with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, yet neither were held accountable in yesterday’s hearings at the Capitol.
In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, Colonel David Hunt said, “I don’t think the Republicans laid a glove on her.” According to Hunt, “Secretary Clinton’s day of testimony was woefully lacking in substance or depth. It was brilliant on the part of the administration to have her testify to both houses in one day and then have Kerry’s nomination the next. The only thing we did learn or have confirmed is that weapons from Libya were used in Mali and Algeria.”
Hunt concluded by saying that “Secretary Clinton did not tell the truth. For example, her statement that no video was available and that she was not involved in security decisions nor did she see any cables was just not credible.”
American politics as practiced in Washington today resembles the dystopian worlds described in such literary works as Animal Farm, 1984, and The Hunger Games more closely than the world in which our Founding Fathers lived when they wrote and ratified the Constitution. These fictional worlds in which “peace” is “war” and phrases like “the buck stops here” mean “I am not to blame” are more real today than history itself. And no Republican legislator in the Capitol yesterday chose to play the role of Patrick Henry, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin . . . or even Katniss Everdeen.
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