Are the cicadas here yet?

Kevin O'Brien writes in the Cleveland Plain Dealer that

President Barack Obama played for time on the Benghazi disaster. Now he'll play for distance. And no one should be surprised if it works.

The excuse that there wasn't time to get anyone to Benghazi doesn't hold water: When the terrorist attack began, no one knew how it would play out. And apparently, no one in Washington really cared.

Caring would have meant honoring the security request that came five months before the attack. Caring would have meant scrambling fighters and a tanker to refuel them, as well as accepting the offer of a ride from Tripoli to Benghazi for Special Ops troops aboard a Libyan government aircraft. Caring would have meant ensuring that sufficient military assets were stationed within a more reasonable range of a consulate in a volatile country. Caring would have meant relying on Americans, not Libyans, to provide security for the consulate.

Caring would have meant making a credible effort, but Barack "Wasn't Me" Obama's administration and Hillary "What Difference Does it Make?" Clinton's State Department couldn't manage so much as an empty gesture.

And with all of that knowledge in hand, the media will be desperate to duck out and cover the next story -- any story. Are the cicadas here yet?

That's why predictions that the coverup will cost Obama his presidency are way overblown. The Senate and the media won't let him fall.

Once again, the most insulated president in the history of the republic will employ a strategy of blaming underlings and changing his story at will, knowing that anyone who tries to call him to account will be branded a racist, dismissed as a political opportunist or simply ignored.

That strategy hasn't failed His Serene Highness yet.

Clinton may get dinged, because she doesn't enjoy Obama's utter invincibility against the truth. But her media security is darned good, too.

A fair treatment of the facts would destroy both of them, because their failures -- either through incompetence or indifference -- contributed directly to the deaths of four innocent Americans at the hands of this nation's sworn enemies, and their cynical political priorities led them to try to cover up the truth.

The scandals mount, as do the rationalizations, the changing stories and the low-level functionaries thrown under the bus.

The media pray for cicadas.

And the president who never made a bad decision -- because everything that turns sour is pinned on an opponent or a subordinate -- remains untouchable.

Hat tip Neo-neocon