Concocting fiction...and making everyone else live with it

Concerning the death of Hillary's and Barack's "close friend" Ambassador Chris Stevens and other Americans who died that night in Benghazi, Mark Steyn writes,

As was confirmed by yesterday's release of selected emails by the State Department, Mrs Clinton did not even know her ambassador's name:

From: H [mailto:HDR22@clintonemail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2012 11:38 PM
To: Sullivan, Jacob J; Mills, Cheryl D; Nuland, Victoria J
Subject: Chris Smith

Cheryl told me the Libyans confirmed his death. Should we announce tonight or wait until morning?

"Chris Smith", huh? At least she got the "Chris" right.

I loathe the fakeness of contemporary politics. Presumably those brave souls who battled through to page 323 of Hard Choices did so because they want to get to know "the real Hillary". But instead it's just a more organized version of the fake Hillary - of the lies she improvised into life on the night her friend Chris Wossname sacrificed himself for the illusions of Obama-Clinton foreign policy.

It was apparently Sid Blumenthal, selfless Clinton Foundation charity worker, who emailed HDR22 to pin the Benghazi attack on "a sacrilegious internet video" - and the thought was so appealing to the Secretary of State that it overrode any alternative suggestions she was getting from career diplomats or the heads of the intelligence agencies, assuming any career diplomats or the heads of the intelligence agencies had her email address. So she and Barack went and made a commercial in which they gave the "sacrilegious internet video" two thumbs down, and then they went and lied over the coffins of the dead.

That service at Andrews Air Force Base is the only sacrilegious internet video in the Benghazi story. It was a fiction from start to finish - a heartwarming fairy tale on a patriotic set - but profoundly sacrilegious in its profane violation of something sacred: the homecoming of fallen heroes, two of whom saved dozens of lives by slogging on valiantly through an all-night firefight to die on a rooftop waiting for the cavalry that never came. No matter. They are merely extras - non-speaking parts - in Hillary's fantasy.

Michael Gerson wrote this week:

Does Clinton really have the political skills to pull this off? Her husband was a master of projecting likability, remorse and good intent. She is plausible as a president but mediocre as a candidate. Her silence is often an improvement on her availability. As new controversies come — and that is close to a political certainty — will her polling hold? I have heard significant Democratic donors wonder about this aloud.

But if Clinton succeeds, it would expand the boundaries of the permissible. It would again define deviancy down. Americans would have rewarded, or at least ignored, defiant secrecy and the destruction of documents. Future presidential candidates and campaign advisers would take note. Americans would have rewarded a skate along the ethical boundaries of money and influence. Future donors would see a green light, no matter what candidate Clinton says about campaign finance reform.

A democracy becomes the image of the virtues it rewards.

But, as Mrs Clinton would say, what difference at this point does it make? Both the awful hollow moral void and the accompanying ruthless unyielding discipline were present in those days after Benghazi. She concocted her fiction and then made everyone else live with it.

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