Why is it per se inappropriate to question Hillary's health...

...she thinks her health is an excuse for not discharging her legal duties, after all.

//Here’s the really galling part, considering the screams of outrage that greet any comment about Clinton’s age or health in this election cycle: CLINTON stated she received no instructions or direction regarding the preservation or production of records from State during the transition out of her role as Secretary of State in early 2013. However, in December of 2012, CLINTON suffered a concussion and then around the New Year had a blood clot. Based on her doctor’s advice, she could only work at State for a few hours a day and could not recall every briefing she received. CLINTON did not have any discussions with aides about turning over her email records, nor did anyone from State request them. She believed her work-related emails were captured by her practice of sending email to the state.gov email address of her staff. CLINTON was unaware of the requirement to turn over printed records at that time. Her physical records were boxed up and handled by aides. Ace of Spades noticed, “Hillary’s Brain Damage came right at the sweet spot: It came to provide her an alibi, then left just in time to permit her to be president.”//

For those Hillary-supporters who believe that corporations and foreign dictators made donations to the Clinton Foundation out of a concern for doing good works... ...put on your "surprised face." More than half of donors to Clinton Foundation got meetings with Hillary.

The many lies of Hillary...
....a never-ending drama.

Colin Powell rejects Hillary's attempt to blame him for her violation of the law.

//Of course she had, and for her own reasons. She wanted to hide as much of her business as possible from journalists and congressional committees seeking information on how she operated. Given the gross intermingling of State Department and Clinton Foundation business, this was only prudent.

If Hillary had her way, no one would know that Clinton Foundation honcho Doug Band tried to get donor Gilbert Chagoury a meeting with the recent ambassador to Lebanon, and Hillary aide Huma Abedin (who, amazingly, held positions at both the State Department and the foundation) was extremely solicitous.

No one would know that, in the latest revelation, when Band wanted the crown prince of Bahrain to see Hillary, Abedin coordinated with him on trying to set up the meeting.

No wonder that Colin Powell finds Hillary’s effort to enlist him as one of the justifications for her private server so galling. Over the weekend, Powell told a reporter, “her people have been trying to pin it on me.”

Referring to a description of his email practices he sent to her (at her request), Powell said, “The truth is, she was using [her private server] for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did.”

No one forced Hillary to use her private email for State Department business in a manner so flagrantly against the rules that in any other circumstance (i.e., if she weren’t the Democratic nominee for president), she would be vulnerable to sanction and prosecution.

And no one forced her and her husband to run their foundation as a vast pay-to-play scheme whose inner workings must be shielded from public view. That’s her responsibility and no one else’s — certainly not Colin Powell’s.//

Apparently, the FBI has a very low standard of what constitutes "being truthful."

15,000 more emails that were not turned over to the State Department discovered by the FBI.

Clearly, discrimination is at work.

Of course this violates the narrative.

//An additional NCES chart shows the percentage of 18 to 24-year-old men and women in degree-granting institutions. In the 1960s and 1970s, men were significantly more likely to be in college than women. Around 1990, the proportions reached parity. Since then, a higher percentage of women have been going to college than men, with the gap reaching 7 percent in 2012, when 44.5 percent of women and 37.6 percent of men were enrolled.

Female students are also more likely to finish college than their male counterparts. More than six in 10 women enrolling in college in 2006 graduated by 2012; the similar proportion for men was only 56.5 percent. This fact contributes to female superiority in post-graduate education, with women earning 60 percent of the master’s degrees and 51 percent of doctorates in the 2011-2012 academic year.

So, if men are now underrepresented in higher education, where might they be? One place is in prison. At the end of 2014, almost 93 percent of inmates in state and federal correctional facilities were male.  There were over 1.4 million male prisoners compared to 113,000 female inmates.

The next Affirmative Action President:

James Taranto writes:

//When Bill Clinton finished second in New Hampshire in 1992 with less than 25% of the vote, he was called the “comeback kid.” Yesterday Hillary Clinton finished second with nearly 40%, and it’s being called a devastating loss. Which just goes to show how right she was the other day when she observed that the struggle for women’s equality is not over.

We kid! Of course Mrs. Clinton, who unlike her husband 24 years ago is the inevitable nominee, did suffer a devastating loss—the worst since pen monger Paul Fisher, who finished 71.7 points behind John F. Kennedy in 1960. Votes are still being counted, but it looks as though Bernie Sanders’s percentage will exceed 60%, and his margin of victory 22 points.

Gamblers still expect Mrs. Clinton to be the nominee, and even (just barely) the president a year from now: As we write, ElectionBettingOdds.com puts the likelihoods at 78.1% and 50.4%, respectively. But it is increasingly clear that she is one of the weakest front-runners in American history—weaker even than herself in 2008, who did win New Hampshire.

Inevitability is the only thing she has going for her, and it may not be enough. What happened? It’s a commonplace by now that Mrs. Clinton is not a natural politician and that she launched her political career with a marital booster rocket. She thus missed the skill-development opportunities that accompany challenging early-career bids for lower office. But how in the world could she have gotten worse at this, not better, since 2008?

We can’t possibly give a full answer to that question in a single column, because it is an overdetermined effect. But a story Gawker’s J.K. Trotter broke yesterday illuminates one major cause.

Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, Trotter discovered a July 2009 email exchange between Marc Ambinder, then a contributing editor of the Atlantic, and Philippe Reines, Mrs. Clinton’s State Department press secretary. Mrs. Clinton was planning a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Ambinder wondered if he could get an early look. “On two conditions,” Reines responded. “Ok,” said Ambinder. Reines’s reply made clear the conditions were not just about timing or sourcing:

3 [conditions] actually

1) You in your own voice describe them [sic] as “muscular”

2) You note that a look at the CFR seating plan shows that all the envoys—from Holbrooke to Mitchell to Ross—will be arrayed in front of her, which in your own clever way you can say certainly not a coincidence and meant to convey something

3) You don’t say you were blackmailed!

“Got it,” replied Ambinder. Later that day he published a story that complied with the first two conditions right at the top:

When you think of President Obama’s foreign policy, think of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. That’s the message behind a muscular speech that [Mrs.] Clinton is set to deliver today to the Council on Foreign Relations. The staging gives a clue to its purpose: seated in front of [Mrs.] Clinton, subordinate to [Mrs.] Clinton, in the first row, will be three potentially rival power centers: envoys Richard Holbrooke and George Mitchell, and National Security Council senior director Dennis Ross.

In three responses to Trotter, Ambinder tosses up an enormous word salad: “I don’t remember much about anything. . . . The exchange is probably at best an incomplete record of what went down. That said, the transactional nature of such interactions always gave me the willies. . . . At no point at The Atlantic did I ever feel the pressure to make transactional journalism the norm.”

In sum, he complied with the third condition and did not acknowledge that he was “blackmailed” even after being caught out 6½ years later. The Atlantic cooperated, too, appending this cryptic note atop Ambinder’s 2009 piece: “On February 9, 2016, Gawker called the reporting of this post into question. It is The Atlantic’s policy never to cede to sources editorial control of the content of our stories.”

At least two other journalists covered the speech in ways consistent with the conditions Reines imposed on Ambinder. Mike Allen of Politico:

In a muscular first major address as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton warns adversaries on Wednesday that they “should never see America’s willingness to talk as a sign of weakness to be exploited.” . . .

A look at the CFR’s guest seating chart shows that arrayed in the front row will be top members of her team—the envoys she has called her “force multipliers”: Richard Holbrooke, George Mitchell, Dennis Ross, Philip Goldberg and Stephen Bosworth.

And the New York Times’s Mark Landler, writing after the speech (credit to former blogger Morgen Richmond for the find):

With its muscular tone and sweeping scope, it was . . . an effort to recapture the limelight after a period in which Mrs. Clinton has nursed both a broken elbow and the perception that the State Department has lost influence to an assertive White House. . . .

She even marshaled a cheering section of special envoys and other senior American diplomats in the first few rows at the Council on Foreign Relations. . . .

A few weeks ago, a senior administration official said, Mr. Obama telephoned Mrs. Clinton to inform her he was moving the State Department’s top Iran adviser, Dennis B. Ross, to a job in the White House.

Mr. Ross will offer advice on a range of issues, from the Middle East to Afghanistan. That, some officials said, could cause him to rub up against George J. Mitchell, the special envoy for the Middle East, and Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, who report to both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama.

We should emphasize that while Ambinder clearly crossed an ethical red line in taking dictation from a source, there is no evidence that Landler or (at least in this case) Allen did anything of the sort. It’s possible they thought of the “muscular” cliché unbidden, and it’s highly plausible that they received talking points from Reines without any strings attached.

But even that latter possibility would illustrate the broader point we’d like to make here—the one that goes to Mrs. Clinton’s weakness as a candidate. She has long been coddled by journalists awed by her proximity to power and her status as a “feminist icon” and bête noire of conservatives. (A 2010 email from Ambinder to Reines, quoted by Trotter in the same piece: “This is an awesome presser . . . She is PITCH f#$*& PERFECT on this stuff.”)

In his much-discussed Politico essay last month on Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson touched on the point:

The main reason Trump could win is because he’s the only candidate hard enough to call Hillary’s bluff. Republicans will say almost anything about Hillary, but almost none challenge her basic competence. She may be evil, but she’s tough and accomplished. This we know, all of us.

But do we? Or is this understanding of Hillary just another piety we repeat out of unthinking habit, the political equivalent of, “you can be whatever you want to be,” or “breakfast is the most important meal of the day”? Trump doesn’t think Hillary is impressive and strong. He sees her as brittle and afraid.

Even that now looks like an overestimation of Mrs. Clinton’s strength. Her luxuriant treatment by friendly journalists and other establishment figures has caused a progressive wasting of whatever political muscle she had developed, so that even a 98-pound weakling like Bernie Sanders may prove to be a match for her.

As for Trump, he easily won the Republican primary, matching his polls, possibly exceeding 35%, finishing some 20 points ahead of second-place John Kasich, and leaving the GOP at least as unsettled as the Democrats.

Journalists and political professionals have long regarded Trump as inevitable, like Mrs. Clinton—only in the opposite direction: She was certain to be the nominee; he was certain to fade or self-destruct. (Disclosure: This columnist shared the latter assumption until two or three months ago.) He has proved stronger than expected in part because the expectations were so low—and in part because, again in contrast with Mrs. Clinton, the hostility of the media has afforded him ample opportunity to build his strength.//

Ruh-Roh!

Hillary's argument has been that while the fussy-old CIA may have classified something as "Top Secret", the State Department didn't - which is breathtakingly stupid and, so, will be swallowed by her apologists and the news media, i.e., the same people...

...but now the State Department is acknowledging that the State Department agrees that she had "Top Secret" emails on her unsecured server.

//For months, Hillary Clinton and her presidential campaign have stuck to a consistent story line when faced with allegations of classified information on the private server she used exclusively as secretary of state: She was the victim of an overzealous intelligence community bent on categorizing information as top secret or classified when it was, in fact, neither.

That defense hit a major snag on Friday when the State Department announced that it, too, had found “top secret” information on Clinton’s server — 22 emails across seven separate emails chains. The information, the State Department said, was so secret that those emails would never be released to the public.//

So much for the "inter-agency squabbling" defense.

How dare she commit this wanton display of journalism?!?!?!?!

Hillary gets asked about "enabling" Bill's sex crimes:

//On Wednesday's New Day, CNN's Alisyn Camerota surprisingly broached the issue of Bill Clinton's sordid sexual past during her interview of Hillary Clinton — something that the Big Three morning newscasts skirted doing in their Wednesday interviews of the Democratic presidential candidate. Camerota noted how Donald Trump raised the "allegations from your husband's past," and pointed out that "he's going further, actually, than that. He's making it about you. He's saying that you are an enabler of bad behavior and of sexual assault." She asked, "What's your response to Donald Trump?"

When Mrs. Clinton replied, "I have no response," the anchor pressed the former secretary of state on the issue: "But when someone accuses you of being an enabler of sexual assault, don't you need to respond to it...particularly since this is an issue that you wanted to talk about on the campaign trail — campus sexual assault — you say that survivors need to be believed, and they need to be heard. So when he's accusing you of doing something that is the antithesis of what you want to talk about, don't you need to address it?" //

So, Hillary says:

1.  She first was told that Benghazi was an organized attack.

2. She told her daughter and the Egyptian ambassador that it was an organized attack.

3.  But then the group taking credit withdrew their claim and the CIA then said....?...not clear but they were writing the talking points....which is not true.

4. Then there were protests about the video, so maybe it was the video? It was definitely the fog of war.

 5. But the family members who said that she blamed Benghazi on the video were emotionally distraught and have a right not to remember what she said,and

6. She definitely didn't say it was the video to them.

But why didn't she say it was the video.  Her explanation is that what she told her daughter and the Egyptian was wrong and she changed her mind....to the video as the cause.

So, if that's true, why deny that she said that?

What we see in Hillary's story is that she has told so many lies and had to tailor her story to fit the unfolding facts that she has to make U-turns and deny clear facts with the "calm confidence of a Christian holding four aces."

As for me, Hillary's statement to the family that they were going to have the video-maker arrested, and the fact that he was arrested in the middle of the night, confirms that his arrest was arranged by the White House.

Why have we never heard from this guy?  If Bush had done this, this guy would have been famous as a martyr to free speech.

Honestly, no one can explain the difference anymore.

Clinton can't explain the difference between Democrats, socialists

//Hillary Clinton on Tuesday night was unable to explain the difference between Democrats and socialists.

"Uh, you'd have to ask… I am not one," Clinton said after MSNBC's Chris Matthews asked her whether or not she identified as a socialist during an interview on Hardball.

As Clinton fumbled question, Matthews even gave the candidate an out by saying, "I'd say you're a pretty typical Democrat…but is that a question you want to answer or would you rather not?"

"I can tell you what I am," Clinton said. "I'm a progressive Democrat who likes to get things done, and who believes that we are better off in this country when we're trying to solve problems together, getting people to work together. There will always be strong feelings and I respect that, from the far right, the far left, the libertarians, whoever they might be. We've got to get people working together, we've got to get the economy fixed, we've got to get all our problems really tackled."

Self-identified socialist candidate Bernie Sanders, Clinton's main challenger in the Democratic primary, has effectively shifted the Democratic Party's base to the left during the 2016 primary, and on the trail Clinton has shifted her rhetoric to the left to match Sanders. While the former Secretary of State has become more liberal in respect to the KeyStone XL Pipeline, the Trans Pacific Partnership and her strategy to combat terror in the Middle East, she refrained from identifying as a socialist, like Sanders.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., made a similar flub while being interviewed by Matthews in July, when she focused on Republicans instead of explaining the difference between a Democrat and a socialist.//Self-identified socialist candidate Bernie Sanders, Clinton's main challenger in the Democratic primary, has effectively shifted the Democratic Party's base to the left during the 2016 primary, and on the trail Clinton has shifted her rhetoric to the left to match Sanders. While the former Secretary of State has become more liberal in respect to the KeyStone XL Pipeline, the Trans Pacific Partnership and her strategy to combat terror in the Middle East, she refrained from identifying as a socialist, like Sanders.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., made a similar flub while being interviewed by Matthews in July, when she focused on Republicans instead of explaining the difference between a Democrat and a socialist.Self-identified socialist candidate Bernie Sanders, Clinton's main challenger in the Democratic primary, has effectively shifted the Democratic Party's base to the left during the 2016 primary, and on the trail Clinton has shifted her rhetoric to the left to match Sanders. While the former Secretary of State has become more liberal in respect to the KeyStone XL Pipeline, the Trans Pacific Partnership and her strategy to combat terror in the Middle East, she refrained from identifying as a socialist, like Sanders.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., made a similar flub while being interviewed by Matthews in July, when she focused on Republicans instead of explaining the difference between a Democrat and a socialist.Self-identified socialist candidate Bernie Sanders, Clinton's main challenger in the Democratic primary, has effectively shifted the Democratic Party's base to the left during the 2016 primary, and on the trail Clinton has shifted her rhetoric to the left to match Sanders. While the former Secretary of State has become more liberal in respect to the KeyStone XL Pipeline, the Trans Pacific Partnership and her strategy to combat terror in the Middle East, she refrained from identifying as a socialist, like Sanders.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., made a similar flub while being interviewed by Matthews in July, when she focused on Republicans instead of explaining the difference between a Democrat and a socialist.Self-identified socialist candidate Bernie Sanders, Clinton's main challenger in the Democratic primary, has effectively shifted the Democratic Party's base to the left during the 2016 primary, and on the trail Clinton has shifted her rhetoric to the left to match Sanders. While the former Secretary of State has become more liberal in respect to the KeyStone XL Pipeline, the Trans Pacific Partnership and her strategy to combat terror in the Middle East, she refrained from identifying as a socialist, like Sanders.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., made a similar flub while being interviewed by Matthews in July, when she focused on Republicans instead of explaining the difference between a Democrat and a socialist.Self-identified socialist candidate Bernie Sanders, Clinton's main challenger in the Democratic primary, has effectively shifted the Democratic Party's base to the left during the 2016 primary, and on the trail Clinton has shifted her rhetoric to the left to match Sanders. While the former Secretary of State has become more liberal in respect to the KeyStone XL Pipeline, the Trans Pacific Partnership and her strategy to combat terror in the Middle East, she refrained from identifying as a socialist, like Sanders.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., made a similar flub while being interviewed by Matthews in July, when she focused on Republicans instead of explaining the difference between a Democrat and a socialist.Self-identified socialist candidate Bernie Sanders, Clinton's main challenger in the Democratic primary, has effectively shifted the Democratic Party's base to the left during the 2016 primary, and on the trail Clinton has shifted her rhetoric to the left to match Sanders. While the former Secretary of State has become more liberal in respect to the KeyStone XL Pipeline, the Trans Pacific Partnership and her strategy to combat terror in the Middle East, she refrained from identifying as a socialist, like Sanders.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., made a similar flub while being interviewed by Matthews in July, when she focused on Republicans instead of explaining the difference between a Democrat and a socialist.Self-identified socialist candidate Bernie Sanders, Clinton's main challenger in the Democratic primary, has effectively shifted the Democratic Party's base to the left during the 2016 primary, and on the trail Clinton has shifted her rhetoric to the left to match Sanders. While the former Secretary of State has become more liberal in respect to the KeyStone XL Pipeline, the Trans Pacific Partnership and her strategy to combat terror in the Middle East, she refrained from identifying as a socialist, like Sanders.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., made a similar flub while being interviewed by Matthews in July, when she focused on Republicans instead of explaining the difference between a Democrat and a socialist.//

The Nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...and all is quickly forgotten.

The horrible truth is that the feminist establishment in the U.S., led by Gloria Steinem, did in fact apply a double standard to Bill Clinton’s behavior because he was a Democrat. The Democratic president and administration supported abortion rights, and therefore it didn’t matter what his personal behavior was.
But we’re living in a different time right now, and young women have absolutely no memory of Bill Clinton. It’s like ancient history for them; there’s no reservoir of accumulated good will. And the actual facts of the matter are that Bill Clinton was a serial abuser of working-class women–he had exploited that power differential even in Arkansas.  And then in the case of Monica Lewinsky–I mean, the failure on the part of Gloria Steinem and company to protect her was an absolute disgrace in feminist history! What bigger power differential could there be than between the president of the United States and this poor innocent girl? Not only an intern but clearly a girl who had a kind of pleading, open look to her–somebody who was looking for a father figure.

Nostalgia Moment - Remember how much Constitutional Law we learned under the Clinton Presidency?

Well, if Hillary gets elected, we may get to learn more.

"Is the Office of President of the United States subject to statutory disqualification? If former Secretary of State and former Senator Hillary Clinton is convicted under 18 U.S.C. Section 2071, is she disqualified from holding the presidency?"

I'm sure that we will learn all sorts of special reasons why there is obviously no such disqualification, and, of course, .....

LET'S MOVE ON!!!

Good times....good times.....

And when Hillary decreed that the past should be that she did not tell grieving families that "'we are going to have the film maker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son"...

...the Ministry of Truth sprang into well-oiled, practiced action, memory-holing the contrary truth and fabricating useful artifacts to support the new and better truth.

Hillary accuses Benghazi families of lying.

//Did you tell the families that the attack was about the film?  Answer: No.  Justin has addressed her subsequent "fog of war" dissembling, which is belied by the fact that she consistently managed to get it right in private discussions, while peddling a very different tale in public.  But let's ignore that part of her answer for the moment.  She was asked a direct question: Did she, or did she not, tell those family members that the Internet film was responsible for their loved ones' deaths?  She says she did not.  This is a direct contradiction of very explicit memories shared on the record by multiple people who have far less incentive to lie than, say, a truth-challenged politician seeking power.  This should be a serious problem for Hillary Clinton.  The media spent an enormous amount of time fact-checking Donald Trump's false claim about watching "thousands" of Muslims dancing in the streets of New Jersey on live television after 9/11.  Here we have the presumptive Democratic nominee essentially arguing that Benghazi victims' relatives are either forgetful simpletons, or liars.  How mysterious that they all "forgot" in exactly the same way, and that their "lies" all match up.  Is this another one of those conspiracies Hillary sees around every corner when her political ambitions are threatened?  Stephanopoulos didn't follow-up on this point during the interview.  Other journalists should, relentlessly.  She's sure she didn't blame the video in those discussions?  If so, why are the families saying she did?  And if they're inventing a collective memory out of whole cloth, is it just a coincidence that Hillary happened to invoke that video during her public remarks that day?  And that another administration spokesperson made the same untrue connection on national television the next day?  C'mon. //

She'll ignore requests to save the lives of Americans...

....but if it is payola for her family, she's "johnny on the spot."

More information from Hillary's emails:

Hillary intervened after request to her son-in-law to help with investment.

Note that it was NOT a professional journalist who asked this question....

...which really kills the journalists favorite response when they only publish stories about conservative politicians caught in sex scandals, i.e., hypocrisy is news.

//Two weeks ago, Hillary Clinton tweeted that "every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed and supported." Of course we had to assume that she wasn't referring to the many women who accused her husband Bill of violating them.

At a campaign event in New Hampshire on Thursday, a woman in the audience asked Hillary if believing all "survivors" meant believing Bill's accusers as well, including Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones. Hillary's response: "I would say that everybody should be believed at first until they are disbelieved based on evidence."

This raises some interesting questions, namely about whether this means Hillary adheres to a "guilty until proven innocent" approach to sexual assault accusations. Hillary, a former lawyer, should know how much that sentiment flies in the face of our judicial system.//

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news.

Remember how families of a dead soldier had "unlimited moral authority" to sit outside of Bush's ranch for years?

So much window dressing.

If it is a Democrat in the White House, then who cares?

Father of Benghazi victim calls Hillary "scum."

She could put a puppy into a blender on live TV and still get the Democrat nomination...

...she pretty much did that already.

Thanks to Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony on Thursday, we now understand why the former secretary of state never wanted anyone to see her emails and why the State Department sat on documents. Turns out those emails and papers show that the Obama administration deliberately misled the nation about the deadly events in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012.

Don’t forget how we came to this point. Mrs. Clinton complained in her testimony on Capitol Hill that past Congresses had never made the overseas deaths of U.S. officials a “partisan” issue. That’s because those past deaths had never inspired an administration to concoct a wild excuse for their occurrence, in an apparent attempt to avoid blame for a terror attack in a presidential re-election year.

The early hints that this is exactly what happened after the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans cast doubt on every White House-issued “fact” about the fiasco and led to the establishment of Rep. Trey Gowdy’s select committee.

Opinion Journal Video

Main Street Columnist Bill McGurn on Hillary Clinton's testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Photo credit: Getty Images.

What that House committee did Thursday was finally expose the initial deception. To understand the willful depth of that trickery, let’s briefly recall the history.

In early September 2012, at the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Joe Biden summarized to thunderous applause the administration’s re-election pitch: “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.” Translation: The president had revived the economy, even as he had put “al Qaeda on the run,” as Mr. Obama put it. Five days later, four Americans in Benghazi were dead. It appeared the White House had slept through a terror attack on the anniversary of 9/11.

The administration instead immediately presented the attack as a spontaneous mob backlash to an anti-Muslim YouTube video. At 10:30 on the night of the attack, Mrs. Clinton issued a statement about the violence, blaming the video. She repeated the charge in a speech the next day. President Obama gave his own speech that day, referring to the video and refusing to use the word “terrorism.”

The next day, Mrs. Clinton mentioned the video twice more. The day after that, Press Secretary Jay Carney said: “We have no information to suggest that it was a preplanned attack.” Mrs. Clinton promised the father of one of the victims that the administration would “make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.” In his weekly address, Mr. Obama talked about the video. When the Libyan president said there was evidence the attack was planned months in advance, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice contradicted him. She instead told five Sunday talk shows—five days after the attack—that “based on the best information we have to date,” the attack “began spontaneously” in response to “this hateful video.” Mr. Obama for two full weeks continued to talk about YouTube.

Here’s what the Benghazi committee found in Thursday’s hearing. Two hours into Mrs. Clinton’s testimony, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan referred to an email Mrs. Clinton sent to her daughter, Chelsea, at 11:12 the night of the attack, or 45 minutes after the secretary of state had issued a statement blaming YouTube-inflamed mobs. Her email reads: “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Queda-like group.” Mrs. Clinton doesn’t hedge in the email; no “it seems” or “it appears.” She tells her daughter that on the anniversary of 9/11 an al Qaeda group assassinated four Americans.

That same evening, Mrs. Clinton spoke on the phone with Libyan President Mohamed Magariaf, around 8 p.m. The notes from that conversation, in a State Department email, describe her as saying: “We have asked for the Libyan government to provide additional security to the compound immediately as there is a gun battle ongoing, which I understand Ansar as Sharia [sic] is claiming responsibility for.” Ansar al Sharia is al Qaeda’s affiliate on the Arabian Peninsula. So several hours into the attack, Mrs. Clinton already believed that al Qaeda was attacking U.S. facilities.

The next afternoon, Mrs. Clinton had a call with the Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Kandil. The notes from it are absolutely damning. The secretary of state tells him: “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack—not a protest.” And yet Mrs. Clinton, and Ms. Rice and Mr. Obama for days and days continued to spin the video lie.

In other news Thursday, Judicial Watch unveiled a new cable, sent the day after the attack, from the Defense Intelligence Agency to the State Department Command Center. It explains that the attack was carried out by a “Salafi terrorism group” in “retaliation for the killing of an Al Qaeda operative.”

The cable says “the attack was an organized operation with specific information that the U.S. Ambassador was present.” The cable included details about the group’s movements and the weapons it used in the assault.

Count on the Obama administration to again resort to blaming “confusing” and “conflicting” information at the time for its two-week spin. That was Mrs. Clinton’s flimsy excuse at the hearing. But her own conversations prove she was in no doubt about what happened—while it was still happening.

Democrats on the committee spent most of the hearing complaining that it was a waste of time and money. Quite the opposite. It was invaluable, for the clarity provided by those three emails alone.

Reprehensible.

I head a liberal from San Francisco crowing about how Hillary had won at the hearing, but he doesn't seem to understand how so many of Hillary's answers revolt normal people or how her answers are going to be the prime feature of the 2016 campaign a year from now.

//It was only a day after Clinton appeared in front of the Benghazi Select Committee, scoring what the mainstream media declared  a great victory by seeming “presidential.” Ironically, the same performance made me dislike her more than ever, as now we had absolute email evidence she lied to the parents of the Benghazi victims at their funeral when she already knew the four had been killed in a terror attack, not because of some amateurish video.  (Yes, I had always strongly suspected it, but now there was concrete evidence.) Yet as Charles Woods, Tyrone Woods’ father, wrote in his diary from that day: ”I gave Hillary a hug and shook her hand. And she said we are going to have the film maker arrested who was responsible for the death of my son.”

As a parent, I can’t imagine anything more despicable than the secretary of state (and the president) lying to me at my son’s funeral about his death while in service to our country. What kind of human being does that?  It makes my head spin.//

Which do you believe?

That an elderly woman has early onset Alzheimers or..

...that everyone else misremembers Hillary blaming the video?

Clinton Claims She Didn't Blame Benghazi Attack on a YouTube Video

Throwing the First Amendment under the bus.

Remember how the Clinton administration explained that the Benghazi attack was the righteous response of Muslims to provocation?

We knew they were lying.

They knew they were lying.

Revealed: Hillary told Egyptian PM day after Benghazi attack that Mohammed movie had nothing to do with it.

//But it gets worse. Remember this post? Charles Woods, the father of former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, who was killed in Benghazi, claims that none other than Hillary Clinton told him after the attack, “‘We will make sure the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.’”According to the document Jordan mentions in the clip, she knew the whole time that the movie was a red herring. Why was she still telling people, including family members of the fallen, things to the contrary when she was telling Chelsea Clinton in e-mails the day it all went down that an “Al Qaeda-like group” was responsible? (And why, for that matter, did she think the U.S. government should or could arrest and prosecute a man for making a film it didn’t like?) Did some other intelligence come to light later suggesting that the movie was a motive for the Benghazi attack? If so, how come Hillary didn’t mention that to Jordan today?//