"It's been almost four years since Hillary Clinton came on a Sunday show."

Said John Dickerson, introducing Hillary Clinton on "Face the Nation." I watched it. Here's the transcript. I feel as though I should pick something specific out, but I mostly have a general observation, which is that it's exasperating to listen to her because she follows a pattern of beginning with a short, perhaps inadequate answer to the question asked, and then she dumps paragraphs of material as if the goal is to make you forget the question or at least lose interest in whether an answer will ever arrive. She'd be a lot more appealing to me if she gave a short, clear answer and then just stopped.

I'll give one example:

DICKERSON: Was [Benghazi] your 3:00 a.m. phone call? And how well did you handle that crisis, by the standard you raised in that ad?
CLINTON: Well, of course it was a crisis. 

This looks like it's responsive, but the question wasn't was it a crisis, but is this the sort of thing you were talking about in the old 3:00 a.m. ad.

And we lost four brave Americans, including the person that I asked the president to send as ambassador, Chris Stevens. But we live in a dangerous world. And even our diplomats are at threat. And that goes all the way back to, for goodness' sake, taking over our embassy in Tehran or the bombings of our embassy in Beirut, when President Reagan was in charge. This is a dangerous world. And I think what we had to do during that period of time, in trying to protect our people after the attack on the consulate, getting them evacuated, not only working on what was going on in Libya, because, remember, we had embassies that were under attack or threatened to attack by terrorist groups across North Africa, indeed, across a much larger swathe of the world. So, I think it was terribly tragic, what happened. I immediately asked for an independent review, just like former secretaries of state did. And I made that public. And the only other person who did that was Secretary Albright after our embassies were bombed in Africa. So, my view on this is, we have to learn things. And we are always learning. We learned after Beirut. We learned after Tanzania and Kenya. We have learned after Benghazi, but we're not going to be able to represent the United States working out of hermetically sealed tanks. We are going to have to be out in the world. 

None of this addresses whether she met the standard she referred to in that ad. It's awfully close to her old "what difference does it make?" remark. It's a dangerous world and we have to be out in it. We're always learning.