"Adam Schiff falls right into Bill Maher’s trap..."

Adam Schiff falls right into Bill Maher’s trap as he criticizes a statement he thought was from Trump but was actually from Obama.

MAHER: “This statement from the administration: ‘The president had the constitutional authority to direct the use of military force because he could… pic.twitter.com/5jg3wpdAQZ

— Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) March 7, 2026

And earlier in last night's show:

Bill Maher apologizes to his liberal audience as he delivers this take on the “Iran war”:

“This week, war. Did you hear about that thing?”

“We bombed Iran, and it’s going on now. If you expected me to say I hate it, I don’t. Sorry.”

“Sorry. And you cannot name one horrible… pic.twitter.com/rHnGhMpK2g

— Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) March 7, 2026

"So we're dealing with what we're dealing with right now."

NEW: I asked House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) about Nancy Pelosi saying in 2011 that President Obama didn't need Congressional approval to bomb Libya, but Dems now say President Trump needs approval to bomb Iran?

Jeffries said Iran is "very different" & told me "I… pic.twitter.com/SkLr1R5wr1

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) March 3, 2026

"We're dealing with what we're dealing with right now" is an excuse for the ages. "This is different," he begins, and yet he hasn't worked out how it's different. He just needs it to be different. A dangerous move when you're winging it and don't know the facts of the things you're saying are different. There are a few seconds — 0:26 to 0:33 — where Jeffries knows he's in trouble. He mutters the hilarious line, "First of all, I was not in Congress," and shows a flash of shame before resetting with the all-purpose segue "So we're dealing with what we're dealing with right now."

"The Trump administration is planning to transport a group of immigrants to Libya on a U.S. military plane..."

"The nationalities of the migrants were not immediately clear.... The country is racked with conflict, and human rights groups have called conditions in its network of migrant detention centers 'horrific' and 'deplorable.' The Libya operation falls in line with the Trump administration’s effort to not only deter migrants from trying to enter the country illegally but also to send a strong message to those in the country illegally that they can be deported to countries where they could face brutal conditions.... A major transit point for Europe-bound migrants, Libya operates numerous detention facilities for refugees and migrants. Amnesty International branded those sites 'horrific' and 'a hellscape'...."

The NYT reports.

Meanwhile: "Trump offers illegal immigrants $1,000 to 'self-deport'" (BBC): "The scheme relies on migrants utilising the CBP Home app, which can be used to confirm that person's return to their home country...." So, part of the incentive to self-deport is that you get to go to your home country. The threat of removal to Libya (or Rwanda) is powerful. 

Susan Rice talks about doing Sunday show appearances after the Benghazi attack — She was "a team player."

From an interview in The Atlantic with Edward-Isaac Dovere:

Dovere: The Sunday-show appearances around the Benghazi attack have become so much of your public identity. Your mother actually warned you not to do it, and thought Hillary Clinton should have instead. In the end, that became an issue getting in your way to be Obama’s secretary of state, and continues to be an issue Republicans attack you over now.

Rice: She said, “Why you?” And I said, “The White House asked me to do it.” And she’s like, “Well, where’s Hillary?” And I said that she’d been asked, but declined. And I presumed—I hadn’t had this conversation with her—that she had had an extraordinarily draining week, having lost four Americans in an American overseas facility, and all the pain and trauma that that entails for the people of the State Department, for the families, for everybody. But I agreed, as a team player. And her instinct was, “I smell a rat. You shouldn’t do it.” And I said, “Mom, don’t be ridiculous. I’ve done this many times before.” She was absolutely right.

Dovere: What did that experience teach you about the way that politics, and at least cable news, political media work?

"Instagram will test hiding the number of likes and views that photos and videos receive — a central aspect of its platform — to rein in competitive tendencies and make the experience a little 'less pressurized.'"

"Instagram’s head, Adam Mosseri, said the change is designed to minimize the stress of posting online, where users can fixate on how many likes their videos draw. 'We want people to worry a little bit less about how many likes they’re getting on Instagram and spend a bit more time connecting with the people that they care about,' he said Tuesday during Facebook’s annual developer conference, F8.... Hiding the counts could potentially introduce new problems for users, such as diminishing the feeling of camaraderie from liking a popular post tied to a social cause or a massive in-joke.... Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey said last week that if he could build his social network anew, he would rethink its emphasis on likes and retweets as markers of success. In a prototype of the Twitter app, dubbed twttr, the company is experimenting with removing like and retweet counts by default."

WaPo reports.

Meanwhile, "Facebook bans extremist leaders including Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos for being ‘dangerous’/The bans are a sign that the social network is more aggressively enforcing its hate speech policies under pressure from civil rights groups" (WaPo). That article has this interesting correction: "Louis Farrakhan is an extremist leader who has espoused anti-Semitic views. An earlier version of this story and headline incorrectly included him in a list of far-right leaders."

That correction had me spending some time reading Farrakhan's Wikipedia page — because I realized I couldn't really place him squarely on the right or the left. I learned some interesting things about him: 1. He's very old (85), 2. He's "speculated that his father.... may have been Jewish," 3. He was good enough as a child at playing the violin to win an award on the Ted Mack Original Amateur Hour (in 1946), 4. He's wife's name, originally, was Betsy Ross, 5. In the 50s, he was a professional  calypso singer  known as "The Charmer" and, later, "Calypso Gene," 6. After he joined the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad required all members to "choose between music and the Nation of Islam," which he did, but only after doing one more music gig, at "a Jewish resort in the Catskills," 7. He originally supported Obama, but rejected him and called him "the first Jewish president" because of the  intervention in Libya ("We voted for our brother Barack, a beautiful human being with a sweet heart... Now he's an assassin"), 8. He embraces Dianetics and has said "All white people should flock to L. Ron Hubbard. You can still be a Christian; you just won't be a devil Christian. You can still be a Jew, but you won't be a satanic Jew," 9.  He said Hitler "wasn't great for me as a Black man but he was a great German and he rose Germany up from the ashes of her defeat by the united force of all of Europe and America after the First World War.... Now I'm not proud of Hitler's evil toward Jewish people, but that's a matter of record. He rose Germany up from nothing."

"West African migrants are being bought and sold openly in modern-day slave markets in Libya, survivors have told a UN agency helping them return home."

"Trafficked people passing through Libya have previously reported violence, extortion and slave labour. But the new testimony from the International Organization for Migration suggests that the trade in human beings has become so normalised that people are being traded in public...."

One 34-year-old survivor from Senegal said he was taken to a dusty lot in the south Libyan city of Sabha after crossing the desert from Niger in a bus organised by people smugglers. The group had paid to be taken to the coast, where they planned to risk a boat trip to Europe, but their driver suddenly said middlemen had not passed on his fees and put his passengers up for sale.

“The men on the pick-up were brought to a square, or parking lot, where a kind of slave trade was happening. There were locals – he described them as Arabs – buying sub-Saharan migrants,” said Livia Manante, an IOM officer based in Niger who helps people wanting to return home....

Meanwhile, in Europe: "The number of people reported as potential victims of slavery and human trafficking in the UK has more than doubled in the past three years."

"We are starting to recognise a lot more cases as being human trafficking cases," [said Tamara Barnett, from the Human Trafficking Foundation]. "It used to be very much seen as just the trafficking of women into the sex trade. There was quite a narrow view of what it involved but now there is definitely a broader view of what is human trafficking."...

A man who was trafficked to work in the UK from Poland has spoken to the BBC about his experience working in the West Midlands.... "To begin with it was really good, then they started taking half my money and I felt like I was imprisoned," he said. "I started work at 7.30am and finished at 17:00. I should have earned between £380-£400 a week. The money was being transferred into my bank account, but when I went to withdraw it, a person came with me and I would only get half of it. I realised this was definitely wrong and I escaped."

WaPo's Fact Checker looks back on "Obama’s biggest whoppers."

"The Fact Checker started during the 2008 campaign and then went on hiatus for the first two years of President Obama’s presidency before becoming a permanent Washington Post feature in 2011..."

Was the hiatus because you didn't want to fact-check Obama?

We get to see 10 4-Pinocchio statements by Obama, in chronological order, but only beginning after the first 2 years.

The most-remembered one is: "If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it."

The one that relates to the tricking of Mitt Romney was: "The day after Benghazi happened, I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism." What Obama had said the day after "Benghazi happened" was: "No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for."

That vague "no acts of terror" must have been carefully chosen, because he said it again, twice, the next day (with "act" instead of "acts"),  "No act of terror will dim the light of the values that we proudly shine on the rest of the world," and "no act of terror will go unpunished." That states a general proposition without saying that Benghazi was an act of terror. And there is a distinction between "terror" and "terrorism" that Glenn Kessler (the Fact Checker) finds important. 

How does Julian Assange feel about the impending Trump presidency...

... which he played some part in making happen:

If the question is how I personally feel about the situation, I am mixed: Hillary Clinton and the network around her imprisoned one of our alleged sources for 35 years, Chelsea Manning, tortured her according to the United Nations, in order to implicate me personally. According to our publications Hillary Clinton was the chief proponent and the architect of the war against Libya. It is clear that she pursued this war as a staging effort for her Presidential bid. It wasn't even a war for an ideological purpose. This war ended up producing the refugee crisis in Europe, changing the political colour of Europe, killing more than 40,000 people within a year in Libya, while the arms from Libya went to Mali and other places, boosting or causing civil wars, including the Syrian catastrophe. If someone and their network behave like that, then there are consequences. Internal and external opponents are generated. Now there is a separate question on what Donald Trump means.

So, what does he think Trump means?

Hillary Clinton's election would have been a consolidation of power in the existing ruling class of the United States. Donald Trump is not a DC insider, he is part of the wealthy ruling elite of the United States, and he is gathering around him a spectrum of other rich people and several idiosyncratic personalities. They do not by themselves form an existing structure, so it is a weak structure which is displacing and destabilising the pre-existing central power network within DC. It is a new patronage structure which will evolve rapidly, but at the moment its looseness means there are opportunities for change in the United States: change for the worse and change for the better."

Trump chaos... as told by the NYT.

I don't trust the NYT to tell the story straight, so I'm picking my way "Trump Staff Shake-Up Slows Transition to Near Halt" looking for bits of real news and cherry picking evidence of bias:

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition operation plunged into disarray on Tuesday with the abrupt resignation of Mike Rogers, who had handled national security matters....

An aide to Mr. Trump’s transition team who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal matters said that the delay was taking place because the wording of [a legal document required to conduct the transition] was being altered and updated, and that it was likely to be signed later Tuesday.

Still, the slow and uncertain start to what is normally a rapid and meticulously planned transfer of power could have profound implications for Mr. Trump’s nascent administration, challenging the efforts of the president-elect to gain control of the federal bureaucracy and begin building a staff fully briefed on what he will face in the Oval Office on Day 1.

The chaos caught the attention of some senior Republicans who criticized Mr. Trump during his campaign but said after he won that they would not necessarily rule out joining his administration or advising him....

The turmoil at the highest levels of his staff upended months of planning and preparation for a process that many describe as drinking from a fire hose even in the most orderly of circumstance....

So... Rogers left and they're finishing that legal document. But: disarray, chaos, turmoil...

I'm utterly jaded by the emotive prose from the NYT. 

By the way, who is Mike Rogers? Here's Bret Baier and panelist Laura Ingraham talking about him on November 11th:

"Here's a candidate [Trump] who ran in part on the Benghazi issue. You've got the 13 Hours guys that endorsed Donald Trump. And you've got a guy running your national security transition that comes under fire from conservatives over Benghazi," Baier said.

"The 13 Hours guys were infuriated, fuming when that report came out, because the report basically called their integrity into question—said that these heroes were doing it just to sell a book," Ingraham added.

Watch the video at that link. If you're a Trump supporter, I don't think you'll feel bad losing Mike Rogers.

Because I think the NYT is terribly slanted toward helping the Clintons, I read everything with an eye toward getting to normal.

I think: How would the equivalent material be presented in an article about Trump? And then I try to average it out, back to the middle. It's annoying, but it's possibly a good mental exercise, not unlike what I do when I read what I have to read for my job: judicial opinions. I don't have to read The New York Times, but where else am I going to get the news? Everything else is also bad in its own way, and I'm accustomed to the bad that is The New York Times.

This morning what I'm reading is "Chelsea Clinton’s Frustrations and Devotion Shown in Hacked Emails," by Amy Chozick. I assume the damaging material — which would be right up front in a Trump article — begins to appear many paragraphs down. I'm not going to tarry at the mushy beginning. (The first paragraph reads like a children's book: "Chelsea Clinton was alarmed.")

So let's skip ahead:

Though her housecleaning role had Hillary Clinton’s tacit approval (“My mother strongly agreed,” Ms. Clinton said in one email laying out proposed changes at the foundation)....

Ugh! Not far enough! (But let me just say that language-oriented feminists would chide Chozick for that "housecleaning" metaphor.)

Ms. Clinton, 31 at the time, had held various jobs, including positions at McKinsey & Company and Avenue Capital, a hedge fund owned by a major Clinton donor. She had degrees from Stanford, Oxford and Columbia but had not quite found a way to harness all of her academic wherewithal...

Translation: Chelsea was at loose ends, drifting, unable or unwilling to make anything out of her long and very elite education. The word "wherewithal" is particularly silly, especially with the mixed-metaphor verb "harness." "Wherewithal," the noun, is usually a polysyllabic way to say money. The unnecessary reaching for polysyllabic words is an old-fashioned form of humor. H.W. Fowler cautioned against it all the way back in 1908. What is this urge, suddenly, to write like George Eliot or Charles Dickens? They were not bullshitting us. Are you?

And the funny thing is, Chozick sees that Chelsea Clinton is dipping into inane polysyllababble*:

Ms. Clinton often gravitated to weighty policy discussions and interspersed statistics and SAT words into casual conversations.

Hours after the 2012 attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya, she mused about the unrest in Egypt and Libya in a late-night email to her mother. “Such anathema to us as Americans — and a painful reminder of how long it took modernism to take root in the U.S., after the Enlightenment, the 14th, 15th, 16th, 19th amendments,” she wrote. “Much to discuss when we talk, hopefully tomorrow?”

In another email addressed to “Dad, Mom,” Ms. Clinton seemed apologetic, writing, “I hope this mini-behemoth is not rife with grammatical errors or inadvertent gaps; I am sorry if either true.”

"SAT words" is putting it kindly. Why would a 31-year-old woman who went to Stanford, Oxford,** and Columbia use words like "anathema" and "behemoth"*** so badly, and why would the only offspring of Bill and Hillary Clinton even feel the need to try to impress her parents in the first place? What did they do to deserve it? Does it have anything to do with why Chelsea was at loose ends so late in her privileged life and why they installed her in their charitable operation?

Now, the meat of the Chozick piece is the "cascade of grievances, gossip and infighting" that the installation of Chelsea unleashed at the foundation:

Ms. Clinton had already started to fret about the intermingling of foundation business with Teneo, the corporate consulting firm co-founded by Douglas J. Band, one of her father’s closest aides. She suggested an audit of the charity and wrote that she was concerned that Teneo’s principals had been “hustling” business at foundation gatherings....

Band fought back with a 13-page memo about all the millions he'd raised for the foundation and Bill Clinton:

“We have solicited and obtained, as appropriate, in-kind services for the president and his family — for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like,” Mr. Band wrote.

The subtext was clear: Where Ms. Clinton saw a messy overlapping of business and charity that could haunt both of her parents, Mr. Band saw an ungrateful daughter who was naïve about how what he called “Bill Clinton Inc.” made its money, and how her own expensive lifestyle was funded.

“I just don’t think any of this is right and that we should be treated this way when no one else is, only because CVC has nothing better to do and need justify her existence,” he wrote in one email, using the initials for Chelsea Victoria Clinton. Mr. Band, who had already planned to leave the foundation to focus on Teneo, often expressed frustration at the global charity’s nepotism, pointing to Ms. Clinton’s installing her friends in central roles....

That is buried in the center of Chozick's piece, which proceeds into some fluff about a note "from the Bon Jovis" and Bill Clinton "buying clorox wipes" and Chelsea's feeling "profoundly disturbed" about the Haitian earthquake. Remember the headline: The idea is to leave you with an amorphous, generalized empathy for Chelsea with her frustrations and daughterly devotion.

But the story from the leaked emails is about the inner workings of the Clinton foundation — how the Clintons got rich finagling in a way that Band justified and Chelsea seems to have been able to see was quite wrong.
_____________________________

* I just coined that word, polysyllababble. But Google tells me it has been used twice before in the history of mankind as revealed by the internet, so let's just say I discovered it independently and I'm surprised I'm in a group as small as 3.

** Note that I, unlike Chozick, use the Oxford comma after "Oxford."

*** The Oxford English Dictionary defines "behemoth" as "An animal mentioned in the book of Job; probably the hippopotamus; but also used in modern literature as a general expression for one of the largest and strongest animals."

"No Tie to Global Terrorism Is Seen" headlines the NYT.

That appeared at the NYT yesterday, at the top of the front page, and you can see the time stamp: 3:20 PM.

That caught my eye because of the way the NYT, in an earlier report, blogged here, made Donald Trump seem bad for for saying "I must tell you that just before I got off the plane, a bomb went off in New York and nobody knows exactly what’s going on." The Times followed that by saying that Hillary Clinton "seemed to scold Mr. Trump for his quick assessment. 'I think it’s always wiser to wait until you have information before making conclusions,' Mrs. Clinton said." The Times omitted what Hillary said right before that: "I've been briefed about the bombings in New York and New Jersey." All we had were 2 candidates having heard about what happened and calling it a bomb. But the NYT presented it to look as though Trump was impulsive and Hillary was sober and thoughtful.

How little should it take before we jump to impugn others for "making conclusions"? If we're going to be super-sensitive, no one will escape reproach. How was it possible for the NYT to say "No Tie to Global Terrorism Is Seen" less than a day after a bomb explodes with an investigation getting underway?

Meanwhile, this morning, we're getting a new report — "Police Raid New Jersey Home in Search of Manhattan Bomber":

Hours after five pipe bombs were discovered near a train station in Elizabeth, N.J., federal agents and the police raided a home nearby early Monday morning as part of the sweeping search for the person or people responsible for Saturday night’s bombing in Manhattan.

The police released a photograph of a 28-year-old man, described as a naturalized citizen of Afghan descent, , [sic] Ahmad Khan Rahami, who is wanted in connection with the attack.

It's just a name. Just a place of origin. Remember: It’s always wiser to wait until you have information before making conclusions.

ADDED: It's dangerous to elevate Hillary Clinton for issuing the sober bromide "it’s always wiser to wait until you have information before making conclusions," because it makes me want to think of the times when she made a conclusion before she had information. For example: "We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with."

"House Benghazi Panel Finds No New Evidence of Wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton."

That's the headline in The NYT. Key word: new.

The 800-page report, however, included some new details about the night of the attacks, and the context in which it occurred, and it delivered a broad rebuke of government agencies like the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department — and the officials who led them — for failing to grasp the acute security risks in the Libyan city, and especially for maintaining outposts in Benghazi that they could not protect.

The committee, led by Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, also harshly criticized an internal State Department investigation that it said had allowed officials like Mrs. Clinton, then the secretary of state, to effectively choose who would investigate their actions. In addition, it reiterated Republicans’ complaints that the Obama administration had sought to thwart the investigation by withholding witnesses and evidence.

Why did Trump say — with no evidence — that "Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed" during the Benghazi attack?

A few days ago, NBC's Lester Holt confronted Donald Trump about his statement, in a speech, that during the Benghazi attack, Ambassador Chris Stevens "was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed."

Trump's response was: "Were you there? Were you there? Were you with her?" That is, he goes on the offensive. Instead of taking any responsibility for substantiating his charge, he acts like he can get away with saying anything that other people don't step up and disprove.

And Holt lets him get away with that ridiculous debate move. Accepting the defensive position, Holt says: "She has testified before the committee that she wasn't asleep, it happened during the daytime. There's no evidence."

Trump's response is scattershot, mixing the idea that she could have been literally asleep with the argument that "sleep" was really more of a metaphor:  "It happened all during the day and the story was going on for a long period of time...  and she was asleep at the wheel, whether she was sleeping or not, who knows if she was sleeping..."

My first reaction was: ridiculous! But then I heard something yesterday on "Fox News Sunday" and flipped into thinking that the very ridiculousness of it is a devious trick. Chris Wallace confronted Newt Gingrich about the "soundly slept in her bed" quote:

WALLACE: Now, Mr. Speaker, you can certainly argue about how Hillary Clinton handled Benghazi. But the fact is, the attack happened at 3:00 or 4:00 here in the afternoon in Washington. And she was working late into the night. As I say, there's plenty to attack her on. But why not stick to the facts?

GINGRICH: Well, first of all, I've had different people say different things about what she did that night and what her instructions were. Second --

WALLACE: She wasn't asleep is the point.

GINGRICH: OK. She certainly --

WALLACE: Maybe she should have been, but she wasn't.

The transcript notes "laughter" over Wallace's little joke. And Gingrich jumps past any controversy over whether Hillary was sleeping and sleeping soundly and in her bed. And here's where I want you to see what I saw, that "soundly slept in her bed" is a trap.

GINGRICH: OK. I think that on a lot of things people can argue about that Trump says and that Hillary says, but the objective fact is there were over 600 requests for security from Libya. Now, that number came from the chairman of the intelligence committee, not from Donald Trump. They were ignored. The fact is that in the end, there was no effective effort to respond. The fact is, she clearly lied about why it occurred. And again, you had families of the people who were killed who say she lied to them. So, I think this is a debate — they can get into details of picking a fight with Donald Trump. This is a debate I think they're not going to win, because on the larger framing of the debate, the country is overwhelming going to be with Trump....

That is, Hillary Clinton doesn't want to go into the subject of Benghazi. She'd like to close the door on it or view it from a distance as part of her vast collection of experience. But Trump is laying out a particular detail — that she soundly slept in her bed — a provocative lie that Hillary and her proxies will be tempted to try to correct. If they go there, then the specifics of Benghazi are getting talked about again, and it's not good for Hillary.

She and her supporters may think that it's worth it, because it's such a great opportunity to show people Trump's reckless disregard for the truth, but I think he thinks he's placing the winning bet, because: 1. Attention to Benghazi hurts her, 2. He seems to be okay with brazenly standing his ground, and 3. There's the path of retreat to metaphor: She was "asleep at the wheel," unaware and inept, even if awake.

As Chris Wallace's joke had it: What she did was worse than if she'd been sleeping. She should have been sleeping. Benghazi might have worked out better if she'd been out of the picture. That's where that conversation ends up going. So I'm speculating that he threw out a blatant fiction as an irresistible conversation starter.

"Can I just finish the two wars we're already in before you go looking for a third one?"

Said Robert Gates when Barack Obama asked him for his opinion on intervention in Libya.

From an interview on "Face the Nation" today. John Dickerson had asked Gates about what he thought of Ben Rhodes referring to the American foreign policy establishment as "the blob":

Hillary says "we didn't lose a single person" in Libya.

That's going to get a response.

"In a cobblestone plaza, under an Ottoman clock tower, men lounge in the sun with the paraphernalia of cafe culture..."

"... croissants, cellphones, cigarettes and paper cups of nus-nus, a silky coffee drink with a dash of milk and cream. In the best shopping areas, near the old Italian buildings, there are gyms and pizza parlors and gleaming outlets for European fashion brands. Not many war zones can boast Benetton or Marks & Spencer or, as Tripoli does, a well-stocked Boss outlet.... 'It’s become like America, a land of opportunity — for kidnappers,' said Mohanned el Mahjoub, a chatty 30-year-old militia commander, as we sped through Tripoli one night in his hulking four-wheel-drive Jeep."

From "Tripoli, a Tense and Listless City With Gunmen and a Well-Stocked Hugo Boss Outlet," by Declan Walsh in the NYT. In case you've been wondering, what is it like, these days, living in Libya.

"The president was wary. The secretary of state was persuasive. But the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi left Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven."

"This is the story of how a woman whose Senate vote for the Iraq war may have doomed her first presidential campaign nonetheless doubled down and pushed for military action in another Middle Eastern country. As she once again seeks the White House, campaigning in part on her experience as the nation’s chief diplomat, an examination of the intervention she championed shows her at what was arguably her moment of greatest influence as secretary of state. It is a working portrait rich with evidence of what kind of president she might be, and especially of her expansive approach to the signal foreign-policy conundrum of today: whether, when and how the United States should wield its military power in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.... The New York Times’s examination of the intervention offers a detailed accounting of how Mrs. Clinton’s deep belief in America’s power to do good in the world ran aground in a tribal country with no functioning government, rival factions and a staggering quantity of arms. The Times interviewed more than 50 American, Libyan and European officials, including many of the principal actors. Virtually all agreed to comment on the record. They expressed regret, frustration and in some cases bewilderment about what went wrong and what might have been done differently..."

Bill Clinton is brutally confronted over the VA and Benghazi — "Your wife lied over 4 coffins!" — and all we see is his mild demand to be allowed to respond...

... escalating into a politely stated request to "shut up"...



... and we never hear his actual answer, because the camera goes out the door with the ejected questioner. Maybe there were other cameras, and we'll see the rest, but this was brutal. It's easy to create this kind of disruption and hard to know what the speaker can do... other than support a candidate who has not inspired that kind of anger.

Drudge presents it like this:

Trump pays for a showing of "13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi" in Urbandale, Iowa.

"Mr. Trump would like all Americans to know the truth about what happened at Benghazi... The theater is paid for. The tickets are paid for. You just have to RSVP."

By the way, Ted Cruz mentioned the movie by name in the beginning of his closing statement at last night's debate. He said: "'13 Hours' — tomorrow morning, a new movie will debut about the incredible bravery of the men fighting for their lives in Benghazi and the politicians that abandoned them."

"Clinton talked at this last DNC debate about her failure as Secretary of State as if she was successful," Facebooks Jim Webb...

... because that's where he's speaking from now, not the debate stage anymore.

While she held that office, the U.S. spent about $2 billion backing the Libyan uprising against Qadaffi. The uprising, which was part of the Arab Spring, led directly to Qaddafi being removed from power and killed by rebel forces in 2011. Now some 2,000 ISIS terrorists have established a foothold in Libya. Sophisticated weapons from Qaddafi's arsenal—including up to 15,000 man-portable, surface-to-air missiles have apparently fallen into the hands of radical Islamists throughout the region. For a Secretary of State (and a Presidential administration) this is foreign policy leadership at its worst.

ADDED: Here's a report on the debate. Hillary was asked "How much responsibility do you bear for the chaos" in Libya.

AND: There's some talk about Webb maybe having the idea of running as an independent. Since he never got any traction as a Democratic Party candidate, it's hard to take this seriously. I assume he wants to be a voice, and we are reading his Facebook post. If he were to say he was an independent candidate, would that amplify his voice and boost his stature and credibility? He's just a voice, either way. To me, your credibility is better if you present yourself as what you really are.