If you wondered why the sky is full of flying pigs, and why the rumor is spreading that hell is freezing over, it’s because the Press and the mainstream media in general are beginning to notice that the feet of Obama are made of clay – or at least that his hands are, the persons who administer his policies.

This criticism of Attorney General Eric Holder, claiming to know nothing about his department’s illegal raid on Associated Press phone records in order to investigate the source of an information leak, comes from the pen of Dana Milbank writing in the left-leaning Washington Post:

As the nation’s top law enforcement official, Eric Holder is privy to all kinds of sensitive information. But he seems to be proud of how little he knows.

Holder was appearing before the House Judiciary Committee for an oversight hearing. He was asked -

Why didn’t his Justice Department inform the Associated Press, as the law requires, before pawing through reporters’ phone records?

“I do not know,” the attorney general told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday afternoon, “why that was or was not done. I simply don’t have a factual basis to answer that question.”

Why didn’t the DOJ seek the AP’s cooperation, as the law also requires, before issuing subpoenas?

“I don’t know what happened there,” Holder replied. “I was recused from the case.”

He “recused” himself from the case because, he said, he was “ a possessor of information eventually leaked” – which leak his department was investigating. But if he had the information, was it not therefore already leaked? And what reason would there be in that for him to “recuse” himself? If he were likely to be  investigated as one of the people who could have, might have, done the leaking, he would be right to recuse himself, as he couldn’t be both investigator and investigatee. But the leak was of  a plan by the Intelligence Services. If Horder heard of it because it was leaked, and therefore had his department investigate it, wasn’t that the proper thing for him to do? Or is he afraid that not having his department investigate the leak when he first heard of it makes him vulnerable to investigation? Curiouser and curiouser!

Why, asked the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), was the whole matter handled in a manner that appears “contrary to the law and standard procedure”?

“I don’t have a factual basis to answer the questions that you have asked, because I was recused,” the attorney general said.

On and on Holder went: “I don’t know. I don’t know. . . . I would not want to reveal what I know. . . . I don’t know why that didn’t happen. . . . I know nothing, so I’m not in a position really to answer.”

Holder seemed to regard this ignorance as a shield protecting him and the Justice Department from all criticism of the Obama administration’s assault on press freedoms. But his claim that his “recusal” from the case exempted him from all discussion of the matter didn’t fly with Republicans or Democrats on the committee, who justifiably saw his recusal as more of an abdication. …

“[I]t seems to me clear that the actions of the department have, in fact, impaired the First Amendment,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) told Holder. “Reporters who might have previously believed that a confidential source would speak to them would no longer have that level of confidence, because those confidential sources are now going to be chilled in their relationship with the press.”

In a sense, the two topics that dogged Holder most on Wednesday — the AP phone records and the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups — were one and the same. In both cases, Americans are being punished and intimidated for exercising their right of free expression — by the taxing authorities, in the conservatives’ case, and by federal prosecutors, in the reporters’ case.

But Holder cared so little about those two issues that he said not a peep about either the IRS or the AP in his opening statement. When he was questioned about the AP case, his first response was to suggest the criticism of him was political. “I mean, there’s been a lot of criticism,” Holder said. “In fact, the head of the RNC [Republican National Committee] called for my resignation, in spite of the fact that I was not the person involved in that decision.” …

[Holder]  may have recused himself from the leak probe that led to the searches of reporters’ phone records (a decision he took so lightly that he didn’t put it in writing), but he isn’t recused from defending the First Amendment. 

Didn’t the deputy attorney general who approved the subpoenas have the same potential conflict of interest that Holder claimed?

“I don’t know.”

When did Holder recuse himself?

“I’m not sure.”

How much time was spent exploring alternatives to the subpoenas?

“I don’t know, because, as I said, I recused myself.”

But when the Justice Department undermines the Constitution, recusal is no excuse.

Strictly speaking, the word “recuse” can only apply to a judge or juror: he can recuse himself from a case because of a conflict of interest.

But Eric Holder sets a precedent that extends the application of the term.

It’s a great tactic: avoid being held responsible for whatever goes wrong in the organization under your control by “recusing” yourself. 

The head of BP might have recused himself when his company’s oil rig polluted the waters of the gulf.

The heads of Enron and Solyndra might have repelled accusations of mismanagement  by recusing themselves.

The Nazi war criminals might have escaped trial at Nuremberg by recusing themselves.

Napoleon might have avoided exile on St Helena by recusing himself.

And just think of the cosmic and historical disasters from which omnipotent “God” could claim to have recused himself!

Obama might elude responsibility for capitulating to the Islamic enemy in Benghazi, using the IRS to intimidate his political opponents, subverting the First and Second Amendments, plunging the US into deep debt, and numerous other calamities which he should be called to answer for, by simply recusing himself.

He could try it anyway, if Holder gets away with it.

*

These important points about collaboration – or conspiracy – between Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice and the nefarious group Media Matters are made by Arnold Ahlert in an article at Front Page. They show how habitual the corruption of the Obama DOJ has become:

Internal DOJ emails obtained in 2012 by the Daily Caller revealed the leftist advocacy group regularly collaborated with the DOJ to attack reporters who covered DOJ scandals.

Tracy Schmaler, Office of Public Affairs Director for the Justice Department, worked with Media Matters staffers to attack a number of prominent journalists, including Townhall Magazine’s Katie Pavlich, Breitbart.com writers Joel Pollak and Ken Klukowski, Fox News’s William LaJeunesse, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Megyn Kelly, Martha MacCallum, Bill Hemmer, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, and National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy. Former DOJ Civil Rights Division attorneys J. Christian Adams and Hans von Spakovsky were also attacked.

The Daily Caller obtained the emails after filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that was fulfilled long after the 20-business-day limit required by law.

Moreover, the Office of Public Affairs has no business conducting a political operation. Its function is to keep the public informed about what the DOJ is doing to enforce the laws. That it was more than willing to violate its mandate is a good indication of how deep the rot at the DOJ goes.

Yesterday [May 15, 2013], Eric Holder did what he does best whenever he appears before a Congressional Committee: provide as little information as possible, become indignant when anyone suggests he has acted improperly, and fob responsibility for every possible impropriety conducted by his department onto someone else – when he’s not busy stonewalling scandals. Even a contempt of Congress citation for his refusal to provide critical information in the Fast and Furious gunrunning debacle that resulted in the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, along with hundreds of Mexican nationals, including children, has failed to chasten his contempt for the rule of law, or his determination to maintain the most ideologically-compromised Department of Justice in modern history.

Holder can only serve as long as he maintains the support of President Barack Obama. That he still does, speaks volumes – about both men.

Who could possibly have foreseen that if women and gays were allowed to join the armed forces, there would be cases of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape? What an amazing development!

This is from a Washington Post report:

Military sexual assault isn’t new. In February 2004, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered a 90-day review of sexual assaults after allegations of crimes committed against female soldiers in Iraq and Kuwait. … The Pentagon’s own report last week estimated the number of military women and men victimized was up by 35 percent over the past two years. … While 70 percent of women and 83 percent of men said they “would feel free to report sexual assault without fear of reprisals to a large extent,” only 44 percent of those women who reported assaults were satisfied with their commanders’ handling of their cases; 33 percent said they were dissatisfied. In fact, only 3,374 reports of sexual assault were filed in fiscal 2012, last week’s report said, while the Pentagon survey said some 26,000 troops told the survey they had experienced “unwanted sexual contact.” Women who had been sexually harassed said that more than half of the offenders were military co-workers, 28 percent were military personnel and 27 percent were “in their military chain of command.” …

Apparently not enough is being done by the military itself to prosecute and punish sexual offenders, so now Congress may try to deal with the problem more effectively with legislation.

That will put a stop to the shenanigans, wouldn’t you say?

We found the picture via Front Page, and we quote from the article about it by Theodore Shoebat:

According to a report, the victim was a Syrian helicopter pilot who was journeying to bring food to army bases and villages around the Marraat Noman city in the Idleb province, until he was shot down, murdered and beheaded and his head cooked on a grill. …

It is vital to keep in mind that the act of cooking the head of an enemy is rooted deeply in the Islamic religion. The most famous warrior in Sunni Islam’s history, Khalid ibn Walid, decapitated the head of a man named Malik ibn Nuwayrah, before raping his wife; he placed it under a cooking pot in which he cooked food and from which he then ate …

The Hadith for this recounts:

And he [Khalid] ordered they bring his [Malik's] head and he placed it with two other rocks and he cooked on top of the three a pot, and Khalid ate from it that night in order to terrorize the renegade Arabs and others.

This story is further substantiated by the Arab scholar Ibn Khallikan, who writes the story thus:

[T]he head was put in the place of one of the three stones which supported the flesh-pot. Malik, as we have said, surpassed most men by the abundance of his hair, which was so thick, that the meat was cooked in the pot before the fire had reached the skull. …Khalid seized on the wife of Malik – or by another account he purchased her out of the booty — and married her.

We must now realize: we have not seen the full face of Islam yet; true Islam is more than just terrorism with bombs and guns; it is a cultic system which emphasizes human sacrifice and cannibalization of Allah’s enemies. …

Al Azhar University decreed that it was permissible to cannibalize enemies of Islam … human sacrifice was promoted by Safwat Hegazi … a Syrian rebel grilled a man’s head … [and] we have actual footage, recently released, of a Syrian jihadist eating the heart of his enemy. …

(To watch the disgusting video, see our post Eating their hearts out, May 13, 2013 – two days ago. There can, we think, be some doubt as to whether this is really a human head or perhaps a rubber mask on the grill; but there is no doubt that the rebel leader in the video is taking a bite of a man’s internal organ. Later he confirmed that he ate part of the victim’s lung – raw.)  

… comes tumbling down. And the media get their come-uppance.

We plundered this video from the rich stores of PowerLine. We couldn’t resist it.

We are happy to announce that L: A Novel History by Jillian Becker is recommended by PowerLine.

See it on the prestigious PowerLine mobile book shelf here.

Our text and the video it refers to come from an article in Investor’s Business Daily, by Andrew Malcolm.

He starts with a delectable irrelevance about a man who didn’t take much notice of the sun when attributing the warming of the earth to humankind:

Former journalist, former representative, former senator, former vice president, former husband, former cable channel owner, former inventor and former environmentalist barker Al Gore has obviously given up the global warming game. It’s amazing what a few hundred million petro-dollars will accomplish.

Malcolm is alluding of course to Al Gore’s sale of his TV company to Al Jazeera.

But now we turn to the sun:

Our Sun has reached middle age as stars go, about four billion years old. It’s grown about 6% in that time and — oh, look, Albert was sort of right about one thing — increased its surface temperature about 300 degrees. You probably didn’t notice. …

In another 4.5- to 5-billion years, right about the time Obama’s national debt will be paid down, our Sun will have used up all its hydrogen fuel. That begins a very long, very nasty decay process that involves cataclysmic things like collapsing and expanding in size out to envelope its three closest planets–Mercury, Venus and — oh-oh — Earth. …

Scientists know all this because, thanks to a generation of space telescopes like Hubble, we can watch the slow-motion decay of other distant suns, even though they may well actually have disappeared by the time the light of their decay story reaches Earth.

NASA is also studying our own star. The Solar Dynamics Observatory was launched three years ago. Even though it’s circling the Earth at nearly 7,000 miles an hour and the Earth itself is moving through space about 46 miles every minute, the observatory can stay focused on the Sun.

It snaps a “photo” of the Sun every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths.

This new NASA video includes images at the wavelength of 171 angstroms. … The sun particles you see are a little more than one million degrees Fahrenheit.

The four-view of the Sun near the video’s end includes additional wavelengths.

A couple of things to watch for in the fast-moving video below: At 1:11:02 you’ll see the largest solar flare of this cycle, from Aug. 9, 2011. At 1:28:07 watch the frozen Comet Lovejoy flash by on a very close encounter of the solar kind on Dec. 15, 2011. …

And at 1:51:07 that black dot zipping by in the upper left is Venus passing between Earth and the Sun, as it does every century or so. …

NASA constructed this video by taking two images per day from the observatory’s first three years.

Scientists chose this light range to allow views of the Sun’s increased activity over three years of its 11-year activity cycle. The video’s elapsed time also allows human eyes to detect the Sun’s 25-day rotation. (If it looks like the Sun tilts at times, it’s not. It’s the spacecraft rolling to recalibrate focus.)

 

Are these cannibals the same Syrian rebels that Obama and Cameron declared to-day deserve help in their fight against Bashar Assad?

Or is there a different rebel army over there, one we never get to hear of; one that punctiliously observes “the rules of war”; behaves like gentlemen towards the enemy; will establish a civilized government; and will be so grateful to Obama and Cameron that they will be friends of the West forever?

*

Update next day, May 14, 2013. Extracts from an article by Daniel Greenfield at Front Page:

Time Magazine has obtained an exclusive interview with Khalid al Hamad, a commander of the Omar al Farouk brigade of the Free Syrian Army, who was caught on video trying to eat a dead Syrian soldier’s heart. … Al Hamad has now confirmed that the video is real, and that he did indeed take a bite of the soldier’s lung. … Al Hamad, who is Sunni and harbors a sectarian hatred for Alawite Muslims, said he has another gruesome video of his killing a government soldier from the Alawite faith. Hopefully we will slaughter all of them [Alawites]. I have another video clip that I will send to them. In the clip I am sawing another Shabiha [pro-government militiaman] with a saw. The saw we use to cut trees. I sawed him in small pieces and large ones.” … Time identifies the Islamist cannibal as a commander of the Omar al Farouk brigade. Despite being known as the Independent Omar al-Farouq Brigade, they are one of the largest units of the Free Syrian Army.The Farouk Brigade has been described as “Moderately Islamist.” In other words, these are the people we would be giving weapons to if Obama decides to arm the Syrian rebels. While Khalid al Hamad’s cannibalism seems bizarre and demented, there are unfortunately precedents. Syrian soldiers, before the Six Day War, were shown biting the heads off cats and dogs in ceremonies demonstrating their valor. Two years ago, Rumsfeld posted a video given to him by Saddam which featured Syrian soldiers biting the heads off snakes and stabbing puppies to death while Assad Sr. watches.

A major religious war of conquest is being waged by Islam all over the world.

It is encountering no determined resistance by the Western powers.

The only battlefield where forces of the West fought back was Afghanistan, but there the West, led by the United States’ which has the mightiest military force on earth, gave up trying to win, and has unspokenly but in effect conceded victory to the savage hordes of Islam.

The information and quotations below come from two articles at the website of Raymond Ibrahim:  here from an article by Ibrahim himself about the war on Christians wherever  Islam rules, and here from another by Enza Ferreri on how the West is being subverted by Islam with a new kind of colonization - and how one man is showing a way to resist it.

First, the religious war waged by Muslims on Christians. 

We summarize:

A mass exodus of Christians is currently underway. Millions of Christians are being displaced from one end of the Islamic world to the other. In 2003, Iraq’s Christian population was at least one million. Today fewer than 400,000 remain.

In Egypt, some 100,000 Christian Copts have fled their homeland soon after the “Arab Spring”.

In Mali, after a 2012 Islamic coup, as many as 200,000 Christians fled. According to reports, “the church in Mali faces being eradicated”.

In Bosnia, Christians are leaving en masse amid mounting discrimination and Islamization. Only 440,000 Catholics remain in the Balkan nation, half the prewar figure.

That is the result of  President Clinton’s sacrifice of American lives when under his leadership the West allied with Islam to fight the battles of the 1990s. 

In Ethiopia, after a Christian was accused of desecrating a Koran, thousands of Christians were forced to leave their homes homes when “Muslim extremists set fire to roughly 50 churches and dozens of Christian homes.”

In the Ivory Coast — where Christians have been crucified — Islamic rebels massacred hundreds and displaced tens of thousands of Christians.

In Libya, Islamic rebels forced Christian nun orders to flee.

In Muslim-majority northern Nigeria, where nary a Sunday passes without a church bombing, Christians are fleeing by the thousands; one region has been emptied of 95% of its Christian population.

In Pakistan, after a Christian child was falsely accused of desecrating a Koran, Muslims went on an anti-Christian rampage.

In Somalia, where Christianity is completely outlawed, Muslim converts to Christianity are fleeing to neighboring nations, including Kenya and Ethiopia, sometimes to be tracked down and executed.

In Sudan, over half a million people, mostly Christian, have been stripped of citizenship in response to the South’s secession, and forced to relocate.

Now as the U.S. supports the jihad on secular president Assad, the same pattern has come to Syria: entire regions and towns where Christians lived centuries before Islam came into being have been emptied, as the opposition targets Christians for kidnapping, plundering, and beheadings, all in compliance with mosque calls that it’s a “sacred duty” to drive Christians away. In October 2012 the last Christian in the city of Homs — which had a Christian population of some 80,000 before jihadis came — was murdered.

Next, how Islam is colonizing the West – for example, Britain:

Here one man is fighting back. The story shows how easily Islam can be defeated where there’s a will to do so. But it must be noted that throughout most of the West there is no such will. Most western European countries have capitulated, preferring to punish anyone who objects to the vicious ideology of Islam and Muslim encroachment on his native territory, rather than to resist the appalling conqueror. And the United States has elected a leader whose administration positively helps the advance of Islam.

“We don’t debate unprofessional councillors, unprincipled journalists, and self-righteous community organizers; we turn the tables on them”: this is how British planning lawyer Gavin Boby, also known as the “mosque buster”, describes the activity of his organization, the Law And Freedom Foundation.

He uses the law to stop the building of mosques in the UK by demonstrating to local councils that the building of a mosque or an Islamic centre is actually in violation of British law. And he succeeds: the count so far is 16 victories out of 17 cases.

Gavin Boby is a 48-year-old planning lawyer from Bristol, South-West England. He deals with planning permissions or zoning permissions.

00Like many other people in Britain, for almost 10 years Boby had witnessed the progressive penetration of Islam in his country, but like many other people he watched idly not knowing what to do about it.

It was the same feeling of impotence that most of us shared. But then, a couple of years ago, he had this idea. Many mosques disrupt neighbourhoods and drive out long-time residents. … Why not use his legal skills to help local communities resist planning applications for mosques? …

This is very topical in light of the recent revelations that the Boston bombers’ mosque “has been associated with other terrorism suspects, has invited radical speakers to a sister mosque in Boston and is affiliated with a Muslim group that critics say nurses grievances that can lead to extremism”, has classic jihadi texts in its library, and gave money to two terrorist charities which have been shut down by the U.S. government. But then again, when is something about the violent nature of Islam not topical these days? 

… What are mosques? As we know, mosques are not like churches or synagogues, they are far more than houses of worship and contemplation, many of them are centres of jihadist activity that indoctrinate to commit and support violence against infidels. In America, as many as 4 different studies have independently come to the same conclusion that 80 per cent of US mosques “were teaching jihad, Islamic supremacism, and hatred and contempt for Jews and Christians”.

The Law And Freedom Foundation website declares: “A mosque is not merely a place of worship. Islamic doctrine requires the application of Islamic law within its geographical reach.”

We can see the truth of that in London. It is no coincidence that sharia-law areas or self-declared Muslim areas with Muslim patrols acting like vigilantes in cities like London are near mosques. We are increasingly seeing Muslim patrols in the proximity of mosques saying to passers-by that they can’t walk a dog, wear a skirt, drink alcohol.

… Gavin Boby explains that mosques are being used as the bridgehead, the forefront of the advance of Islam in a territory.

What happens in neighbourhoods – usually working class districts which are not used to dealing with officialdom – where a mosque is built is that the area changes forever for its residents, who no longer recognize it and eventually have to move out, due to things like the parking jihad, general harassment, vandalism.

“The parking jihad is” he describes, “soon after the construction of a mosque, people will find no parking space there, their driveway is being blocked or even a car is parked in the driveway inside your property and if you ask them to move their car they’ll say it’s only for an hour.” The parking tends to be used as a way to establish possession and control over the area, of saying: ”This is a mosque area, we are the owners now and there’s nothing you can do about it”, and then after that it gets worse until the point when people move out. …

The mosque is not simply a building of worship but also a political one …

Every mosque is instructed to be based upon the original mosque in Medina, where Muhammad originally in the 7th century set up his religious-political doctrine of social control, and the mosque is a place of government, it is a place where treaties are made, death sentences are passed, armies are blessed and dispatched, it is primarily about political control and it is very much used as a tool of advance.

So, this is the why of the Law And Freedom Foundation’s operation. Now let’s see the how.

Gavin works pro bono as a planning lawyer for anyone wishing to fight the erection of a mosque. He says:

“The method is very simple. A planning application gets submitted for a mosque in an area, and it will never be called a ‘mosque’. It will be called a community centre; an inter-faith centre; a public community, harmony-building outreach centre, and then the neighbours contact us, and it’s usually people who have never been involved in politics before, are shy of politics and officialdom and ask us to help them to resist it. And that’s what we do, we help them to simply use established methods of consultation to tell the local authorities: ‘We object to this proposal because of the effect it will have on the neighbourhood, the effect on parking, the effect on noise, the effect on disturbance, the architectural effect, the effect of concentrations of people generally, the amenity for residents.’ …”

That has proved to be a successful method of mosque busting. But Gavin Boby does more than that:

The second approach …  goes more to the core of what Islam is. [His] organization’s website states: ”Also, it is hard to see how a Local Authority has the power to grant planning permission for a mosque, since the purpose of a mosque is to promote a doctrine that incites killing, enslavement and war.” …

He advises his clients: “Don’t focus on the religious and political aspects, focus on the technical ones, but what we are doing is trying to stop the area from being Islamized.” But the two issues, i.e. the political question and the concern about community safety, are in fact indissolubly interconnected; he acts from knowledge of the intimidation and violence that the mosques regularly bring with them.

He observes that mosques are increasingly being built in the UK in numbers which are disproportionate to the need for them, and often in areas with hardly any Muslim population. …

Boby has become a household name in the counterjihad movement, and others outside the UK are following his example, like Geert Wilders in Holland, whose party recently launched the “MoskNee” (“MosqueNo”) project. …

He was also invited to speak in Ottawa, Canada by the organization Act for Canada, which points out that the University of Alberta’s former Chair in Islamic Studies explained how the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Hassan al-Banna hoped to change “the status of the Mosque, bringing it from a static place of worship to a center of Islamic revolution”, while Youssef Qaradawi, unconditionally endorsed by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood operating in Canada, wrote: “It must be the role of the mosque to guide the public policy of a nation, raise awareness of critical issues, and reveal its enemies. From ancient times the mosque has had a role in urging  jihad for the sake of Allah“. …

In August/September 2012 Mr Boby toured Australia on invitation of the Q Society of Australia. … Many Australians did not know that in their country there are already over 340 mosques and Islamic prayer rooms, many of which are rooms in once secular public buildings and public spaces.

As can be expected, there is controversy and attempts to stop this mosque-busting lawyer from giving speeches wherever they are scheduled, and he has been vilified by the mass media.

Of course he would be vilified, since the media throughout the West are predominantly on the Left, and the Left refuses to see Islam as the advancing menace that it is.

This photo of a man atrociously injured by the bombing of the Boston marathon by Muslim terrorists is from Cryptome, where more such pictures are to be found.

Back  in Benghazi, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty held off numerically superior forces for hours before dying on a rooftop waiting for back-up from a government that had switched the answering machine on and gone to Vegas.

Mark Steyn writes cogently at National Review Online:

Hillary Clinton had denied ever seeing Ambassador Stevens’s warnings about deteriorating security in Libya on the grounds that “1.43 million cables come to my office” — and she can’t be expected to see all of them, or any. Once Ambassador Stevens was in his flag-draped coffin listening to her eulogy for him at Andrews Air Force Base, he was her bestest friend in the world — it was all “Chris this” and “Chris that,” as if they’d known each other since third grade. But up till that point he was just one of 1.43 million close personal friends of Hillary trying in vain to get her ear.

Now we know that at 8 p.m. Eastern time on the last night of Stevens’s life, his deputy in Libya spoke to Secretary Clinton and informed her of the attack in Benghazi and the fact that the ambassador was now missing. An hour later, Gregory Hicks received a call from the then–Libyan prime minister, Abdurrahim el-Keib, informing him that Stevens was dead. Hicks immediately called Washington. It was 9 p.m. Eastern time, or 3 a.m. in Libya. Remember the Clinton presidential team’s most famous campaign ad? About how Hillary would be ready to take that 3 a.m.call? Four years later, the phone rings, and Secretary Clinton’s not there. She doesn’t call Hicks back that evening. Or the following day.

Are murdered ambassadors like those 1.43 million cables she doesn’t read? Just too many of them to keep track of? No. Only six had been killed in the history of the republic — seven, if you include Arnold Raphel, who perished in General Zia’s somewhat mysterious plane crash in Pakistan in 1988. Before that you have to go back to Adolph Dubs, who died during a kidnapping attempt in Kabul in 1979. So we have here a once-in-a-third-of-a-century event. And at 3 a.m. Libyan time on September 12 it’s still unfolding, with its outcome unclear. Hicks is now America’s head man in the country, and the cabinet secretary to whom he reports says, “Leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back to you before the end of the week.” Just to underline the difference here: Libya’s head of government calls Hicks, but nobody who matters in his own government can be bothered to.

What was Secretary Clinton doing that was more important? What was the president doing? Aside, that is, from resting up for his big Vegas campaign event. A real government would be scrambling furiously to see what it could do to rescue its people. It’s easy, afterwards, to say that nothing would have made any difference. But, at the time Deputy Chief Hicks was calling 9-1-1 and getting executive-branch voicemail, nobody in Washington knew how long it would last. A terrorist attack isn’t like a soccer game, over in 90 minutes. If it is a sport, it’s more like a tennis match: Whether it’s all over in three sets or goes to five depends on how hard the other guy pushes back. The government of the United States took the extremely strange decision to lose in straight sets. Not only did they not deploy out-of-area assets, they ordered even those in Libya to stand down. Lieutenant Colonel Gibson had a small team in Tripoli that twice readied to go to Benghazi to assist and twice was denied authority to do so, the latter when they were already at the airport. There weren’t many of them, not compared to the estimated 150 men assailing the compound. But they were special forces, not bozo jihadists. Back in Benghazi, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty held off numerically superior forces for hours before dying on a rooftop waiting for back-up from a government that had switched the answering machine on and gone to Vegas.

Throughout the all-night firefight in Benghazi, Washington’s priority seems to have been to do everything possible to deny that what was actually happening was happening at all. To send “soldiers” on a “mission” to “fight” the “enemy” was at odds with the entire Obama narrative of the Arab Spring and the broader post-Bush Muslim world. And so the entire U.S. military was stood down in support of the commander-in-chief’s fiction.

As Mr. Hicks testified, his superiors in Washington knew early that night that a well-executed terrorist attack with the possible participation of al-Qaeda elements was under way. Instead of responding, the most powerful figures in the government decided that an unseen YouTube video better served their political needs. And, in the most revealing glimpse of the administration’s depravity, the president and secretary of state peddled the lie even in their mawkish eulogies to their buddy “Chris” and three other dead Americans. They lied to the victims’ coffins and then strolled over to lie to the bereaved, Hillary telling the Woods family that “we’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.” And she did. The government dispatched more firepower to arrest Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in Los Angeles than it did to protect its mission in Benghazi. It was such a great act of misdirection Hillary should have worn spangled tights and sawn Stevens’s casket in half. …

What are the press toadies of the administration doing to shelter Obama and Clinton now that the truth is coming out?

The dying Los Angeles Times reported this story on its homepage … under the following headline: “Partisan Politics Dominates House Benghazi Hearing.”

Chris Stevens was the poster boy for Obama’s view of the Arab Spring; he agreed with the president on everything that mattered. The only difference is that he wasn’t in Vegas but out there on the front line, where Obama’s delusions meet reality. Stevens believed in those illusions enough to die for them. One cannot say the same about the hollow men and women in Washington who sent him out there unprotected, declined to lift a finger when he came under attack, and in the final indignity subordinated his sacrifice to their political needs by lying over his corpse. Where’s the “partisan politics”?Obama, Clinton, Panetta, Clapper, Rice, and the rest did this to one of their own. …

And Hillary Clinton dismissed the question of what really happened in Benghazi on that hellish night with the angry retort “What difference does it make?”

The embassy security chief, Eric Nordstrom, had the best answer to that: It matters because “the truth matters” — not least to the Libyan president, who ever since has held the U.S. government in utter contempt.

Truth matters … [and] for the American people to accept the Obama-Clinton lie is to be complicit in it.

Will the majority of the American people accept the Obama-Clinton lie about Benghazi? Time will tell.