Hillionaire's Hill grill and the stark contrast between serious Americans and lie-loving post-Americans

Of all the aspects of Hillionaire's testimony before the House select committee on Benghazi yesterday - the theater of it, the specific revelations, , the Sid Blumenthal factor, her overall poise, save a coughing fit that briefly interrupted proceedings, the media spin that began even as the hearing was still in process - the most significant was how it pointed up the difference between Republicans - and here I mean serious Republicans, those who are worthy of an R behind their name, who understand that American leadership is destiny's call in an otherwise senseless world, who cherish truth, decency, freedom and life, as opposed to Reasonable Gentlemen, carnival barkers and one-note johnnies - and Freedom-Haters.

Freedom-Haters, as exemplified by Elijah Cummings, used their time yesterday to keep pushing the "this-is-all-a-partisan-witch-hunt" meme, in keeping with their modus operandi in any situation - craft and perpetuate a narrative that readily resonates with the feelings-driven, low-information post-American cattle-masses to the point that it drowns out any and all facts that are damning to their case and their cause.

In the case of post-American foreign policy in the age of the Most Equal Comrade, that has meant grabbing on to any circumstantial sliver that could allow them to come up with a sound bite conveying the lie that the MEC and his nomenklatura had eradicated worldwide jihad, even as it had bequeathed a robust economy here in post-America:

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.

The Benghazi attack occurred five days later.

And then came the willful deception involving the video:

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. 

By the end of those two weeks, the meme had an aura of implausibility to it in the minds of many post-Americans, but many others were sufficiently impressed by the faux seriousness of those spouting it to conclude that the matter was as those spokespeople were presenting it.

Cut to October 22, 2015, the day the irrefutable smoking gun was made visible to the whole world:

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.

Jordan also presented evidence that career-level types at State knew, even during the above-mentioned two-week period, what was really going on:

In a series of e-mails shown by Jordan, experts in the State Department’s Near East Affairs Bureau are shown reacting dubiously to Rice’s claim. “I think Rice was off the reservation on this one,” one wrote. “Off the reservation on five networks!” another responded. Another e-mail said the “WH [was] very worried about the politics. This was all their doing.”

The essence of what is going on here is the same as it always is with Freedom-Haters: develop the keenest possible sense of where the vulnerabilities lie as you are amassing power, and address them immediately:

 The Benghazi attack shortly before the 2012 election didn’t fit the administration narrative that the war on terror was over and that al-Qaida was on the run. It endangered President Obama’s reelection chances and Hillary’s chances to succeed him. That is why she invented and propagated the Benghazi video lie and told it to the parents of the Benghazi dead in front of their son’s caskets.

Thus we see one informative way in which we can speak of two types of Americans (although there is actually a third in this formulation - the great swath of the populace that is so addicted to amusement and distraction that all this is going right past them). There are those who understand the value of mining the essence of our national identity - that is, the first nation in history to be founded on an idea, that idea being that freedom is the essential condition for human well-being - and being fiercely dedicated to preserving that essence, and those who see the entire social / cultural / political stage as a platform for extolling "fairness" and "equality" and "social justice" because it is the fast track to a degree of power enjoyed by tyrants.