“What difference does it make?” Hillary Clinton dares ask the country. Specifically, “what difference does it make” why Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens became the first US Ambassador since Arnold Raphael (Pakistan, 1988) to die in the line of duty. But her conduct, and that of her de facto boss, make abundantly clear “what difference does it make.”

What did she mean, what difference does it make?

Secretary of State Clinton made that remark in a testy exchange with Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI). She had come to testify (if you can call it that) before the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Relations. Senator Johnson was one of three Senators (the other two were Rand Paul of Kentucky and, wonder of wonders, old John McCain) to throw her more than softballs yesterday morning. (In fact, Senator Robert Menendez, D-NJ, and his co-partisans poured out enough treacle to give anyone a diabetic seizure.) Johnson laid it on the line: why did the State Department (including UN Ambassador Susan Rice) put out a wild story about protests over a video, when everyone who cared to know, knew that was not the motive for the murder of Ambassador Stevens and three other men?

Breitbart News has Clinton’s verbatim riposte:

With all due respect, the fact is we have four dead Americans. Whether it was because of a protest or because guys outside for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans. What difference at this point does it make?

I’ll tell you what difference it makes!

Hillary Clinton. Photo: US Department of State

How dare she ask “what difference does it make”? The administration she works for, pulled strings to cause the arrest of the man who made a fifteen-minute short subject, on a trumped-up charge. That short subject might not make the American Film Institute’s Top 100 list, nor win “Best Short” at this year’s Oscars. (Not that the Oscars matter a tinker’s dam anymore. But that’s another story.) But not only was that a false pretext for protests in Egypt (very convenient for Muslim Brother Morsi), but—and this is the key—no such protests took place in Libya. Everyone who cared to know, knew this.

Jim Geraghty at National Review Online puts it more grimly: nobody need hold himself accountable, anymore, for anything. Not, that is, if that person has the friendship of a sycophantic media. Never mind that some of the same people who murdered Ambassador Stevens, also had a hand in murdering two Americans (a third died of a heart attack under the strain) at a natural gas field in Algeria. (Though at least the Algerians know how to handle those things. Those particular perps now lie dead for their pains.)

What difference does it make? Well, for one thing, Ambassador Stevens died neither on account of a protest nor on account of “guys outside for a walk one night decid[ing] to kill some Americans.” Neither thing happened. This was set up. The perps planned this attack well in advance. And Ambassador Stevens knew about the setup, and begged for help against it – to no avail. And people we were told lost their jobs over this disgraceful episode, did not lose their jobs.

Senator Rand Paul bluntly said that someone would have lost her job, had he been President.

Had I been president at the time, and had I found that you did not read the cables from Benghazi — you did not read the cables from Ambassador Stevens, I would have relieved you of your post.

Bravo—and CNAV doesn’t care what anybody says against him. Too bad Rand’s other Republican colleagues (except Johnson and maybe McCain) lacked his gonadal fortitude.

And for another, Hillary Clinton’s de facto boss, and her representative at the UN, lied to us. Senator Johnson wanted to know why they lied to us. And all that Secretary Clinton can ask is “What difference does it make”?

Final warning

Craige McMillan, at WND, says you could ask “What difference does it make” about a lot of places where our country now stands. He begins with our having a filmmaker arrested, just as a Muslim country would do (and for the same reason). He goes on by saying that those hearings, like many other Congressional hearings, run according to script. (Maybe that’s why most Republicans at Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs behaved like eunuchs yesterday.) He ends by warning:

What difference does it make, whether you are a passenger on the Ship of Fools, or a bit player in the Theatre of the Absurd? Either way, your children and their children will be shining the shoes of Chinese and Indian businessmen as they pass through the airport, eagerly awaiting any spare yuan the travelers pass their way.

Or any spare rupee, or ruble, or yen – or dinar.

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