From ‘not optimal’ to ‘what difference does it make….’

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived back in the Senate, after dodging a few falling safes, multiple banana peels and an ornery dog named Henry, to give a carefully prepared histrionic rant which can be summed up, “I do care a lot” and “None of this was my fault” and “What difference at this point does it make?”

The last isn’t a sarcastic restatement. It’s what she actually said.

It might make a difference to a Coptic Christian whose trailer for a bad movie was blamed by the leader of the free world for a series of Al Qaeda attacks against American diplomatic facilities and who was sent to prison on the orders of members of the administration.

That filmmaker is the only one to actually get locked up. The ringleader of the attack walks the streets of Benghazi freely. A drone could make short work of him, but no drones are coming his way. Instead a car bomb, planted by Libyan enemies nearly took him out. Some of the other Benghazi attackers were killed by the Algerian military during the siege; doing the work that Obama won’t do. If the Benghazi terrorists finally die, it will most likely be at the hands of the French, the Syrian army or Libyan rival militias.

Benghazi, Obama said, during his appearance with Jon Stewart, the man of many grimaces, was a bump in the road. And that’s all it was. The Obama campaign bus drove over four bodies and reached its destination in an armored parking garage somewhere in D.C. An irritated Hillary Clinton, who is prepping for her own bus tour in 2016, demands to know what difference it makes now to discuss who lied about what and who failed to secure the Benghazi mission.

The election is over, and her testimony was delayed until after the fat lady held up her talking points at the debate and sang. Al Qaeda is dead, except for the parts of it rampaging across Syria, Iraq, Mali, Libya, Algeria and Pakistan, and a decade of war is coming to an end or just beginning. It makes no difference now which one of those it really is, just as it makes no difference, whether, as Clinton said, it happened “because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans?”

Over in Cairo, leading senators visited Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood President, Mohammed Morsi and tried to explain to him that ranting about Jews being the bloodthirsty spawn of apes and pigs who must be driven out of the Middle East is “inappropriate” if he expects to be considered a force for stability in the region. In response, Morsi told the senators that he respects all religions and that the only reason the New York Times belatedly mentioned the story a month later is because the apes and pigs control the media.

Afterward Obama sent him a bunch of tanks and jets, because really what difference does it make?

Morsi knows that he can say whatever he pleases and still get the F-16s and Abrams tanks and the billions of dollars in aid, and so it makes no difference at all what he says.

Sure at some point in the near or distant future, Morsi might use those weapons to, “free the land from the filth of the Jews”. And then the Christians. And when that happens, someone will sit down in front of a Senate panel and explain that they really do care a lot, that it wasn’t their fault and that assigning blame makes no difference at this point.

And then there’s nothing left, but to ask what difference would it make if she had secured the Benghazi mission, if Obama had dispatched timely rescue forces or if we had stayed the hell out of Libya. If would have made a large difference to the dead, but not a whole lot to Hillary 2016.

France is fighting in Mali now and it’s getting about as much support from Washington, as the dead of Benghazi did. The drones aren’t flying here either and neither is much of anything else. Obama’s people have said that they support the French operation but that they’re still waiting to get a “clear picture” of the mission, the enemy and how much this will offend the Morsis of the Muslim world.

The quest for a clear picture was also the pitch made by Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Barack Obama whenever they were asked about the Great YouTube Trailer Terrorist Attacks of 2012. The picture never got any clearer, but as they would say, “What difference does it make?”

This really isn’t about Benghazi, which could have been secured for a fraction of the $16 million that her State Department spent on overpriced Kindle book readers and the $4.5 million it spent on art in embassies. You could have dropped the cost for fully protecting the Benghazi mission into the billion that State spent on global warming. Or the dough that Howard Gutman, campaign contributor and Ambassador to Belgium who shares some of Morsi’s views, spent renovating his embassy into a shining example of Green Sustainableness could have instead been spent on fortifying the Benghazi mission.

This isn’t even about Hillary 2016. It’s about the Middle East where bad policies make a world of difference. And it’s about a political establishment that rewards the Hillary Clintons for the disasters they make while punishing the Michele Bachmanns for the truth that they tell, because it is unable to come to terms with its own mistakes.

Carter gave us the Mullah-ridden Iran and began pouring money into the Pakistani terror machine of the ISI. Obama gave us a North Africa that is beginning to look like Iran and has shoved handfuls of cash, weapons and support at any Islamist whose views and affiliations stop just short of Al Qaeda, even if he happens to be Al Qaeda’s best friend.

But what difference does it make when few Republican senators can discuss what the Brotherhood really stands for and its impact on the Middle East and the West? Crimes don’t make a difference unless there are people who can expose them for what they are. Democrats have criminalized many ordinary things, such as buying cough syrup without a photo ID or making a movie that offends Muslims, but they have decriminalized other things, such as funding and arming terrorists and endangering the survival of the free world.

Reversing this process and reversing Hillary 2016 requires men and women who can show why what happened in Benghazi, in Cairo and across the region makes a difference. It will make a difference when there are enough people who realize that in the last four years, these policies have paved the way for replacing the war of drones and hijackers with a global war on the scale of the first two.

Then the difference that Hillary dismissed and that her colleagues in Obama Inc. have held at bay for another four years will finally be made.