Wanted: Pills for Dementia

The headline from the Daily Mail suggests that a frame is being passed around. “Hillary Clinton reveals what REALLY led to Benghazi massacre – and demolishes White House claim it was triggered by anti-Islam film”

The State Department has said that it never believed the September 11th attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was the result of a protest over an anti-Islam movie – directly contracting the rest of the Obama administration.

By trying to distance her department from the inept and deceptive handling of the Benghazi attack, which left U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American officials dead, Hillary Clinton could help herself politically for a 2016 presidential run.

Or maybe it means that I need some memory pills. And here I was thinking that Hillary was on TV expressing regret for the hateful video that spawned the Cairo and Benghazi attacks. There I was remembering that Susan Rice — who works for Hillary [erratum: Rice is a Cabinet officer] — went around saying the same thing. And how could I have been mistaken about the ad she and the President took out in Pakistan expressing disgust for that horrible video — the very video which it turns out had nothing to do with anything.

In a briefing on Tuesday, State Department officials said ‘others’ in the executive branch concluded initially that the attack was part of a protest against the film, which ridiculed the Prophet Muhammad. That was never the State Department’s conclusion, reporters were told.

Others? Who might those others be? Yet another mystery to be solved.

The Buck Stops There

In the Obama administration everything evolves. Policy positions, intelligence assessments — even the facts themselves. Even more remarkable, our memory of what the facts were on a given date are also mutable. In the words of Isabelle Allende “memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives.”

Somewhere there struggles to the surface a phrase heard before. “I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” In the Obama administration the past is a fiction; the present is an illusion, and the future is something we only hope to have.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHb6q4lIQ-w