I think there’s a flaw in Mickey’s theory:

I’m not suggesting the White House is intentionally provoking Republicans over Benghazi, the better to produce counterproductive overreach. OK, sorry. I’m totally suggesting the White House is intentionally provoking Republicans over Benghazi. It’s not like this is something the White House hasn’t been accused of before. Remember the “birther” controversy, where Obama delayed releasing his birth certificate for years as the conservative fringe wound themselves up in greater and greater knots of paranoia? ’Look, what a bunch of crazies” was Obamas implicit message then. That may be his message again. Sure beats “The debate is over.”

The problem is that (as we were told ad infinitum by Democrat partisans), the Clinton scandal was “just about sex.” Here the lies (and continued stonewalling) are about four dead Americans, killed by administration ineptitude.

…you can keep your un-nuked country. Period:

“The US delegation reaffirmed our commitment to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon,” said a White House statement released after talks in Jerusalem between Rice, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior officials from both sides.

“The delegations held thorough consultations on all aspects of the challenge posed by Iran, and pledged to continue the unprecedented coordination between the United States and Israel,” it added.”

I’m sure that Israel feels much more secure now.

The four “D”s: deny, delay, disrupt, discredit.

Trey Gowdy is in for a rough ride, but I think he knows that.

…continue to collapse:

A newly-released government email indicates that within hours of the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya; the State Department had already concluded with certainty that the Islamic militia terrorist group Ansar al Sharia was to blame.

The private, internal communication directly contradicts the message that President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice and White House press secretary Jay Carney repeated publicly over the course of the next several weeks. They often maintained that an anti-Islamic YouTube video inspired a spontaneous demonstration that escalated into violence.

You don’t say.

It’s nice to see Sharyl Atkisson finally free to do real reporting now that she’s out from under the strictures of the Democrat-enablers at CBS.

[Mid-morning update]

Boehner is (finally!) going to establish a special Select Committee. Rumor is that Trey Gowdy will lead it, which should have these criminals very worried.

It’s now a crime to quote Winston Churchill there:

…the police have effectively just criminalized Liberty GB’s political platform. There are words for regimes that use state power to criminalize their opponents and they’re not “mother of parliaments” or “land of hope and glory”.

How far England has fallen.

One of his most towering achievements: He’s actually made one of the worst places on earth worse:

It would be the height of unfairness to blame the Obama administration outright for everything that’s happened in the Middle East in the past five years. The region’s bad actors and cultural disorders are often well beyond the reach of the United States, regardless of who’s in office. But limitations are one thing—ineptitude another. It’s simply hard to find a single instance of President Obama responding to recent regional events in a way that has paid off either for the United States or its allies. At the same time, America’s antagonists — chiefly Iran and its enablers — have been emboldened and are now ascendant.

It’s a pretty comprehensive foreign-policy disaster.

[Update a few minutes later]

“No one defends Obama on foreign policy these days.”

Well, to be fair, Carney still does. But he gets paid to.

It’s pretty hard to, though I expect I have some commenters who will continue to pathetically attempt it.

[Update later morning]

Obama’s Punch and Judy foreign policy:

Obama, in other words, knows precisely what he doesn’t want to do. No errors. No big, embarrassing strikeouts. Singles and doubles. In baseball, that’s called a Punch and Judy, station-to-station offense. Move the runners along gradually; keep momentum going.

But if your global rivals know you best by your self-imposed limits, how capably can you project power? Is it canny to concede more than necessary? This is the central question for Obama’s foreign policy. He argued forcefully here that the greater danger is picking reckless fights or pretending a war-exhausted American public will support war in Syria, Ukraine, or anywhere in Asia.

The problem for Obama is the perception here and elsewhere that the most forceful thing he’s done on this trip or since Benghazi has been to explain what he can’t do — not what he can.

The number of things he can’t do is boundless.

Sharyl Atkisson’s take:

Obama administration officials have insisted they were acting on “the best intelligence available at the time” and that they clarified the story as they got more information.

But taken as a whole, the documents and testimony revealed since the attacks support the idea that the administration’s avoidance of the word “terrorism” was a strategy rather than an accident or mistake.

You don’t say.