Hillary is declining her “invitation” to testify on Benghazi.

…and Bathsheba.

Can someone explain to me why resigning over an extra-marital affair would allow you to decline to testify before Congress?

“Ambassador Stevens didn’t die because the White House had a bad night. He died because the White House has bungled North Africa. Would that it were all that they’ve bungled. As I wrote earlier, get ready for the next war, regardless of what happens tomorrow.

[Update a while later]

Actually, it’s not the next war. It’s just the next battle in the current ongoing world war.

Better get ready for it. The misnamed clash of civilizations (because there is nothing civilized about them) is going to continue until it is resolved, one way or the other.

Why did we abandon the compound?

The larger question that is raised here is why the U.S. has abandoned this diplomatic outpost, so that anyone–whether reporters or civilians, friends or foes of the United States–can rummage through its rubble. The jihadists who attacked our consulate were surely hoping to drive us out of Benghazi, and they have now accomplished this purpose. I am at a loss to know why marines were not sent to secure the site of the compound and why efforts have not been made to rebuild. This is yet another failure that gives the people of the Middle East an impression of American retreat.

An impression that is apparently deliberate. But the media wants to pretend it isn’t happening, at least until Wednesday.

[Update a few minutes later]

“All jacket and no bombers“:

Back in Benghazi, the president who looks so cool in a bomber jacket declined to answer his beleaguered diplomats’ calls for help – even though he had aircraft and Special Forces in the region. Too bad. He’s all jacket and no bombers. This, too, is an example of America’s uniquely profligate impotence. When something goes screwy at a ramshackle consulate halfway round the globe, very few governments have the technological capacity to watch it unfold in real time. Even fewer have deployable military assets only a couple of hours away. What is the point of unmanned drones, of military bases around the planet, of elite Special Forces trained to the peak of perfection if the president and the vast bloated federal bureaucracy cannot rouse themselves to action? What is the point of outspending Russia, Britain, France, China, Germany and every middle-rank military power combined if, when it matters, America cannot urge into the air one plane with a couple of dozen commandoes? In Iraq, al-Qaida is running training camps in the western desert. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are all but certain to return most of the country to its pre-9/11 glories. But in Washington the head of the world’s biggest “counterterrorism” bureaucracy briefs the president on flood damage and downed trees.

I don’t know whether Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan can fix things, but I do know that Barack Obama and Joe Biden won’t even try – and that therefore a vote for Obama is a vote for the certainty of national collapse. Look at Lower Manhattan in the dark, and try to imagine what America might look like after the rest of the planet decides it no longer needs the dollar as global reserve currency. For four years, we have had a president who can spend everything but build nothing. Nothing but debt, dependency, and decay. As I said at the beginning, in different ways the response to Hurricane Sandy and Benghazi exemplify the fundamental unseriousness of the superpower at twilight. Whether or not to get serious is the choice facing the electorate Tuesday.

But let him keep the bomber jacket.

He won’t need it much on Oahu.

My thoughts on “absolute moral authority,” over at PJMedia.

[Update a few minutes later]

You know, the more I read this, the angrier I get: “He said … Clinton assured him that they were going to ‘arrest and prosecute’ the man that made the scapegoated YouTube video critical of Islam.”

Mr. Woods was probably in a state of shock, but my response would have been, “Really, Madame Secretary? Really? In response to the murder of my son by jihadis, you’re going to violate the First Amendment of the Constitution, and impose sharia law in the United States? Sounds to me like the terrorists have won.”