Maureen Dowd is no fan of Hillary Clinton. In her latest New York Times op-ed entitled "The Empire Strikes Back," Dowd upbraids the Republican members of the House Select Committee on Benghazi for their inept questioning of America's former secretary of state; however, she also pinpoints Hillary's responsibility for the Libyan debacle. Dowd writes:
"Since she was, as her aide Jake Sullivan put it, 'the public face of the U.S. effort in Libya,' one of the Furies, along with Samantha Power and Susan Rice, who had pushed for a military intervention on humanitarian grounds, Hillary needed to stay on top of it.
She had to be tenacious in figuring out when Libya had deteriorated into such a caldron of jihadis that our ambassador should either be pulled out or backed up. In June 2012, the British closed their consulate in Benghazi after their ambassador’s convoy was hit by a grenade. A memo she received that August described the security situation in Libya as 'a mess.'
When you are the Valkyrie who engineers the intervention, you can’t then say it is beneath you to pay attention to the ludicrously negligent security for your handpicked choice for ambassador in a lawless country full of assassinations and jihadist training camps."
Dowd further declares:
"Trey Gowdy and his blithering band of tea-partiers went on a fishing expedition, but they forgot to bring their rods — or any fresh facts."
Not so fast, Maureen! As Stephen Hayes writes in a Weekly Standard article entitled "Still Waiting for the Truth":
"Charles Woods has been waiting a long time for the truth. He met his son’s body at Joint Base Andrews, three days after the attacks, at a solemn ceremony in just outside Washington, D.C. He first met Clinton at that brief memorial service. He remembers it well, in part, he says, because he took notes immediately after he spoke with her.
. . . .
He recorded Clinton’s exact words. 'We are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son,' he read. Then he looked up. 'I remember those words: ‘who was responsible for the death of your son.’ She was blaming him and blaming the movie.'
Woods was skeptical at the time that she was telling the truth. His doubts were validated with each new revelation of the administration’s post-attack dissembling. But he was shocked by what he learned in the hearing Thursday.
At 11:12 p.m. on September 11, 2012, the night of the attacks, Hillary Clinton wrote to her daughter, Chelsea, and noted that the compound in Benghazi had been attacked by 'an al Quaeda-like group.' She did not mention a video, as she had in her public statement, released by the State Department an hour earlier.
The following day, September 12, 2012, Clinton spoke with Egyptian prime minister Hesham Kandil. Their discussion was captured by a State Department note-taker, whose job is to record conversations among high-level diplomats by producing a near-verbatim summary.
'We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film,' Clinton explained to Kandil, according to the State Department memo. 'It was a planned attack – not a protest.'"
Yes, Hillary lied to Charles Woods. She also lied to Patricia Smith. And Susan Rice, another of Dowd's so-called Furies, lied to the entire nation, with the knowledge and approval of President Obama, for which she was rewarded with the post of United States National Security Advisor.
Which brings me to the question of whether moral integrity still matters in today's world. Can a US presidential candidate flagrantly lie without repercussions to the parents of terror victims, in order to attain the highest office in the land? Regrettably the answer must wait until November 8, 2016, unless the FBI tosses a monkey wrench into Hillary's political machine before said date.
