If we needed any more evidence of the tone deafness of today's Republican Party, we got it yesterday when Senate and House committees grilled Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over the attacks on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi.
Here is the most admired woman in the world, just out of the hospital, about to leave a job that is thought of as the most difficult in the world next to the presidency itself and one in which she is regarded as having done extremely well, and a bunch of middle aged white guys decided to descend on her.
The optics alone were disastrous for the Republicans. Clinton starts out by taking full responsibility and then sheds genuine tears of pain as she remembers personally greeting the families of the victims.
Then the lightweight likes of Rand Paul tell her that he'd have fired her if he were president. Look, if Rand Paul was president, nobody as smart as Hillary Clinton would ever come to work for him. Come to think of it, if Rand Paul is president I'll be hoping that my prime minister appoints an excellent foreign minister on behalf of my adopted homeland of Canada.
By the way, if Rand Paul was so concerned about security at U.S. embassies, why did he propose cutting their budgets by almost three-quarters?
But the highlight that made the news all over the world was Clinton's dressing down of our own Senator Ron Johnson. Johnson continued to harp on the tired Republican conspiracy theory that somehow the State Department and the Obama administration were trying to cover up the true nature of the attacks.
"With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans," Clinton told Johnson. "Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening."
Watch a video of the exchange.
I think the American people like a show of resolve like that once in awhile.
I wouldn't mind it if Hillary Clinton moved from the second toughest job in the world to the toughest in a few years. And I wouldn't mind it if we got ourselves a new U.S. Senator at the same time.
