Hillary has always been at war with Benghazi

This came up in a slightly different conversation yesterday but it's good that we occasionally refer back to the famous 21st Century Neocon Mission Statement.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

And it's still true. The world we live in is one of infinite possibility as long as you concede that there is no reality. 

After we felt like having a little "light intervention" like a war amuse bouche, and as all the while various Libyan tribes and strong men pass the time turning their fellow citizens into scrapple, this is how low the stakes are on what constitutes moral horror and a good candidate to lead the free world. The fifth or eighth or 12th or 20th iteration of a chickenshit investigation with all internal integrity of a cotton-candy cone being hit with the firehose, and a former first lady/senator/secretary of state who keeps rolling out new appeals based on riding in a van to order a burrito or sitting down to an interview with the auteur behind a navel-gazing twaddlefest targeted at New York blogger solipsism. 

These are the types of battles you get when you arm yourselves only with weapons this mean and flimsy. There is almost no point in debating whether Hillary Clinton is a real person or a good candidate or even one with a certain axis of political aspirations if the next topic in the discussion is going to be something either totally imaginary or morally devoid to the point of insanity. We don't need a real or a fake Hillary Clinton, or to bother determining which one is which. We're hardly even going to talk about the one we already have.