RUTHFULLY YOURS

Is it time for the GOP to start ignoring Obama and concentrating on Hillary? After all, Peggy Noonan ^[1] has informed us that most of the country is tuning him out already.

Well, not quite. As Daniel Henninger ^[2] pointed out the other day, there’s plenty of damage our increasingly authoritarian president can yet do in his remaining time in office.

But because of the extra-constitutional power grab Henninger describes, it is all the more imperative that Hillary Clinton not step into Obama’s shoes for eight years, cementing policies and programs never voted on by the Congress or approved by the public. The nature of our republic would be altered forever.

But how to stop her? Hillary is the solid frontrunner for 2016 not only for the Democratic nomination but in the general election. Of course it’s yet several years away, but no one is even close. And given the heavy propagandizing — the endless “War on Women” smear exploiting every soccer mom from Maine to Maui, plus the usual dollop of the right is racist, coupled with the inevitable mainstream media “wisdom” that it is past time for a female president — she seems a shoo-in. And this is before NBC produces its four-part hagiographic extravaganza of the type normally reserved for the pope.

And don’t expect the recent Huma/Weiner hijinks to have any affect. That will be far in the rear-view mirror. And the rest of the scandals — Whitewater, etc. — will seem even further away.

No, there is one real hope to stop Hillary and that is Benghazi.

Benghazi is Hillary’s Achilles’ heel, but the news Thursday — broken by CNN’s Jake Tapper ^[3] — that the CIA has been administering lie detector tests to agents who were there, obviously to prevent them from talking, threatens to turn the attention away from Hillary’s State Department to the CIA. It seems the CIA was up to its neck in Benghazi, many more of its personnel at the so-called annex the night of the terror attack, with several of them severely wounded.

Some quick questions come to mind. With more than twenty CIA people at the annex (we can assume they were armed), far more than we had been told or led to believe, why did they fare so poorly against their Islamist attackers? Is this the reason the military wasn’t called? Did Langley assume their men could defend themselves?

I certainly have no idea, but we must be careful not to let the natural inquiries into the CIA’s activities obscure Hillary’s role. She still was the woman who told Tyrone Woods’ father — at the dead SEAL’s funeral — that they would get the maker of that “terrible video.”

This seems all the more ridiculous with the new facts coming out. The secretary of State must have known at this point there had been a full-scale — and rather successful — assault on a significant CIA installation, not to mention the first death of U.S. ambassador in years.

Why was she lying to Charles Woods ^[4] and why was she lying to us? It’s one thing to smirk at the camera and blame your husband’s infidelity on the “vast right-wing conspiracy” and another to tell a man whose son just died for his country, our country, a despicable, self-serving untruth.

It’s unconscionable and immoral. A woman who does that cannot be allowed to be president. It is the responsibility of all of us to stop it. Benghazi is the key. Keep the pressure on.

And John Boehner, let’s get that select committee rolling.