Hillary Clinton: "I'm the Real Victim of Benghazi"

Her boss isn't much different. (Well, former boss.)

I think what will be written of the current administration by historians is that it had this one recurring theme: An inability either to act responsibly or take responsibility for anything it actually did wrong, which seems to be a lot. The sheer degree of fecklessness is mind-boggling. To be fair however, there is a huge outbreak of fecklessness among world leaders these days, so to some degree it *could* be a lot worse. But it also *could* be a lot better, and I don't think the typical Yankee likes settling for "It could have been worse," when it comes to the quality of our public officials. After all, we're paying a lot for these people. We ought to get quality. But we're not.

Still, in a representative gov'tal system, you get the gov't you got coming. Collectively, we decide every X no. of years what we're going to get, be it Congressoids, town board members, presidents, etc. While in all practicality we are limited to what our two major parties hand over to us, we're still ultimately responsible as a people for allowing the system to go merrily forward. How to change that? Not sure. It's been tried. Any time a 3rd party gets too scary to the other two, they either buy them out or, if they refuse to get bought, produce incriminating photos of someone's tawdry affair two years ago or place before them actual or invented evidence of financial chicanery of some kind (taxes, etc.), or just plain threaten to make the new party's leadership persona non grata among business or other common interests by various legal and illegal means, and *poof!*, that third party everyone was hoping for that would "restore balance to The Force" suddenly disappears in a summary fashion. Remember Ross Perot? Gee, why *did* he just suddenly stop trying to build up a real alternative third party? Internal disagreements? Really? A successful businessman allowed "internal disagreements" to dissuade him from a serious, big goal, like eventually becoming president or at least to launch a viable third political party in the U.S.? I for one don't buy it. So what could possibly have motivated him to do so after he threw everything he had into the effort until one day -- after it looked a lot like he would succeed -- nothing. Suddenly, he says "Stop the train, we're getting off here!", and that's that. I can only guess, but I can't imagine it wasn't anything short of an offer he couldn't refuse, as it were. There are other examples of this kind of thing, too. U.S. electoral history is littered with the bodies of third parties that got killed off before they ever really had a chance to get on one leg. And that's how it works in a duopoly. The duopolists conspire covertly or overtly to keep any further competitors out of the market. And that's what the U.S. political "market" acts like.

But the people allow it to continue. If we really, *really* wanted to end it, each individual would just pick damn near anyone not running under the heading of one of the two major parties in any given election and vote for them. Perhaps not a particularly wise way to vote, based on principle; after all, who knows what that other candidate believes in and wants to do (suppose a voter could take the time to do their homework before going into the booth -- there's a novel idea...). But wouldn't it be a shock to "the system" to one day see all manner of non-Dems and non-GOPers sweep into offices all over the U.S. and collectively render those two parties minority operatives generally in the gov'tal machinery of the U.S. Is this likely any time soon? No. And that's why "we the people" ultimately only have ourselves to blame for having the kind of under-performing political apparatus that we currently pay through the nose for.

Let's hope enough of us are at least wise enough to keep Hillary the hell out of elected office, should she decide to go for it. We couldn't keep Obama from appointing her Sec'y of State, but we can stop her from becoming his successor. We've paid enough for our collectively dismal choice of her former boss not once but TWICE to be POTUS; if we make the same sort of mistake again by hiring someone for that job who is arguably more feckless than he has proven to be, I simply won't know what to say except what I have already said: We get the gov't we deserve.

I think the main problem with the idea of a female president is that American women simply don't tend to value male life. Hillary's actions re: Benghazi certainly demonstrate this. This is also found in her famous (or infamous) quote: "women are the primary victims of war." Forget that males make up about 98% of war dead. Then, there's her fight to keep Boko Haram off the terrorist watch list while they were murdering boys. Her tune suddenly changed once girls were targeted.

Unless getting rid of the draft is the very first action a female president would take after being elected, I feel that she has absolutely no moral right to be president. It's not fair for a woman who was never subjected to the draft to be able to draft men to go to war and die at her whims. It would be like a white president sending only black soldiers to fight on behalf of him/her or a male president only drafting female soldiers. If Hitlery is elected, it will be disastrous for men. Her attitude here proves it.

I don't like Hillary, but I also hate when people put something in quotes when it really isn't a quote - especially as a headline. I read the article and did not see Hillary say "I'm the real victim of Benghazi" (feel free to correct me if I am wrong - maybe I overlooked it).

As far as I can tell, it is the commentator's opinionated sum of her explanation about Benghazi, but Hilary never said that she is the "real victim."

I just think it's important to keep things factual before anyone repeats that Hillary said something that she really didn't.

It's not MANN so much as it is Drupal, the site content management software. Only admins can delete entire comments and thus also comment threads. If a person posts something, then wants to delete it, but someone else has replied to it, then that reply would also get dropped too since the original post it was referencing would no longer be there. In essence you could cause someone else's comments to get deleted by deleting your own. I think that's why the Drupal devs chose that approach. Still, if there are no replies to a comment you posted and there's no practical administrative reason why you shouldn't be able to go back and delete it, agreed, it seems dumb. But as you and others have done in the past, filling the message body with enough "Deleted"s to make Drupal happy is all that's needed. But sorta dumb, yeah.

...whatever happened to the old categories system MANN used to use before 2006? Years ago submissions to MANN were categorised into a whole number of different areas, whether it be circumcision, abortion, domestic violence, education etc. I know it's been a long time since the current site structure was adopted but I much preferred the old system myself.

I don't suppose there's any chance of something similar to the original categories system ever coming back, is there?

I also liked them. At some point, they did stop getting used. I am not sure why. Possibly because the words used to tag the item taxonomically may not have been quite specific enough too often or maybe a given piece fell into more than one category and so to categorize it one way while arguably it could go into another bucket (but you could only choose from one label) may have been deemed misleading. Well, the current version of Drupal may today be more flexible than the older version in terms of assigning labels, etc., so it's worth looking into... next question: What would be your idea of a list of comprehensive tags that was not too great in number but comprehensive enough so as to cover the big bases?

This is an "APB" type question; anyone who wants to take a stab at it, go ahead and post. I also have my own ideas about such a list but am happy to hear anyone and everyone else's, too.