WELL, AT LEAST WE AREN'T QUITE AS BAD AS THE REPUBLICANS

Limbaugh's explicit portrayal of conservatives as more than willing to ignore the truth to defend one of their own is more striking when we consider the Senate Intelligence committee's report on Benghazi:

- the Committee believes the State Department should have recognized the need to increase security to a level commensurate with the threat, or suspend operations in Benghazi. However, operations continued with minimal improvements in security and personnel protections.

- The majority members of the committee—the Democrats—concluded that the attacks “were likely preventable.”

- The talking-points controversy was always strangely misdirected—in part because, as this report makes clear, there is a lot that was substantively wrong with the way things were managed in Benghazi. That is true particularly if the subject of discussion is Hillary Clinton. She does not come out well in this report, in any part, although the Republican minority is more florid in its criticisms. The State Department made mistakes when she was its leader. One of the findings is that nothing changed even when “tripwires” meant to prompt an increase in security or suspension in operations had been crossed, and people in the Department knew it.