I wasn’t going to comment on this, I was actually ashamed to admit that I spent the entire day watching Hillary’s testimony to the Bengazi Committee. But the latest flap about the GOP candidates whining about the tough questions they got from their debate moderators recalled it to memory. Now I understand they have told the RNC and Priebus to take a hike, and they’re interested in getting some Conservative personalities, like Hannity and Limbaugh, do the moderation at the next debate. Please, Please, Please, God, let it happen, make it so, Puh-Leeeze. The nation really needs to see the echo chamber at work.

Yeah, I actually watched the entire congressional committee grilling of Hillary Clinton, live, when it was televised. Well, not the entire inquisition, I did take time off for meals, bathroom breaks, and several minor household errands. I think I dozed off once, too. One thing’s for sure, Hillary’s bladder is in much better shape than mine.

I must admit, she outdid herself. She completely humiliated the pack of Republican meth-head Matlocks that tried to get their Perry Mason moment at her expense. They had hour after hour to tag-team her, and not only did they not turn up anything that hadn’t already been already put to rest in previous hearings, but they even managed to bring up rhubarbs that had already been thoroughly debunked. They even managed to forget to ask her some legit questions that might have yielded genuine paydirt for their cause, questions I wanted to hear answered myself! For example, how much of her Foggy Bottom policy input went in to setting up the tragic situation in Libya in the first place? Instead, they wasted time with her Sidney Blumenthal emails, and several other blind alleys that led nowhere, and whether she REALLY slept alone that night. (What did they think, that she was banging one of her interns? And even if she was, why would she tell them?) It was humiliating, well, at least, it was humiliating if you were a Republican. If you were a Democrat it was just embarrassing, embarrassing that these pathetic hillbilly ambulance chasers are the elected majority in our country’s legislature.

Personally, I’m convinced nothing much happened in Libya that night that she can be blamed for, other than simple incompetence. Sure, it happened on her watch, just like 9/11 happened on GWB’s watch and the Lebanon Marine Corps barracks bombing happened on RWR’s watch. But none of them can really be blamed for those events either, and the bipartisan, unbiased hearings that followed those tragedies made that clear: no one can anticipate everything. Most Americans understand perfectly well what the phrase “Monday Morning Quarterback” really means. Our enemies spend a lot of time trying to sneak past our defenses, and sometimes they succeed. After all, that’s their job.

And can you really blame her confusion after? There were a score of attacks on American diplomatic outposts that night across a dozen time zones–the night of the infamous video. Is it any wonder she couldn’t figure out what was happening, or that it took her a few days to finally put it all together from what must have been miles of teletype copy and confused midnight messages and hastily decoded diplomatic cables?

I was really interested in hearing more about her emails and the phantom server, where a true potential for malfeasance or even criminality lies, and the jackasses on the panel never really went there. I’m still not satisfied with what that is all about. But nooooooooo, they were to busy with the old “was it a video or was it terrorism?” She answered that right already months ago: “What difference does it make?” Her inquisitors were not just partisan, vicious, stupid and disorganized, they were incompetent, which is much, much worse. They should have left Issa in charge.

It was sad that the several Democrat members of the committee felt compelled to intervene on her behalf. They only diminished her glory. She took that generation of vipers apart all by herself, it was a masterful performance and I was impressed. Bill himself couldn’t have handled it better.

Halfway through the questioning, I got a phone call that forced me to mute the TV so I could talk for about 20 minutes. I could see something that had not occurred to me before, when I was concentrating on the sound, the questions and the testimony. These people couldn’t do their job because they were so full of hate. They couldn’t think straight, they were trembling, quivering with hatred. I could see the faces of her questioners and not hear them speak, and what really struck me was the pure rage there. Hunter Thompson’s phrase is perfectly apt “Fear and Loathing”. They were positively dripping with venom, the anger distorting their features, I could clearly read every “gotcha!” and every “oh, yeah?”, and in the meantime, Hillary was the Ice Queen, calmly parrying their frenzied thrusts, doing a masterful job of controlling her yawns and her eye rolls.

They never had a chance, their fanaticism made them incapable of reason, and as George Smiley once put it, “that inflexibility ultimately led to their downfall…” She cut their collective balls off and served them up with a flourish.