Steyn on the Middle East Meltdown: ‘An Act of War, Not a Movie Protest’

From one of his best columns ever, and that’s saying something:

as Secretary Clinton and Gen. Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher’s teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: that’s not a spontaneous movie protest; that’s an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower’s response to it. Secretary Clinton and Gen. Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

… The United States government lost track of its ambassador for 10 hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they’ve investigated Mitt Romney’s press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press.

For whatever reason, Secretary Clinton chose to double down on misleading the American people. “Libyans carried Chris’ body to the hospital,” said Mrs. Clinton. That’s one way of putting it. The photographs at the Arab TV network al-Mayadeen show Chris Stevens’ body being dragged through the streets, while the locals take souvenir photographs on their cellphones. … Even allowing for cultural differences, this looks less like “carrying Chris’ body to the hospital” and more like barbarians gleefully feasting on the spoils of savagery.

Read the whole thing. And he’s right that no novelist or scriptwriter would ever portray a president or an administration as craven and reality-impaired as this one, because, at least until a week ago, no audience would believe it. But here we are.