Re: Benghazi Consulate Was Under 'Lower Security Standard'

Patrick, it is depressing to find the Government of the United States has taken two weeks to confirm what I wrote a couple of days after the slaughter in Libya:

We’re told that, because the consulate in Benghazi was designated as an “interim facility,” it did not warrant the level of security and protection that, say, an embassy in Scandinavia would have. This seems all too plausible — that security decisions are made not by individual human judgment but according to whichever rule-book sub-clause at the Federal Agency of Bureaucratic Facilities Regulation it happens to fall under.

Big, money-no-object government will inevitably tend to the stupid, and the biggest, most lavishly funded government on the planet is certainly no exception to the rule. But it is a near parodic example of rule-by-moronized-bureaucracy that if you build a US consulate in the provincial cities of peaceful allies throughout the developed world you are required to turn it into an eyesore fortress loathed by the locals, but if you're in a hotbed of jihadism emerging from a bloody civil war all security considerations can be waived.

The "bumps in the road" (in the President's exquisite formulation) are not just the corpses of real Americans but the charred husk of superpower credibility.

But hey, don't worry! Didn't he look great sitting between Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg on "The View"?