In Hillary Clinton’s forthcoming memoir, Hard Choices, about her time as secretary of state, she settles the Benghazi issue once and for all, assuring it will not come up again or haunt her in 2016. Ha-ha, yeah, right — she’s tried that a few times before. Her Republican critics, she writes, “are a broken record about unanswered questions. But there is a difference between unanswered questions and unlistened to answers.” Politico has obtained the one “gripping” chapter that anyone really cares about; it’s called, in the plain style of a book titled Hard Choices, “Benghazi: Under Attack.”
“I will not be a part of a political slugfest on the backs of dead Americans,” she writes. “It’s just plain wrong, and it’s unworthy of our great country. Those who insist on politicizing the tragedy will have to do so without me.”
The deaths of four Americans in Libya on September 11, 2012, Clinton recalls, were “a crushing blow” and “a punch in the gut.” In the requisite taking-responsibility section, she writes, “As Secretary I was the one ultimately responsible for my people’s safety, and I never felt that responsibility more deeply than I did that day.”
But that does not account for the “regrettable amount of misinformation, speculation, and flat-out deceit by some in politics and the media,” says Clinton, by which she mostly means Fox News. She defends then–Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice for her public comments in the days after the attack and singles out those who “fixate on the question of why I didn’t go on TV that morning, as if appearing on a talk show is the equivalent of jury duty, where one has to have a compelling reason to get out of it. I don’t see appearing on Sunday-morning television as any more of a responsibility than appearing on late-night TV. Only in Washington is the definition of talking to Americans confined to 9 A.M. on Sunday mornings.”
Which brings us to the fact that this conversation is not going away any time soon: Clinton is scheduled for an interview with Fox News timed to the book’s release. Wonder what they’ll ask about.
