Senator Ayotte's Progress on Benghazi

Senator Kelly Ayotte has performed a great service for the United States and the State of New Hampshire in her dauntless quest to get to the bottom of the truth about Benghazi.

She blocked Ambassador Susan Rice's potential nomination for Secretary of State and made sure it went to Senator John Kerry instead.  Now Susan Rice is embarrassed to be President Obama's National Security Adviser and the onus of being the United States Secretary of State is John Kerry's burden.

Thanks in no small measure to Senator Ayotte.

But, beyond that, the senator has been stymied by the liberal media's refusal to prosecute for her party the Benghazi incident as the scandal her supporters are sure that it is, so she's currently taking a hiatus on investigating until someone else does the work instead.  Then maybe she can board the train that left the station last year.

Or maybe she should just come out and admit that she was using Benghazi to string her supporters along and make sure that, instead of Ambassador Rice, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham's friend got State.  They're her buddies; they make a nice little cabal.  The deal for Kerry was just a case of good, old-fashioned, backroom bipartisanship.  I wonder if the cigar made her nauseous.

But her quietude on Benghazi is not really for lack of effort; it's just because she doesn't believe what she knows isn't true and also because she knows that Benghazi doesn't matter anymore.  She must agree with Secretary Hillary Clinton that it makes no difference, so she's just given up.  She's lost heart.

No.  Let me take that back.  She knows it's a trumped-up nothing and she's trying to tiptoe away from it as quietly as she can because to harp on it will make her look kooky as do many of her party's ultrarightist voters whom she'll need to support her candidacy in 2016.

It's that old primary election, general election quandary in which Governor Mitt Romney found himself in last year.  To pump Benghazi as a scandal would be perceived by the non-Republican general public as the quackery that it is, and to ignore it as she's doing now is risking a primary backlash.  Maybe she'll avoid being primaried, but don't look to the Republican, tea-partyish base to be too enthusiastic about her candidacy in the general election.

This, for a Democrat, is schadenfreude at its most relishing best.  Mmm ... taste the schadenfreude.  Roll it on your tongue and savor the aroma before you chew and swallow.

Ayotte in 2016.