Two bits of dialogue from my all-time favorite movie “All The President’s Men” come to mind. The first is during that classic staff meeting where they’re discussing the content of the next day’s edition:

Harry Rosenfeld (Jack Warner): “What about the Dahlberg repurcussions?”

Howard Simons (Martin Balsam): “No one cares about the Dahlberg repurcussions.”

…and that scene inside Ben Bradlee’s office where he’s having a hard understanding the significance of Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting:

Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards): Have you seen the latest polls? Most Americans have never even heard about Watergate. No one gives a shit.”

Keep this in mind as the mainstream dino-media does all it can to avoid reporting on the 9/11 Benghazi attacks that left Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others dead. The Obama administration’s story (actually, lies) about how it was the fault of a little YouTube video and how there’s was no time to scramble military assistance to repel the attackers is unraveling before everyone’s eyes; just don’t expect to read or hear about it from the major media outlets – yet.

It’s important to remember that what did Richard Nixon in was not the actual break-in and the illegal wiretapping that the White House and his Justice Department authorized, but the cover-up and obstruction of justice that took place afterwards. If the Obama administration continues to think itself above the law and congressional oversight it may well find itself repeating the same kind of history. As Red State’s Moe Lane writes:

And let us establish once and for all what happened. The screw-up was in two parts. The first was tactical: the administration made a judgment call on whether or not to (metaphorically) send in the Marines. They decided not to. People died. Did that make it a bad call? Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes the dice hate you. Maybe if the Marines had been sent in the whole thing would have gone spectacularly pear-shaped and we’d have a hundred people dead, not four. But then again, maybe nobody would have died at all. Generally speaking, it’s a lot easier to justify We don’t throw lives away for no good reason than it is to justify We’d rather let four people die than risk a hundred. Still, it’s a hard call to make when it’s you on the scene.

But the second part of the screw-up is less forgivable. The general rule here is Command takes responsibility. JFK survived the Bay of Pigs incident because he embraced that rule. Nixon didn’t survive Watergate because he didn’t. If Obama had said, well, we thought that we had good security up at Benghazi, only we didn’t, so al-Qaeda caught us by surprise and killed our people and that was something that I have to take full responsibility for and I’m never going to let that happen again then, well, he might have lost the election, actually. We didn’t realize at the time, but Obama’s 2012 re-election strategy had pretty much no margin for error. So the administration picked a narrative (it was all due to a YouTube video!) that cynically traded on stereotypes about foreign Muslims and their collective level of impulse control*, and did nothing but push said narrative for as long as they could. Which was, oddly enough, long enough for the election to be over.

It’s debatable what role the President might have played in all of this up to this point, but it’s fairly obvious the reckless incompetence, and ultimate responsibility, for the deaths of the Benghazi four lies at the feet of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Powerline blog’s Paul Mirengoff has a powerful post that makes this case by laying out the facts the major print and broadcast media dare not present:

Under these circumstances, it would not do to attribute the Benghazi killings to the terrorism about which top State Department officials had been warned. Much better to lump what happened in Libya together with the protests that occurred in Egypt, and thereby characterize it as a demonstration that went too far, rather than premeditated terrorism.

Was Hillary Clinton directly involved in this cover-up? It’s difficult to see how she could not have been.

As I understand it, when State pushed back against the CIA’s talking points, a White House meeting was scheduled to thrash out the issue. One can imagine Clinton failing to keep apprised of something as mundane as a mounting threat to be safety of her personnel in Libya. But surely she was in the loop when it came to a bureaucratic struggle about how our U.N. ambassador was going to spin the Benghazi debacle. And surely, her representatives would not attend the meeting in which that bureaucratic struggle was to be resolved without being able to state the desires of the Secretary of State.

Hillary Clinton, then, is culpable at the front end of the Benghazi disaster — when she and/or her agents ignored requests for enhanced security — and at the back end — when she and her agents engineered an attempted cover-up. Her culpability during the attacks is doubtful in my opinion, but I would still like to know what she was doing during those tragic hours.

In a serious society, Benghazi, standing alone, would spell the end of Hillary Clinton’s public career.

Of course, in a serious society, the very idea that someone like Hillary Clinton would be qualified to be Secretary of State is laughable. So let’s lay out the facts as we know them:

1. Hillary Clinton lied in her testimony to Congress. Note this was not done under oath and thus not subject to perjury charges, but I have a feeling she’ll be back and forced to sing like a canary under oath before too long.

2. President Obama went to sleep knowing that a U.S. ambassador and other Americans were being attacked by terrorists in Benghazi.

3. President Obama awoke refreshed the next day and headed to Las Vegas to fund-raise knowing his Libyan ambassador and three others were dead.

4. The entire Executive Branch lied repeatedly to the American people in order to save Obama’s chances for re-election.

Like I and many others have said previously, at least when it came to Watergate no one died. What is happening here is an absolute disgrace, but chickens all over the place are coming home to roost. Now that the dam of coverup, dismissal, and denial is breaking and all hell is about to bvreak loose.

And it couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of people.

UPDATE: I hate to say I told you so, but no one listens to The Great White Shank. It’s amazing how much stuff I post finds its way into the blogsphere the next day. Check this Hot Air post by Ed Morrissey out: now that both ABC and Obama shill Ron Fournier have gotten wind of significant talking point revisions made to the original CIA memo to whitewash (do I hear “cover up”) any references to a terror attack, is there any doubt the dam is truly about to break into scandal territory.

Expect Speaker of the House John Boehner to appoint a select investigation committee with the power to issue subpoenas and then watch all the canaries start to sing. And don’t be surprised if one of the tunes whistled is “Hail To The Chief” – this story is about to go all the way to the Oval Office, where it will become apparent that it was President Obama who gave the orders not to help those poor folks under attack, then tried to cover up his cowardice and lack of command off by blaming the whole thing on a YouTube video, then lied about it repeatedly to the families of the dead and the American people.

The sound you’re hearing is toast being made.