Clinton faces the vapid right-wing conspiracy

Maureen Dowd

Nobody plays the victim like Hillary.

She can wield that label like a wrecking ball.

If her husband humiliates her with a girlfriend in the Oval Office, Hillary turns around and uses the sympathy engendered to launch a political career. If her Republican opponent gets in her space in an overbearing way during a debate, she turns around and uses the sympathy engendered to win a Senate seat. If conservatives hold a Salem witch trial under the guise of a House select committee hearing, she turns around and uses the sympathy engendered to slip into the HOV lane of a superhighway to the presidency.

Hillary Clinton is never more alluring than when a bunch of pasty-faced, nasty-tongued white men bully her.

And she was plenty alluring during her marathon session on Thursday with Republican Lilliputians.

Trey Gowdy and his blithering band of tea partyers went on a fishing expedition, but they forgot to bring their rods — or any fresh facts.

It was a revealing display of hard-core con- servatives in their parallel universe, where all their biases are validated by conservative media. They crawled out of the ooze into the sea of cameras, blinking and obtuse. Ohio’s Jim Jordan, bellowing. South Carolina’s Gowdy, sweating. Alabama’s Martha Roby, not getting the joke. And Indiana’s Susan Brooks, allowing that “most of us really don’t know much about Libya.”

Hillary acted bemused, barely masking her contempt at their condescension.

The Republicans came across as even more conspiratorial than their other target, Sidney Blumenthal, and his nickname is “G.K.,” for grassy knoll. One conservative on the panel, trying to paint Clinton as an addled 68-yearold, as of Monday, kept snidely offering to pause while she read the notes her posse was passing her.

They must have been mistaking her for W., who always looked as if he wouldn’t know what to say if his notes blew away in the wind.

It is not the terrain of Gowdy’s lame committee, but it is legitimate to examine Clinton’s record.

She had to be tenacious in figuring out when Libya had deteriorated into such a caldron of jihadis that our ambassador should either be pulled out or backed up.

In a rare moment of lucidity, Rep. Mike Pompeo, of Kansas, said to Clinton: “You described Mr. Stevens as having the best knowledge of Libya of anyone,” but “when he asked for increased security, he didn’t get it.”

As Hillary kept explaining, that job was the province of the “security professionals,” four of whom were later criticized for providing “grossly inadequate” security at the Benghazi compound and removed from their posts.

The 11-hour hearing showcased the good Hillary, but there were occasional flashes of the bad. She still doesn’t believe that setting up her own server was so wrong.

She seemed oddly detached about Stevens.

There were no call logs of talks between Stevens and Clinton, and she said she could not remember if she ever spoke to him again after she swore him in, in May. “I was the boss of ambassadors in 270 countries,” she explained.

But Libya was the country where she was the midwife to chaos. And she should have watched that baby like the Lady Hawk she is.