Congressional hearings are underway into the storming of the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya and the killing of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. The hearings are interesting — both for what they are telling us about what happened in Libya and within the U.S. government itself as the attacks unfolded, but also for what they are telling us about the twisted, hyper-partisan world of Washington, D.C.
During yesterday’s testimony, which the New York Times described as “riveting,” a veteran U.S. diplomat named Gregory Hicks gave a detailed account of the night of the attack. Hicks, a 22-year Foreign Service veteran, became the head State Department official in Libya after Ambassador Stevens was killed. He testified about how a Special Operations team wanted to fly to Benghazi to help but was overruled by officials in Washington, who concluded it could not arrive in time to help. Hicks also described being “stunned” and “embarrassed” when Administration officials, including UN Ambassador Susan Rice, initially portrayed the attack as a response to a YouTube video and how such comments angered the president of the Libyan National Assembly, who had called the attack a preplanned terrorist act. Hicks testified that the Libyan government’s feeling of being undercut may have delayed their cooperation with Americans investigating the incident. Furthermore, he said that when he raised questions about Rice’s comments, he was effectively demoted and led to understand that he should stop asking questions.
The testimony of Hicks and two other officials, Mark Thompson and Eric Nordstrom, indicate that there is still information to be uncovered and lessons to be learned about Benghazi. When four Americans, including an ambassador, are killed, their deaths deserve a detailed inquiry and a careful evaluation, at the congressional level. Such an evaluation should determine whether changes in law, security arrangements, staffing, or emergency response procedures are needed to prevent such an incident from ever happening again.
Unfortunately, in our modern government, things are never quite that simple. The Times story linked above reflects that unfortunate fact, because much of the article is devoted to the “politics” of what should ideally be an apolitical, objective fact-finding exercise. It’s ludicrous, and disheartening, and it is happening on both sides of the aisle. Republicans should stop portraying every incident as “another Watergate”; it just allows their opponents to dismiss hearings such as yesterday’s as a politically motivated witch hunt. And Democrats should stop trying to downplay the significance of Benghazi and resist every inquiry about why four Americans died. That much, at least, is owed to the memories of those four Americans — and to the many other Americans who serve their country in diplomatic posts in dangerous parts of the world.
The WJC wants to spotlight the rise of anti-Semitism in eastern Europe. And sure enough, the presence of the WJC caused the anti-Semites to come crawling out of their holes, spewing their hateful rhetoric. The Chairman of the Jobbik Party — which sounds like a Tolkien character but is the third-largest party in Hungary — accused Israelis of trying to buy the country, and another Jobbik member of Parliament said his country had become “subjugated to Zionism” and was the target of “colonization” by Israel. The ugly speeches and slanderous scapegoating are chillingly familiar and profoundly disturbing.
It turns out that Iceland, in addition to having the most affirmatively unappealing country name in the world, has an issue with inadvertent incest. It is a small, isolated, sparsely populated land where the residents have lived for thousands of years. As a result, the forces of nature dictate that most of the 330,000 citizens share some common ancestry. But what if you want to make absolutely certain that you avoid consorting with someone with uncomfortably close degrees of sanguinity? Fortunately, Google is offering an Android app that allows Icelanders to use their smart phones to access the Book of Icelander — an ancestry log that includes some 720,000 names — to determine their exact relations with that attractive person they met at work.
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This week 
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Then we received the bill above, demanding a balance due of . . . one cent. One cent! I’m blaming the exchange rate again, because the bottom of the bill says, under “amount paid,” “Canadian funds.” Of course, there is no way I can write a check on my American bank for one cent, Canadian. The letter specifically says that I can’t send cash. And if you think I’m going to risk giving my credit card information, on-line, to bureaucrats who are trying to chase down people who have paid, in full, twice already, you’ve got another think coming. So, my only choice is to write a check for 5 cents, American, and hope that it accounts for the exchange rate and is finally accepted as payment in full by the ETR collectors.
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A Dutch researcher tried to determine if there are patterns to the generation of malicious email used in spam, phishing, and other fraudulent scams. It was a huge task, because there are more than 42,000 internet service providers worldwide. The researcher found, surprisingly, that 
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I mean, look at these things! Just look at them! Multi-hued, horizontal-striped pantaloons, leggings, and tunics. Huge shirtsleeve cuffs and ruffled, lacy collars that look like they belong in a Rembrandt painting. Steel conquistador-style helmets with their sharply curved, pointed brims, burnished to a gleaming pewter glow and topped with bright red ostrich feathers. And they carry pikes for weaponry. Pikes!
The general believes Chavez said those words because he loved Venezuela, but some people are contrasting Chavez’s swaggering, strongman image with the last words and suggesting that Chavez really wasn’t so courageous after all.
Cut off from interaction with the rest of the world for decades, run by the military and a ’50s-era communist dictatorial regime, North Korea and its leaders seem to have a hopelessly distorted view of the world. It releases laughable claims about its leaders and their prowess, it issues remarkably aggressive declarations about fighting with South Korea, the United States, and other purported enemies — and then 
