With their conspiracy theories about the Benghazi affair failing to rile up anyone who didn’t already think President Obama is a Muslim Communist from Kenya, the geniuses at Breitbart.com have decided that the real problem is that the administration isn’t sufficiently remorseful about the deaths of four Americans.

To wit:

It’s disgusting to write-off the complete and total failure in Benghazi as nothing more than “someone in the federal government screwing up,” it’s even more enraging to do so in such a casual and flip way that is meant to engender laughter.  

Four Americans are dead.  They died while they fought off al-Qaeda terrorists whom President Obama assured us were “on the run” thanks to his leadership.  They died waiting for help that never came.

The Breitbart.com author includes a video of the “60 Minutes” interview in which Obama apparently cracks a bad joke, fails to accept any responsibility, and vows to continue killing American diplomats … all in the span of 56 seconds.

Except that the video that accompanies the Breitbart.com piece edits out all of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s remarks, as well as the beginning and the end of Obama’s remarks.

Here’s the Breitbart transcript of the interview:

You know, I remember Bob Gates, you know, first thing he said to me, I think maybe first week or two that I was there and we were meeting in the Oval Office and he, obviously, been through seven presidents or something. And he says, “Mr. President, one thing I can guarantee you is that at this moment, somewhere, somehow, somebody in the federal government is screwing up.” (Laughter)

Here’s the actual transcript from the interview:

Steve Kroft: You said during the hearings, I mean, you’ve accepted responsibility. You’ve accepted the very critical findings of Admiral Mullen and Ambassador Pickering.

As the New York Times put it, you accepted responsibility, but not blame. Do you feel guilty in any way, in— at a personal level? Do you blame yourself that you didn’t know or that you should have known?

Secretary Clinton: Well, Steve, obviously, I deeply regret what happened, as I’ve said many times. I knew Chris Stevens. I sent him there originally. It was a great personal loss to lose him and three other brave Americans. But I also have looked back and tried to figure out what we could do so that nobody, insofar is possible, would be in this position again. And as the Accountability Review Board pointed out, we did fix responsibility appropriately. And we’re taking steps to implement that. But we also live in a dangerous world. And, you know, the people I’m proud to serve and work with in our diplomatic and development personnel ranks, they know it’s a dangerous and risky world. We just have to do everything we can to try to make it as secure as possible for them.

President Obama: I think, you know, one of the things that humbles you as president, I’m sure Hillary feels the same way as secretary of state, is that you realize that all you can do every single day is to figure out a direction, make sure that you are working as hard as you can to put people in place where they can succeed, ask the right questions, shape the right strategy. But it’s going to be a team that both succeeds and fails. And it’s a process of constant improvement, because the world is big and it is chaotic. You know, I remember Bob Gates, you know, first thing he said to me, I think maybe first week or two that I was there and we were meeting in the Oval Office and he, obviously, been through seven presidents or something. And he says, “Mr. President, one thing I can guarantee you is that at this moment, somewhere, somehow, somebody in the federal government is screwing up.” And, you know you’re— and so part of what you’re trying to do is to constantly improve systems and accountability and transparency to minimize those mistakes and ensure success. It is a dangerous world. And that’s part of the reason why we have to continue to get better.

My conservative friends tell me that “there’s always a part they cut out” and that the parts that were cut don’t do anything to change the tone of the remarks that Obama made during the interview.

So … you tell me: Did the “journalists” over at Breitbart.com get it right?

Former boy genius and current Breitbart.com columnist Ben Shapiro has figured out why things went so terribly wrong in Libya and, taking some time away from facing “the political liberals head-on” and “exposing the leftist tilt of the professoriate on college campuses,” he helpfully published his findings at Townhall.com:

Ask any sane person in America whether it would be a good idea to send our ambassador in Libya to Benghazi without a security team. They’d tell you immediately that we need security around our ambassador in a hellhole like Benghazi. Obama knew that. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton knew that.

But they didn’t care. They thought it was far more important to make nice with the native population than to keep our ambassador safe. They thought that the Arab Spring was a nice, happy little uprising, complete with gay bodyguards to apply to protect the ambassador. Really. An ad placed in Libya — Libya! — for the ambassador’s security team made it clear that members of a same-sex marriage would be accepted.

No gay men applied. But the Libyan security team did tell the terrorist mob just where to find the ambassador. And now he’s dead.

No, seriously. The reason that Christopher Stevens was murdered was because the Obama administration allowed gay men to apply for his security team. Of course, no gay men applied … but obviously just mentioning gay men is sufficient to spur terrorists to action.

As David Frum points out, “Some days you read something where you can only whistle and salute. This is one of those days.”

In all seriousness, does Shapiro not have a single honest friend who will read his writing before he publishes it online and tell him he might want to rethink his thesis? Not one?

In a fascinating twist, the Romney camp has switched from attacking President Obama for apologizing and sympathizing with those who attacked American embassies — which was patently untrue — to simply blaming Obama for the attacks themselves and hypothesizing that an Imaginary President Romney would have prevented those attacks:

A top foreign policy aide to Mitt Romney suggested Thursday that the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens would never have happened if Romney were president. There wouldn’t even be anti-American protests in the Middle East if Romney were in charge, the aide said.

“There’s a pretty compelling story that if you had a President Romney, you’d be in a different situation,” Romney adviser Richard Williamson told the Washington Post. “For the first time since Jimmy Carter, we’ve had an American ambassador assassinated.”

He blamed the attack that killed Stevens on Obama’s handling of the region, arguing that the Muslim world would have held the hypothetical Romney administration of 2008-2012 in much greater esteem, which would have prevented violent protests over an anti-Muslim film like the one that led to Stevens’s death.

“In Egypt and Libya and Yemen, again demonstrations — the respect for America has gone down, there’s not a sense of American resolve and we can’t even protect sovereign American property,” he said.

“If only Mitt Romney could be our president right now so that nothing bad would ever happen to America.”

“Why wouldn’t anything bad ever happen?”

“Because of respect and resolve and other good things that Mitt Romney always does and Barack Obama never does. And no apologies. And America.”

So … if you have some free time on your hands right now, feel free to contribute to Richard Williamson’s list of all the bad things that Imaginary President Romney would have prevented:

As an alternative headline, I propose: “Romney needs to find new advisors as soon as humanely possible.” Because nothing screams “presidential behavior” like an badly-timed and entirely ill-advised harangue based on incorrect information:

Republican Mitt Romney slammed the Obama administration’s handling of foreign affairs in the wake of attacks on U.S. diplomatic missions in Egypt and Libya, as the presidential campaign lurched back to negative mode after a one-day pause for reflection over the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Romney branded the administration’s early response to the attacks as “disgraceful,” in a statement the former Massachusetts governor released before confirmation that the American ambassador had been killed.

Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt fired back that the campaign was “shocked that, at a time when the United States of America is confronting the tragic death of one of our diplomatic officers in Libya, Governor Romney would choose to launch a political attack.”

U.S. ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three American members of his staff were killed in an attack on the U.S. consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi. Libyan officials said the attack was carried out by protesters angry over a film that ridiculed Islam’s Prophet Muhammed.

President Barack Obama, in a statement Wednesday morning, strongly condemned “this outrageous attack on our diplomatic facility in Benghazi.” He said he has directed administration officials “to provide all necessary resources to support the security of our personnel in Libya, and to increase security at our diplomatic posts around the globe.”

Romney was expected to address the killings during comments in Jacksonville, Fla., Wednesday morning.

His statement said the administration’s early response to the attacks seemed to sympathize with the attackers.

The U.S. Embassy in Cairo had issued a statement saying, in part, that it condemns “the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims — as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.” The statement, an apparent reference to the video, was posted hours before the Americans’ death in Libya was reported.

Romney said he was outraged by the attacks. He added, “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a statement released at about the same time as Romney’s, condemned the attack in Libya “in the strongest terms.”

I can’t wait to hear how Romney plans to follow up this morning in Jacksonville.

UPDATE: So … Romney’s follow-up turned out to be a double-down; his press conference amounted to a continued attack on the Obama administration, pretty clearly politicizing the deaths of four U.S. diplomats by claiming that the administration apologized for a video that offended Muslims as a response to the embassy attacks (which, if one cares much about timelines or words, is not actually the case).

Over at Counterpunch, Mike Whitney recently set out an interesting hypothetical that he believes should give liberals some pause when it comes to the upcoming election and, in particular, Ron Paul’s candidacy.

Let’s say, Paul surprises his critics and wins the presidency in a landslide victory in November 2012. Then–in his first public appearance as president–he issues an executive order to stop all Social Security payments immediately, thus cutting off the meager revenue-stream that millions of the nation’s elderly need to scrape-by.

Isn’t this the worst-case scenario? Isn’t this what liberals are really worried about?

Okay, so let’s say it all goes-down just as we said. Let’s say Paul tries to strangle Social Security from Day 1. Isn’t that still infinitely better than another Falluja, another Haditha, another Abu Ghraib, another bombed-out wedding party?

Yes, it’s wrong to deprive the sick and elderly of some pittance so they can eek [sic!] by, but is it as wrong as blowing women and children to bits in their own country, in their own cities, in their own homes?

It’s a question of priorities, right? So, what’s more important; ending the bloodletting or some potential threat to Social Security?

As I said above, this is interesting. But mostly because it’s wrong-headed.

First, I’m not at all convinced that the major obstacle standing between liberals and Ron Paul is social security. It’s surely a piece of the puzzle, but I think we could probably put our heads together and come up with a list of things that liberals don’t exactly love about Paul.

Second, even as hypotheticals go, this seems really light on argumentation. Whitney seems to suggest that there are two evils — bombing people in Syria, let’s say, and doing away with social security — and Ron Paul will make sure we don’t bomb anyone but he’ll also do away with social security. The argument is that it’s obvious that bombing people is much, much worse than doing away with social security … except that there’s no argument. Far better for liberals, I’d guess, would be not bombing anyone and finding a way to provide safety nets for those who need them. That’s a goal for which liberals might aim … but not with Ron Paul, who seems committed to isolationism because of his position on how much power the federal government should wield. In other words, Paul takes an anti-war stance not because he’s necessarily opposed to war but because war is a wasteful federal program.

Third, for whom is it worse, we probably ought to ask? Surely, it’s worse for senior citizens who count on social security checks to pay rent or buy groceries if those checks stop. Nowhere does Whitney make clear that when he’s talking about entirely doing away with social security, he’s talking about depriving people of what might be their only income. What’s more, it’s a source of income that comes to them as a result of having paid into the system in the past. In this sense, taking away social security benefits amounts to theft. Libertarians, on my understanding, don’t approve of forcing people to contribute to social security through taxation … but, surely, they must also disapprove of abolishing social security without paying back the people who were taxed for their entire adult lives.

Finally, it seems to me that Whitney is relying on a false comparison between Falluja, Haditha, and Abu Ghraib — on the one hand — and the military intervention in Libya that President Obama undertook last year. I presume this is what Whitney has in mind, since liberals were conflicted over intervention. But liberals weren’t at all conflicted over the war in Iraq, nor were they unhappy when Obama withdrew American troops to bring that war to a close. Nor are we likely to see in Libya (or Syria if we somehow decide to intervene) the sorts of human rights abuses and atrocities we saw in Iraq because we’re simply not involved in the same way. It’s wrong to equate putting tens of thousands of troops on the ground for a full-scale invasion and multi-year occupation with short-term aerial strikes against military targets in a situation where the military is targeting civilians. The opposition to any sort of intervention is certainly a legitimate position to take, but it would be necessary to make an argument about why the intervention in Libya ought to be compared with the war in Iraq rather than to simply say so. In my view — and, I think, in the view of many liberals — it would be desirable to have an administration that won’t engage in the latter but that doesn’t always shy away from the former. Being a liberal doesn’t mean being a complete isolationist.

At bottom, I think that the premise behind the piece is flawed: Liberals don’t have a problem when they fail to support Ron Paul, even if he is the only candidate who opposes every instance of U.S. military involvement. In part, the problems with Whitney’s piece demonstrate my point. But it’s also important to note that pacifism isn’t a requirement for identifying as a liberal.

HT: Jayel Aheram.