HILLARY WILL MAKE ZERO A DEAD DUCK – WILL SHE MAKE HERSELF ONE TOO?

The Obamas and the Clintons detest each other, insiders say. Which isn’t surprising. Aside from Bill – who’s a scoundrel, but an affable one – they aren’t very likeable.

Even if Barack Hussein Obama were as swell a guy as Barack Hussein Obama thinks he is, he snatched from Hillary the prize she’s lusted for most of her life. A better person than she is would harbor some resentment.

So when Hillary and Barack "hugged it out" at a party in Martha’s Vineyard a few days after she’d criticized his conduct of foreign policy in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic magazine, a new world record for a public display of insincerity was set.

Hillary has just begun to hammer Barack, thinks New York Post columnist John Podhoretz. He’ll get more unpopular as the tragic consequences of his policies pile up, so she thinks she must run  "as his sadder but wiser replacement – the one who saw it go wrong."

Journalists shielding the president now will join the critics after the midterm elections. Preserving the viability of the next Democrat candidate for president will matter more then than whitewashing the record of this one.

So rather than try to cover them up, journalists will assert the failures of his administration are due entirely to Mr. Obama’s personal shortcomings (which they hadn’t noticed before), not because the liberal assumptions on which they are based are in any way flawed.

Democrats on Capitol Hill will pile on. They’re angered by presidential neglect, but are biting their tongues to preserve the illusion of party unity until the midterm ballots have been cast.

Mr. Obama won’t be a lame duck. He’ll be a dead duck.

But Hillary may have difficulty collecting on her bet. She "stepped in it" when she implied Mr. Obama’s wisecrack about the theme of his foreign policy indicates he lacks gravitas, said CNN contributor Gloria Borger.

"Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle," Hillary told Mr. Goldberg.

"When we say ‘Don’t do stupid stuff,’ we mean stuff like occupying Iraq," fired back Obama campaign guru David Axelrod, a not so subtle reminder Sen. Clinton had voted to authorize the war.

Liberals blame all our troubles with Islamists on the war in Iraq. But we have it from no less an authority than Barack Hussein Obama that in 2012, Iraq was "sovereign, stable and self-reliant." Chaos there now couldn’t possibly be the fault of his predecessor.

This doesn’t matter to the liberal base, which has an apparently fathomless ability to deny reality when it clashes with a favored narrative. But this trait, coupled with their stridency, isolates them from other Americans.

In 1974, a rift opened between Republicans appalled by President Nixon’s misconduct in Watergate, and a large minority who attacked others in the GOP who uttered even mild criticisms of the president.

Bitter enders are the majority among Democrats. If Hillary embraces them, she can’t win the general election. But if she offends them, she could lose the nomination to a moonbat like, say, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, with whom Valerie Jarrett — de facto president when Mr. Obama is on the golf course — is reported to be meeting with secretly.

And Ms. Clinton isn’t a very credible critic of a foreign policy of which she was the principal architect.

What’s important about the attack on our consulate in Benghazi isn’t what happened on the night of 9/11/2012, but what it might be part of, says Richard Fernandez of the Belmont Club.

"If we take ‘Benghazi’ to be a catch-all word to describe the failed foreign policy whose consequences are now plunging the region into the turmoil, then the ownership of that policy is of the utmost political and criminal consequence," Mr. Fernandez said.

Mr. Obama would rather golf and party with plutocrats than immerse himself in the nitty gritty details of policy. He might not have known how lax security was at the consulate, or how the arms being transferred from the CIA annex to rebels in Syria wound up in the hands of Islamists.

But Hillary would have. She may have more to fear than he when the Benghazi Committee begins its hearings next month.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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