When Hillary Clinton was asked at a campaign event how her administration would differ from Barack Obama’s, she replied in that voice that brings to mind a cat walking across a blackboard: “I’m a woman.” Her silly response naturally garnered a huge ovation from the liberal yahoos in attendance.

How is it that women, who have claimed to be empowering themselves for the past four decades, turn into simpering little girls every time Mrs. Clinton makes pandering statements about their gender?

Ignorance, some insist, is blissful. Perhaps that’s true. I wouldn’t know. I guess you’d have to ask a Democrat. But to those of us not inflicted with the stupid gene, it is certainly embarrassing.

I have heard of one miraculous uterus, but it belonged to the mother of Christ, not the mother of Chelsea.

The question I have not had answered from those who can’t wait to attend Hillary’s coronation is how simply being a woman qualifies her to be Commander-in-Chief of the United States, but not to play, say, centerfield for the New York Mets, quarterback the Dallas Cowboys or even to head up Hewlett Packard.

A great many people, including far too many conservatives, praised Mrs. Clinton for standing up under 11 hours of grilling during her appearance before Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi committee. I can only assume they only read about it and didn’t bother tuning in. If they had, they would have been aware that there was a one-hour break midway through the proceedings. That takes it down to 10 hours. Next, half of the 10 hours was wasted by the likes of Elijah Cummings, Adam Schiff and Linda Chavez, using their allotment not to ask a single question of Mrs. Clinton, but to serve as her defense attorneys.

When you get right down to it, Hillary barely had to break a sweat. Even when we discovered that on the evening of the Benghazi massacre, she was emailing Chelsea an admission that it was a terrorist attack conducted by an al Qaeda-like group that had nothing to do with a video, the Democrats on the committee pooh-poohed the disclosure as old and unimportant news.

It didn’t matter to them in the least that Mrs. Clinton lied to the parents of the four dead Americans as well as to the rest of us, and that Susan Rice did the same several days later on the Sunday news shows and that, completing the trifecta of shame, Barack Obama repeated the same vile lies two weeks later when addressing the U.N. It also didn’t matter to her or the congressional members of her Praetorian Guard that she had dismissed the lies, along with the deaths of the four Americans, by demanding to know what possible difference it made who murdered them.

So far as her defenders were concerned, it also didn’t matter that Ambassador Stevens had sent nearly 600 cables to the State Department begging for additional security in the months leading up to the attack. But not only did Secretary of State Clinton claim to be unaware of the cables, but, even though she has constantly insisted that Stevens was a good friend, hadn’t spoken to him once after assigning him to the killing fields of Libya. What’s more, it turns out that she hadn’t even bothered giving him her email address, although the Russians, the Chinese and no doubt Elijah Cummings, all had it.

As the old saying goes, when you have Hillary Clinton for a friend, you don’t need to go looking for enemies.

On the other hand, if you have served as a loyal bag man, a fixer or a hatchet man, for the Clintons, like Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia or Sidney Blumenthal, you are guaranteed free access. For his part, Blumenthal was looking to make millions in Libya through his connection to the Secretary of State, with a portion of the millions no doubt going to help finance her campaign. Unlike Ambassador Stevens, Blumenthal had daily, sometimes hourly, contact with her highness, even though he was such a toxic individual that even a lowlife like Obama wouldn’t allow Hillary to offer him a job in the scummiest administration in American history.

The only thing that mattered to the former Secretary of State and the moral pygmies on the committee was that Hillary and her presidential aspirations came through the fray unscathed.

Historically, the position of Secretary of State has been held by men of accomplishment, honor and intellect, men such as Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, James Monroe and Daniel Webster.

In our times, we have seen the position of Secretary of State passed around among the inconsequential likes of Ed Muskie, Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, John Kerry and Mrs. Clinton, as if it were a political payoff, along the lines of an ambassadorship to Luxembourg.

In spite of which, people, for some inexplicable reason, continue to ignore the compelling and overwhelming evidence and seriously question whether America’s best days are behind us.