There is not a scintilla of doubt that Hillary Clinton knowingly lied to the American public about Benghazi. “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Queda-like [sic] group,” Clinton wrote in an email to her daughter at 11:12 pm. Sept 11, 2012. “We know the attack had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack, not a protest … Based on the information we saw today, we believe that the group that claimed responsibility for this was affiliated with al-Qaeda,” she told Egyptian prime minister Hisham Kandil that same night. “There is a gun battle ongoing, which I understand Ansar as-Sharia [sic] is taking responsibility for,” she told the Libyan president while the attack was going on.

An hour after emailing Chelsea, Clinton spoke with Obama in a phone call the White House initially denied occurred, before the truth came out. After that phone call, the following statement was released by the State Department. “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation.”

Two days later at Joint Base Andrews, present for the ceremonial return of the bodies of Sean Smith, Navy SEALS Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, and Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Clinton shamelessly lied again — twice. First she told Wood’s father Charles Wood the Obama administration was “going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son.” Then while standing next to our equally duplicitous president, she repeated the orchestrated falsehood. “We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with,” she declared.

Here’s the infamous “3 AM Phone Call" ad Hillary ran in 2008, suggesting she was best suited to "lead the nation in a dangerous world.” We now know that getting in touch with Clinton when it mattered most was virtually impossible for her “friend” Chris, even as hack Sidney Blumenthal had unfettered access during his numerous attempts to “monetize” the Libyan chaos for his own personal gain. In October of 2012, Clinton insisted she was responsible for diplomatic security. “I take responsibility,” Clinton told CNN while visiting Peru. “I’m in charge of the State Department’s 60,000-plus people all over the world, 275 posts. The president and the vice president wouldn’t be knowledgeable about specific decisions that are made by security professionals. They’re the ones who weigh all of the threats and the risks and the needs and make a considered decision.”

What about the numerous security requests made by Stevens, all of which were denied? “I did not see them. I did not approve them. I did not deny them,” she stated at the hearing, foisting responsibility on “trained security professionals” she never conversed with.

It gets worse. Declassified documents made public in January of 2014 reveal former AFRICOM Commander Gen. Carter Ham told members of the House Armed Services subcommittee he learned about the “terrorist attack” on the consulate compound only 15 minutes after it commenced. He told former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and former Joint Chiefs of Staff General chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, both of whom met with Obama one hour and 18 minutes after the attack began, according to a Defense Department timeline. That was 5PM EST. According to testimony Clinton gave the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a year before that, she knew about the attack approximately one hour earlier than that, insisting "we were in continuous meetings and conversations, both within the department, with our team in Tripoli, with the interagency and internationally.“

The entire battle in Benghazi "was a series of attacks in multiple locations by unknown assailants that ebbed and flowed over a period of almost eight hours," stated Ambassador Thomas Pickering, chairman of the Accountability Review Board (ARB) in December 2012. That would be the same ARB appointed by Clinton herself — the one who decided it was completely unnecessary to interview Clinton regarding her accountability. And that would be the same Thomas Pickering who nodded his head in agreement only 20 minutes later when ARB vice chairman Admiral Michael Mullen insisted the entire confrontation lasted "only about 20 or 30 minutes” when a reporter asked why the U.S. military stood down.

In short, we know Clinton, along with several other members of this administration and their willing collaborators, are utterly shameless, unrepentant liars. Yet only one of them, arguably the most shameless, unrepentant liar of the bunch, is running for president of the United States in 2016. Thus we get to the essential question:

Does it matter to the American public?

That such a question is not only relevant, but beyond ridicule, is a testament to the unprecedented level of character deficiency that is rapidly approaching normalcy in our beleaguered nation. It is a character deficiency measured in our popular culture by the increasing acceptance, if not outright adoration, of self-absorbed, know-nothing celebrities, many of whom achieve that status by making the tawdriness of their lives available for public consumption. It is the acceptance of a corrupt media with a Ministry of Truth-like agenda, as in their assertions that Hillary “won” the Benghazi hearing, apparently because no additional damning evidence of her congenital mendacity emerged. The same media that has run interference for her and the Obama administration, when they’re not actively suppressing information inimical to them — a tactic seemingly embraced by self-infantilized college students, 51 percent of whom favor the imposition of speech codes, and 61 percent of whom want trigger warning requirements on the courses they take.

How removed are we from anything resembling common decency? President Obama’s despicable Benghazi disinformation campaign, built on a foundation of calculated lies, was only revealed as such after he was reelected in 2012. Clinton’s willing collaboration with it is a known quantity prior to the 2016 election — and yet she still remains the Democrat Party standard-bearer.

That is only possible in a nation where character and integrity no longer matter at all, or where people view their abandonment as a reasonable tradeoff for ideological gain. It is only possible in a nation where Barack Obama, in alliance with his party and the media, has perfected the art of “scandal fatigue” resulting in a public so inured to the lies, cover ups and unconstitutional activity of this administration, they simply assume all politicians are as untruthful, cold, calculating and soulless as he or Clinton is. When “everybody else does it” becomes the ultimate standard by which we assess the potential leader of the free world, we are sailing in uncharted waters.

Comedian Dennis Miller insists Hillary Clinton will be president because she best reflects the nation we have become. I pray he is wrong, about her — and about us. The nation is barely weathering the current Oval Office occupant, and the installation of an equally compromised successor could be a blow from which we might never recover. Ben Franklin, et al, gave us a republic — if we could keep it. Electing a “victorious” liar is not the way to go about it.

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