Who gave the order? That’s a four-word question, one part, answerable with two words: first name and last name. Why is it so difficult to answer this one question? We had the resources in the air to take out the attackers’ heavy weapons. We had a firing solution on those weapons. Someone made the decision not to stop them from shelling the compound where four Americans asked repeatedly over the course of a seven-hour attack for help. Someone. Who was that someone? Why is this question not on the front page of every newspaper, above the fold, every day, until we get a simple answer to who gave the damned order?

In 2005 we got to know everything in the world about the head of FEMA, fer cryin’ out loud, who bungled sending help to New Orleans when the governor of the state had refused to ask for it. We got his full employment history; we got to find out where he went to school; about the only thing I don’t recall us getting was whether he’s a boxers or briefs kind of guy.  We got weeks and weeks and weeks of breathless reports of every water-cooler conversation in every penny-ante federal bureaucracy about who made what decision and when.  We got in-depth interviews with every corrupt New Orleans ward tool crying about how Geo. Bush wasn’t down on his street corner personally shovelling mud.

Why is it now seven weeks to the day after those attacks and we can’t get one simple, two-word answer?

To say that we oughtn’t be reporting the Benghazi attack because of the presidential election is logically indistinguishable from saying we shouldn’t have reported World War II in 1940 because it might impact the presidential election.  Yes, we weren’t in it then, but which of the two candidates was the more likely better to deal with a conquered France — and not unlikely a conquered England — and a German jack-boot across the neck of a whole continent was just that tiny bit relevant to the voters’ choice.  Wouldn’t anyone agree?

So why is it not equally relevant as to which of two candidates is more likely better to deal with a threat that is actual, immediate, and presently attacking us at every opportunity?  Hitler in 1940 was still going out of his way not to shoot at identifiable Americans who weren’t under actual military convoy, however much he may have wanted to.  These savages today have killed an ambassador.  Not the guy who filled the Coke machine, or the fellow who ran the motor pool.  But the actual, letters-in-his-hand ambassador to the country whose citizens killed him.