[Hoot Gibson]

Hello, you've reached the president. I'm never here.

In Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 3 a.m. television ad in the 2008 primary campaign, we heard the sound of a ringing phone and saw sleeping children. In ominous tones, a narrator warned that “something is happening in the world” and asked, “Who do you want answering the phone?”

Well, it’s 2012, and — the phone is still ringing. Please, somebody answer the damn thing!

The story of the terror attack in Benghazi is that neither Clinton nor the president who made her secretary of state responded to the real emergency when it came. The biggest foreign-policy crisis of the last four years is revealing an astonishing lack of competence and character at the center of the Obama administration.

That’s not to say the Democratic duo did nothing in response to the worst terror attack on American civilians since 9/11. After eulogizing our dead ambassador and three others, Obama and Clinton got to work spinning a web of deceit that would make Richard Nixon blush.

They sent out a wave of aides to mislead and torture the truth. Even now, nearly three weeks later, they have yet to come clean.

In the process, they are demonstrating how to turn a disaster into a scandal.

The attack in Libya, on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, killed one of our ambassadors for the first time since 1979. Christopher Stevens’ diary was recovered by CNN, and it shows he feared he was an al Qaeda target. Yet he had almost no security.

Because of their deception, you don’t have to be a cynic to ask what Obama and Clinton knew, and when they knew it. As Fox News has shown, intelligence officials concluded within 24 hours that the attack was carried out by Islamic terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda. Also, a terror group claimed credit for the attack.

But it wasn’t until this past Wednesday that Clinton hinted of an al Qaeda link. Even then, she made only a single reference and was far from definitive

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