We used to expect more of our presidents than that they not have been indicted for major felonies.

There were no new “bombshells” in the Report of the Benghazi Committee.  But there were exhaustive, chilling new details about a foreign policy gone awry, about gross negligence and deliberate deceit.

Ousting Muammar Khadafy has turned Libya into a base from which ISIS infiltrates Europe and other countries in North Africa.

*Senior State Department officials were warned repeatedly about Islamist danger, but ignored or rejected pleas from Ambassador Chris Stevens on down for more security.  The Diplomatic Security Service staff in Libya was cut from 34 to 6 the month before the attack.

“This was a suicide mission,” a DSS officer assigned to the consulate told a superior in Washington. “There was a very good chance that everybody here was going to die.”

“Everybody back here in D.C. knows that people are going to die in Benghazi,” responded the DSS desk officer in the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau. “Nobody cares, and nobody is going to care until somebody does die.”

Four somebodies did die – and Hillary still didn’t care.  She still doesn’t to this day.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s war in Syria and Iraq isn’t going well, and he has accordingly purged those in charge. 

The excuse given for sacking chief of staff General Firouzabadi is that he’s obese, but he’s been fat for quite a while, and his successor—his deputy Mohammed Baqeri—doesn’t have much battlefield experience. 

The redoubtable Amir Taheri tweets that the new chief of staff is an intelligence professional, not a warrior.  (He’s very slim, by the way).  And he’s got lots of experience in business, where the Revolutionary Guards have done a lot better than in Syrian fights against ISIS and anti-Assad forces.

Aside from Firouzabadi, the biggest loser in this shakeup is the celebrated General Suleimani, easily the most recognizable face among the Revolutionary Guards. 

Suleimani was a selfie star for years, and was even considered a possible successor to the supreme leader by some of the Tehranologists.  That surge of popular stardom has ended. 

Meanwhile, hatred of the Islamic Republic is rampant across the Iraqi border.  A couple of weeks ago, a quarter million Iraqi Shi’ites demonstrated in Baghdad chanting “Down with Iran, down with Suleimani!”

Have you ever wondered why it is that even the most successful companies invariably stall out in terms of growth and profits?

The reason is that any organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit, or a government, reaches a point where it can no longer be managed in an effective and efficient manner as it was when it was smaller.

When I took my first course in antitrust as a graduate student, the big concern at the time was that IBM would monopolize the computer industry, that U.S. Steel would monopolize the steel industry, and that General Motors (GM) would monopolize the automobile industry.

Such concerns seem absurd today, where there is more concern about the long-run viability of these companies than fear they will engage in monopoly power and abuse.

Economists have long understood the dangers of monopolies. Monopolies tend to become slothful and less well-managed, are easily corrupted, increase costs, reduce innovation, and thus slow progress.

But what is too often ignored is that government monopolies of any activity also eventually exhibit all of the characteristics of private sector monopolies, but are even worse because there is often no effective check on them — even in democracies.

Three ISIS suicide bombers killed 43 and injured 239 at Turkey’s Ataturk International airport Tuesday (6/28). The three-part attack “was carried out in a way that suggests the kind of advance intelligence, careful study of a target, and cool execution that would normally be practiced by Western special forces.”

America isn’t on this list of countries where ISIS claims to have covert units in place.  But CIA Director John Brennan said he’d be “surprised if (ISIS) is not trying to carry out that kind of attack in the United States.”

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Gunmen have taken at least 20 hostages today in a café popular with diplomats in Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh.  You’ll never guess what they were shouting.

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One of the guns used in the terrorist attack in Paris last November was purchased illegally from a gun owner in Phoenix. The seller committed at least two federal firearms violations, but hasn’t been prosecuted. Judicial Watch suspects the seller was participating in the infamous “Fast and Furious” operation in which ATF deliberately permitted “straw purchases” for Mexican drug cartels and let guns “walk” across the border.

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There were no new bombshells in the report of the Benghazi Committee Tuesday. But there were chilling new details confirming what those who were paying attention already knew. 

“Benghazi was a foreseeable disaster (the administration) failed to prevent,” summed up Richard Fernandez of PJ Media. “And in the aftermath it was a catastrophe whose lessons they were determined to ignore.”

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Donald Trump was in Pennsylvania Tuesday to deliver a speech on trade so profoundly economically illiterate it could have been given by Bernie Sanders.  It was also profoundly hypocritical, since the merchandise Trump sells – including those stupid hats -- is manufactured abroad.

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Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton met for half an hour Tuesday on her government airplane at the airport in Phoenix.  They didn’t discuss the FBI investigation of Hillary, Ms. Lynch said. Not even the Lying Swine believe that.