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Only it’s not funny. It comes down to the meltdown we’ve seen twice before: either
(a) she was unable to surround herself with a team of competent advisors and managers, or
(b) she did surround herself with a team of competent advisors and managers and she just didn’t listen to them.

Either one is disqualifying.

Where did it all go so wrong?

Medicare-free-for-all. She should have differentiated her health care plan from Bernie’s, which she never did (same plan, but with footnotes). And she should have gone on the offensive with those who said people can keep their current plans if they want: “They can promise that, but they can’t guarantee it. Let’s be real: What if half the people on a private plan decide they like the public option better? Can the private plan survive? Probably not.”

Image. She just didn’t exude presidential-ness. Didn’t anybody tell her, “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have?” She always looks like the junior girls’ P.E. teacher who just rushed onto the stage at the last minute because the dodgeball tournament ran overtime. Male or female candidate for higher office, a stylist is not a frivolous expenditure. If Nixon had had one in 1968, JFK might have lived to a ripe old age.

On the plus side, she did the party a great service by pulling the plug on Michael Bloomberg’s self-driving hovercraft. Pfffffttt.

Is it too late to salvage her campaign? Maybe be the compromise nominee if no one has the magic 1991? Maybe toss her delegates to the one she wants to crown? It’s still kinda early. Maybe.

For the second tier of Democratic candidates the path to the nomination runs through (over?) Joe Biden.

Take Kamala Harris. (Yes, please.) Here’s the Washington Post‘s lead the day after round 2 of the debates: “Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) was the big winner of the first set of Democratic primary debates. She went into June polling at about 7 percent; she emerged at better than double that mark.”

REALLY?! She went from not having the support of 93% of Democrats to not having the support of 85% of them. Stand back! It’s a landslide!

The only thing that’s interesting about the Democratic debates is trying to figure out which candidates are auditioning for the nomination to a third (or fourth) party ticket.

The ones who are trying to “out-freedom” the regular Democrats are clearly vying for a spot on the Libertarian Party ballot.

The ones who are crying “socialist” and “radical” have the delusion a tsunami of public opinion will propel them to lead a new centrist Macaroni-and-Cheese Party.

And the other also-rans are simply hoping for a cabinet appointment in a Democratic administration. And failing that, a book deal. Any book deal. O God, please, a book deal.

And thanks to CNN’s incisive journalism – “Did you hear what she said about you? Go ahead – say it again, say it to his face.” – the turnout for junior high school straw polls will soar to record highs.

Because that’s the real news America wants, not that melodramatic stuff about a proto-fascist President propped up by a proto-fascist propaganda empire.

Anything but the elephant in the room.

As a pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson became famous for operating on little brains.  As a politician he maintains that distinction.

Just as was done with the Iraq war, the absence of incriminating evidence regarding either Benghazi or her emails is being spun as “we know Clinton broke the law, and the difficulty of proving it just shows how fiendishly secretive and clever she is.”

As previously described here, but for three little words Hillary Clinton would now be in the final year of  her second term as President, Senator Barack Obama would be the front-runner for his party’s nomination to succeed her, and Vice-President Joe Biden would still be equivocating on whether to throw his hat in the ring.

Clinton’s initial White House bid was done in by her failure to expose and reject what I call the Rumsfeld fallacy: To justify going to war in Iraq, Rumsfeld spun “the absence of evidence [of WMD] is not evidence of absence” into “the absence of evidence is proof of their existence.”

The Rumsfeld fallacy again haunts Clinton’s candidacy. In fact, it’s the very core of the GOP’s war on Hillary herself.

And just as with the run-up to the war in Iraq, the continued absence of evidence allows the GOP to keep their slanderous narrative alive in perpetuity.

If only her handlers could coach her along these lines:

• “When I became Secretary of State, I’d known for 15 years that there’s no such thing as secure email.  In the early 1990’s when email was becoming widely available, all my tech-savvy friends told me, ‘Don’t EVER put anything in an email you don’t want to see on the front page of The New York Times — once you hit Send, you relinquish all control over what happens to anything you’ve written.’  I didn’t forget that while I was First Lady, a private citizen, or Senator.  And I especially didn’t forget it when I became Secretary of State.”
• “Regardless of how insecure you think my personal email server was, there’s been no evidence at all that the State Department’s email system was any more secure.  Not a week goes by that we don’t hear about government and private corporations’ servers being hacked.  Congressman, how do you know your own server hasn’t been hacked and you just don’t know about it yet?  The truth is, you don’t.”
• “You know you’re not going to find a smoking gun because there isn’t one.  I know you don’t want honest answers, and you’re not going to give honest answers to the American people because then you’d have to stop these ridiculous sideshows.”
• “When is this committee going to declare, ‘We looked everywhere and we didn’t find anything, so we can only conclude there’s nothing to be found?’  That’s never going to happen, is it?”

Here’s what neither side in this unholy inquisition can come right out and say:

Suppose the ambassador and his team had all survived and recovered from the attack. Here’s how he would have been interviewed:
“Libya was in a state of total anarchy. Benghazi, the second largest city, was a vipers’ nest of militias, terrorists, spies, and double agents.  And you decided the anniversary of 9/11 would be a good time to go there with a security force that would fit in an SUV, with a seat or two left over.  What were you thinking?“

If the Republicans say this, it exculpates Clinton and the Obama administration, so that would be game-over for them.

If Clinton and the Democrats even hint at it, they know they’ll be eviscerated for “blaming the victim” and “slandering the memory of a fallen colleague.”

And if the media say this, they’ll be caught in the crossfire from both sides.

But someone has to say it: the ambassador himself made a fatal and tragic mistake. (This is not a case of hindsight being 20/20.)

If there’s been a cover-up of anything, it’s to the credit and honor of Clinton and the administration that this was what they covered up.