Prior to today’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the security failures in Benghazi, Obama campaign traveling press secretary Jen Psaki appeared on CNN to offer a little pre-fallout spin. I suppose that she’s right, really — if Republicans doing their job and refusing to ease up on getting to the bottom of the many disparate elements involved in the deadly disaster in Libya, just because it’s an election year, is political — then yeah, I’d say they’re getting pretty political.

Well, look, I think that’s quite a heady accusation from Congressman Chaffetz and I know Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have been out there making outrageous political accusations as well. The fact is, to the President and to the administration, this is not a political issue. No one wants to get to the bottom of this more than the President. …The administration is providing information they had access to at the time. And the intelligence community has come out and said that this was an organized act of terrorism. But for us, it’s not political. For the President, it’s not political. And it’s unfortunate it’s being brought to that.

Please spare us all the sanctimoniousness about getting “political,” because whether or not the president of the United States and his administration are equipped with the capabilities to deal with serious threats to our national security sure seems like kind of a big deal that voters deserve to know about.

And let’s not pretend nobody in the Obama administration got political with this by trying to portray a dishonest narrative downplaying the true motives behind the attack. Blaming the entire thing on some stupid video was an embarrassing ploy designed to depict to voters that Barack Obama’s policies in the Middle East have been more successful mitigating terrorist influences than they actually have, and the administration’s inability to keep its story even remotely straight suggests that there was perhaps a little more on their minds than only U.S. security interests. Sure, everybody wants to get to the bottom of this — but the Obama administration also has a very vested interest in misdirecting voters’ attention away from their foreign-policy failures, more so now than ever.