It should go without saying that the Obama administration should have been forthright about what happened that day rather than try to deflect blame on to a “right-wing Christian” filmmaker and his alleged provocations. Beyond that, even with an election on the near horizon, the Obama administration probably did not really politically need to mislead the public about those events. Having our embassy in Cairo overrun was humiliating, and the deaths in Benghazi were shocking, but Americans are by this point used to seeing their countrymen killed in lands where Islam predominates, and they have suffered enough humiliations that one more was not going to cost anybody an election.

The Obama administration’s wider policy failures in the Middle East are significant, and they are partly the product of wishful thinking, partly the product of its narrow ideology, and partly the product of the fact that the American public to which he ultimately answers is itself incoherent on the question of what we should be doing there and how we should be doing it. But, even disinclined as I am toward being overly generous to President Obama, he is not the first president to underestimate the dangers and difficulties of the Middle East. The idea that the deaths in Benghazi, horrible though they were, would have been his undoing in the election if not for his administration’s disinformation campaign is probably wishful thinking. But for politicians of President Obama’s genus, truth is simply another multiple-choice proposition, and he and his people chose the version that best suited their immediate needs. One of the many problems with having a government dominated by law-school graduates is that lawyers suffer from a collective delusion that clever argument has a truth of its own, a unique moral weight independent of the facts. Recall that in the 1990s Bill Clinton was openly admired by Democrats for his deft touch with a lie: If you are winning, this line of thinking goes, then at some level you are also right.