I visited the Soviet Union twice back in the eighties. Fascinating place. Loved the Russian orthodox churches and the gorgeous icons, the quaint dachas in Peredelkino where Boris Pasternak used to live. The caviar and blini was terrific too, washed down by endless shots of Russian Standard vodka. And, because I was on cultural exchanges, I met brilliant people like Yevgeny Yevtushenko and a dozen or so other well known Soviet writers and filmmakers.

Funnily enough, most of them would eventually take me aside and ask me if I could help them get out of there. I couldn’t, unfortunately, but I could well understand why they wanted to leave. At the end of both of my trips of about two weeks each, I desperately wanted to get the Hell out myself. I hated the place.

The Soviet Union was like one giant jail. You had no privacy. You had no life. KGB minders followed you everywhere — even, in my case, straight into the lobby men’s room of Moscow’s Cosmos Hotel to watch me tinkle. My Yalta hotel room was so obviously bugged that the painting bulged out at about a thirty degree angle to fit the microphone. (Yes, I peeked.) The Bulgarian mystery novelist in our entourage ran a whole roomful of reel-to-reel tape recorders on the fourth floor of that same hotel, smiling and blushing when I accidentally walked in on him with our Italian delegate. The young woman who interviewed me for Soviet Screen was also a spy, as was my interpreter, Oleg, who accompanied me everywhere. He kept close tabs on anything I was writing, taking notes and reporting back to his superiors.

Sound familiar? I’ve been thinking about it a lot these days because what with the IRS evidently watching our every move and the Associated Press and who knows who else under surveillance, I feel quite literally like I’m back in the USSR. And I haven’t even left home.

The dam really is breaking on Benghazi with even reliable Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein offering criticism of the administration on Meet the Press Sunday.

Will she go under the bus too in the next Jay Carney press briefing, as have the State Department and the CIA? Hard to say, but here’s what the California senator said:

“I think this is a cautious administration,” Feinstein told host David Gregory. ”But this is one instance where, you know, it was what it was. And you saw it. The minute you knew what happened, you knew it was a terrorist attack. And you knew these groups had camps all around the area.”

She also added: “When you see a group going up with RPGS and weapons to break into one of our facilities, you can assume it’s a terrorist attack.”

Cautious administration? Well, maybe — or perhaps more accurately propagandistic and self-preservational.

The latter theory gets traction from the reporting on the editing of the talking points by Jonathan Karl and Stephen Hayes. The officials involved don’t seem concerned with truth, only with saving organizational (State Dept., CIA) or political (Obama, Clinton) face.

Several of these officials doing this editing are already trying to save their reputations, promoting the idea that they are not responsible for the malfeasances of their superiors. That’s true to some extent — their superiors are likely more culpable — but I am not buying their excuse. Call me old-fashioned, but I think the responsibility of an American diplomat and/or official is finally to the American people first. Gregory Hicks could put it on the line for the public. Why couldn’t they?

Even now these officials have not, to my knowledge, volunteered to step forward to testify. Perhaps one of them would explain just why the State Department failed to give an ambassador (or anyone, for that matter) decent security on September 11, in Libya of all places, a country even a disinterested layman would know was roughly as safe as the Somme during World War I.

Or perhaps they could tell who it was that had been refusing security — despite repeated terror attacks — for their Libyan staff for several months and why he or she was refusing it. Where did the buck stop?

And then there’s the matter of why backup was refused for our men on the ground in Benghazi that night and morning. The “not enough time” excuse doesn’t go very far when you consider that no one could possibly know when the terror attacks would end.

The Benghazi scandal is not over.  You will be told that by a lot of people. There is no smoking gun, etc. (Actually, there are many.)

Some folks on the right, because they have been so accustomed to failure in the face of a monolithic media, will be ready to throw in the towel.

That group is particularly disturbing because they are the very people who should be pushing this forward. Without realizing it, their proclamations of pessimism are a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I urge them to overcome it for the sake of our country, because — trust me — Benghazi is not over. It has only just begun.

Anyone paying attention to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearings Wednesday would have plenty of reasons for optimism.  To begin with, the testimony underscored (and how!) what we already knew — that the events of September 11, 2012, were a terrorist attack and not a demonstration over a YouTube video.

Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission in Libya, told the committee that Ambassador Stevens said precisely that — that he was “under attack” — when he made his very first emergency phone call from Benghazi to Hicks on that fateful night.

But don’t take Hicks’ word for it.  Take the word of one of his superiors — Beth Jones, the State Department’s own acting assistant secretary for Near Eastern Affairs.

In the closest thing to a coup de théâtre at the hearing, Congressman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) revealed a September 12 email from Jones to Hicks, State Department officials Victoria Nuland and Patrick Kennedy, and Hillary Clinton’s personal counsel Cheryl Mills, stating that she (Jones) had informed Libyan leadership that the attack at Benghazi was the work of Ansar al Sharia – one of the world’s most well-known Islamic terror groups.

This was four days before Ambassador Rice appeared on five Sunday shows and lied to the American people by blaming the events on the YouTube video and long before Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton repeated that lie, he in front of the United Nations, and she in front of the very Chris Stevens’ coffin with family and friends in attendance.

Hillary de Medici, indeed.

That CBS’ Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer, of all people, nodded in agreement when Rep. Darrell Issa asserted on Schieffer’s Sunday morning show that the administration had engaged in a cover-up regarding Benghazi is a huge sign that this scandal is finally being taken seriously by the most traditional establishment liberal media.

This is bad news for such über-establishment figures as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but they are politicians who come and, alas eventually, though it seems to take forever, go.

More problematically, a permanent organ of our government has been so besmirched by Benghazi it may take years fully to recover, if it ever does — the U. S. Department of State.

By manipulating facts and lying to the American public immediately after the events of September 11, 2012, the State Department has behaved, to its eternal shame, like the propaganda arm of a totalitarian state — and not a very sophisticated one.

This is particularly disturbing since State is — or at least is supposed to be — a non-partisan branch of our government. Members of many administrations co-exist within it to serve our country.

We seem, however, to have returned to the State Department of Alger Hiss’ day — but not, like Hiss’ time, in the form of direct Soviet subversion.  What we have is a post-modern version — a subversion of elitism, self-regard, and, above all, self-preservation.

They lied not for ideals, but for self-interest.  The communists — some of them anyway — at least dreamt of a better world.

From what we know so far, the U. S. Department of State participated in the cover-up of an Islamist terror attack on the brink of  a U. S. presidential election, implying the murders of our fellow citizens were inspired by an execrable video that nobody saw.  I can’t think of anything more despicable and more disrespectful to all of us — and most especially to the families of the deceased.

As of now we don’t know to what degree these State Department officials worked at the behest of the White House in their censorship, but if they were taking orders in all this, they were indeed behaving in the manner of the minions of totalitarian states that have been prosecuted elsewhere as violators of international law.

If Barack Obama is reelected, will he face impeachment over Benghazi — a yet more unpleasant and far more wrenching result than to lose an election?

It could happen — and in my estimation should happen — the way revelations are playing out over the bloody terror attack that took four American lives and has led to weeks of prevarication and obfuscation.

The scandal thus far has at least tarnished and quite possibly implicated everyone from the CIA director, to the secretaries of State and Defense, to the UN ambassador and, of course, the president himself — with no end in sight, because Obama, normally loath to expose himself and even less so in an election season, refuses to answer questions on the subject.

It’s not the crime, but the cover-up, we learned in an earlier impeachment, only in this case the crime may be just as bad or worse.”

That post was a follow-up to my item from the previous week saying that Obama should resign over Benghazi, which was linked to by Drudge, and created a minor brouhaha. Between those two posts, a number of people accused me of being overheated.  I even started to feel that way myself. (Hey, I’m a screenwriter. Dramatic license comes with the job description.)

No longer. Reading Stephen F. Hayes’ new article in The Weekly Standard — “The Benghazi Talking Points” — I am beginning to feel like Nostradamus.  I’m not ready to make any predictions, but let’s put it this way…

Barack Obama is bloody lucky he’s a Democrat, because if he were a Republican, he’d be in deep trouble right now, close to the brink of extinction.  Only his increasingly pathetic loyal media claque can save him.  It will be interesting to see if they do so at the expense of their own reputations.

Of course the reputations of the State Department need to be considered as well, that same State Dept that, according to Hayes (and this is corroborated by emails he publishes), bowdlerized and censored all references to al-Qaeda involvement in the Benghazi events before they could reach the fragile American public in an election year, almost even as they were happening.  This was before Susan Rice made her dog-and-pony performance on the Sunday shows, asserting it was all caused by a video nobody watched, and long before the oleaginous Candy Crowley famously covered up for Obama on Benghazi at the presidential foreign-policy debate.

Hayes names the names of some of the State Department miscreants involved in this repellent anti-democratic censorship. Among them is one Victoria Nuland, who makes Pinocchio seem like Diogenes.  (You can find a video of her as well as some droll tweets from the blogger Ace of Spades demanding an explanation for all this prevarication, and even a tweet from me, here.)

But we are getting there.

Here our political and media leaders take a more psychoanalytic tack, defining those who do violence to us as unfortunate neurotics unable to fit in — misunderstood failures ill-equipped to adapt to our fast-paced, licentious lifestyle.

So they are.

And so was (Godwin’s law alert) Hitler.  Hitler was a failed painter.  Tamerlan Tarnaev was a failed boxer.   No wonder they sought vengeance on a heartless world, poor devils.

The problem with this psycho-drivel is that practically every human being is a failed something or other.  I know I am.  And I don’t know anybody who isn’t.

Forget Hitler.  If we all acted out on our failure only on the level of Tarnaev, civilization wouldn’t even last a day.

The real question should really be what most compels violence among the almost unlimited number of neurotic individuals in the world with some grievance or other.

In our time it is unquestionably Islam, exponentially more than anything else. It’s almost as if that religion were designed in its ideology to attract the disaffected and turn them into violent animals.

The usual liberal media suspects are in a dither these days over the prospect that the dreaded Koch brothers may buy the Los Angeles Times. The MSMniks are expending a lot of ink and pixels over this supposedly apocalyptic purchase.

The proximate cause is the Chicago Tribune Company emerging from bankruptcy and possibly selling its basket of newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel and the Hartford Courant.  The LAT,  however, the only truly national newspaper in this group, is clearly the crown jewel.

Though others are in the hunt (Murdoch, Eli Broad, etc.), the New York Times claims the Kochs have a leg up since they are the only suitors willing to buy the entire package; the others just want the LAT.

So media liberals are having a hissy fit and circling their wagons. One of their prizes may be destroyed or, worse, converted (actually, the paper’s been in miserable shape for years).

They are asserting that the Kochs and blue, blue Los Angeles are a terrible fit and that such a purchase would be a disaster for all concerned — the paper, the city, and even the Kochs (for whom USA Today sheds crocodile tears).

But is this true?

Despite media attempts to portray them as conservative barbarians, the Kochs, like Los Angeles, are socially liberal.  David Koch, who ran for vice president in 1980 as a Libertarian (not a Republican), quite publicly announced he is pro-gay marriage.  This issue is the litmus test for Westside Los Angeles nowadays, bar none. (No wonder the media glosses over the Kochs’ views on this.)

Tapper’s right. The FBI is not looking particularly good as far as their surveillance of murderous Caucasian Islamists on our soil is concerned.  And Tamerlan, evidently , left quite a trail, from domestic violence to reportedly attacking an imam for holding up MLK as someone to emulate. Not exactly subtle.  They were even warned about Tamerlan by the Russians apparently.

The Feds must have been pretty clueless to ignore all this.

Probably. But I offer in their defense one of the hoariest of cliches: The fish rots from the top.

The Obama administration and most of those working for it have taken Islamic terrorism about as seriously as I am taking the Memphis Grizzlies/L.A. Clippers game  currently on my TV — in other words, at best mildly interested. Not being a fan of either team, I could watch — I could switch to something else.

And when Islamic terrorism does rear its head, as in Benghazi, the administration evinces something worse than disinterest — dishonesty, lies, coverup and prevarication (sometimes aided by Tapper’s CNN cohort Candy Crowley).

And they don’t stop. They haven’t offered anything yet even remotely resembling a transparent account of the Libyan events or of their motivation. The secretary of State has told us it’s not even important. (How does that look in the light of Boston?)

So why would we expect the nation’s police department — the Federal Bureau of Investigation — to take these matters with the requisite seriousness?  The message they are getting from the top is …meh.  Until something happens, Islamic terrorism is way down this administration’s list of priorities.  And when it happens, the “t-word” is only mentioned under the most extreme duress (or possible political fallout). And the word “Islam” is abjured even when someone yells “Allahu Akbar!” while shooting everyone in the room.

Over the last few days I have wanted to write about an article published by David Sirota on Salon, which was commented on admirably by my colleagues Roger Kimball and Richard Fernandez. Sirota wrote to express his hope that the Boston Bombers would be white Americans, because otherwise our putative race-hatred of Muslims or people of color of any sort would be enhanced. It’s all about “white skin privilege,” doncha know?

Today Sirota seems like an imbecile (well, he did before), but I would venture to say he doesn’t know why. So I will spell it out for him:  the War on Terror (euphemism alert) is not about skin color. It is about ideology, Islamic ideology.

The Tsarnaevs are white people in the purest sense. They are Caucasians from the Caucasus, of all things, but they believe in Allah — do or die, apparently.

Too young for the civil rights movement, Sirota is an adherent of an ultra-bourgeois nostalgia for racism that hides under the ludicrous rubric “progressive.” It’s laughable, but it’s also sad and dangerous.

It avoids a confrontation with the great issue of our time — what to do about Islam, an all-consuming ideology that seeks to engulf the world. The Sirotas of our culture want to downplay that but the reality remains.

Sloughing this off on “white skin privilege” is particularly worrisome, even venal, because many will believe it. As one who was heavily active in the days that term was invented (’60s) and helped promulgate it in my writing and speechmaking, I can attest to how dangerous it is. Its intention was never really to cure racism, but to perpetuate it, to increase racial enmity by pointing the finger at people who were, if anything, only culpable in the most remote sense.

Sirota and his ilk are contemporary dupes of our 1960’s lie. We all pay the price for it.

Boy, had they superseded. But were it not for Twitter, I may have never known.  I would have just gone to sleep over a book to find myself a fool in the morning (not the first time).

But the Tweets started to come in fast and furious (to coin a phrase) around 10PM Pacific.  The merde had hit the proverbial fan in Boston – specifically from MIT, where a campus cop was shot multiple times and killed, and Watertown, MA,  which, after a carjacking, had turned into a free-fire zone resembling Fallujah at the height of the Iraq War.

Soon enough I was simultaneously on Twitter, Boston Police, Fire and EMS Scanner (the actual police line, available via the Internet — cool), Fox and CNN, trying to piece together what was going on.  One of two suspects, I learned, was apprehended — was this Suspect 1 or Suspect 2 from the FBI pictures, no one could say — another was on the loose.

As I write this, it’s hard to tell what’s going on. But I feel like I’m in the middle of a multi-media movie, balancing multiple inputs, an extraordinary modern phenomenon.

Most interesting is Twitter.  It is at moments like this that it shines.  Suddenly the noise disappears, the endless trivia about people’s latest purchases at Whole Foods or what episode of Madmen was not to be missed, and the hive mind at its best took over, reports of what was happening in Boston arriving with more speed and quite possibly more verisimilitude than what came via the plodding news networks.

Still, something I saw on CNN caught me up short.  It was the best picture yet of Suspect 2, the one in the white baseball hat.  In this photo that appeared on Facebook a short while ago but was authenticated, Suspect 2, whoever he is, looks startlingly young, almost preternaturally young for all this carnage.

Whether he is homegrown, Islamic or a combination, more than anything he puts me in mind of Leopold and Loeb – the two Nietzschean University of Chicago law students who murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks just for the hell of it. (Of course more may be involved here.  It’s beginning to smell a lot like London and Madrid.)

At this moment, Suspect 2 is apparently under arrest. I think — not sure.  More to come.

UPDATE: I went to bed at about 3AM Pacific besotted with Twitter and woke up an exhausted four hours later not so in love.  Much of what I had thought accurate was wrong, most specifically the ID of the killers.  Twitter had me convinced Suspect 2 was Sunil Tripathi, the supposed Brown University student, who disappeared a month ago. A photo of this jejune fellow in a Che T-shirt was the subject of many tweets.  Suspect 1 was supposedly Mike Mulugeta, provenance unknown.

Anyway, I awoke to find everything upside down.  It’s Chechens now.  What I learned from this is that Twiiter, like any exciting online drug, is to be taken with a HUGE grain of salt in the midst of the action.  It turned out, I’m ashamed to admit, the CNN and Fox, who were being more circumspect, were in the end more accurate…. Not as much fun though.

This doesn’t mean Twitter is bad, but Caveat Tweetor.