According to Erik Wemple at the WaPo, Diane Sawyer committed an exemplary act of journalism in grilling Hillary Clinton the other night. Excerpt:

In an interview with Clinton that aired last night on ABC News, anchor Diane Sawyer threw the ARB right back in the face of the former secretary of state. The two tangled over the preparedness of the U.S. diplomatic installation in Benghazi for a terrorist attack. In defending her work on this front, Clinton stressed that she had delegated the particulars of security to the experts in the field. “I’m not equipped to sit and look at blueprints to determine where the blast walls need to be, where the reinforcements need to be. That’s why we hire people who have that expertise,” said Clinton, who did the interview as part of the tour for her book “Hard Choices.”

Sensing an opening, Sawyer cited the document that Clinton herself has so often cited: “This is the ARB: the mission was far short of standards; weak perimeter; incomplete fence; video surveillance needed repair. They said it’s a systemic failure.”

Clinton replied, “Well, it was with respect to that compound.”

The anchor continued pressing, asking Clinton whether the people might be seeking from her a “sentence that begins from you ‘I should have…’?” Clinton sort of ducked that one. The accountability-heavy moment came when Sawyer’s slow and steady line of questioning on Benghazi security prompted Clinton to utter this self-contradictory and sure-to-be-repeated statement: “I take responsibility, but I was not making security decisions.”

For the record, possible-presidential-candidates-in-abeyance should never attach conjunctions to their declarations of responsibility-taking.

I despise the way politicians and other leaders “take responsibility” for their own failures. It’s clear they want to be seen as having taken responsibility, without admitting any guilt. Mistakes were made, etc. I’m not one of those conservatives who is fixated on Benghazi, even though it seems pretty clear that it was a consequential screw-up by the administration. We have bigger fish to fry. Still, this kind of evasive, buck-passing nonsense by Hillary Clinton deserves all the scorn it will draw.