During Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this morning, she had to put up with a crock of stupidity from the likes of Senators Rand Paul, John McCain and Ron Johnson. Finally she got tired of it and let Johnson have it:

Charlie Pierce noticed this and had the following epiphany:

It only came to me late in the afternoon, and with some prompting by a commenter, why the Secretary was able to handle so easily the feral children of the House, and the feral pre-adolescents like Ron Johnson in the Senate. It’s not because she was a senator, although that probably helped. And it’s not because she spent four years eating canapes with various dictators and democrats around the world. It’s because she was First Lady — and therefore, Target 1A — during the craziest four years anyone ever saw. The whole Republican Benghazi legend is spun from the same ball of fantasy whence came Vince Foster’s death, and the billing records, and the cattle futures, and her lesbianism, and the crack pipes on the White House Christmas tree. And, of course, the original Whitewater scandal. . .

I think Charlie’s right. Add in a bit of short-timer’s attitude (I wonder if Hillary gets up every morning counting down the days like we used to in the Navy — when we had two weeks left before we went back to CONUS for separation, we’d say “13 days and a wakeup!”), and she probably said before she went into today’s hearings “I can do this. It’s my last time, and these people are barely worth spitting on anyway.”