Marc Ambinder

It was hard to watch today's House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearings without wincing. We winced when the regional security officer for Libya, Eric Nordstrom, told of his intense frustrations with the State Department's bureaucracy, which apparently did not agree with his assessment of the security situation for diplomats in Benghazi. And we winced when the top State official for diplomatic security, Charlene Lamb, admitted that there was a resource gap; she did the best with the resources she had. I winced when the same Republicans who voted to restrict funding for the State Department complained that the Obama administration should have done more with less.

The death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans has become a political flashpoint for two reasons.

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Marc Ambinder

Marc Ambinder is TheWeek.com's editor-at-large. He is the author, with D.B. Grady, of The Command and Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry. Marc is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and GQ. Formerly, he served as White House correspondent for National Journal, chief political consultant for CBS News, and politics editor at The Atlantic. Marc is a 2001 graduate of Harvard. He is married to Michael Park, a corporate strategy consultant, and lives in Los Angeles.