One critical question was how Obama spent that long night of Sept. 11, 2012, while his charges were busy dying in Benghazi.

“With all due respect,” asked Wallace, “you didn’t answer my question. What did the president do that night?” This was a good question and one that prompts a careful look at the time line.

At 3:40 p.m. Washington time on Sept. 11, 2012, U.S. ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens in Benghazi called his No. 2 man, Greg Hicks, and told him, “We’re under attack.”

(All times cited will be EDT, six hours earlier than Libyan time).

At 4:05 p.m. the State Department Operations Center issued an alert to all relevant agencies, “U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi Under Attack.”

At 4:25 p.m. a six-member CIA team headed by Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods arrived at Stevens’ compound from the nearby annex.

Under heavy fire, Woods’ team recovered the body of Foreign Service IT specialist Sean Smith but could not find Stevens’ body in the burning building.

At 5 p.m. President Barack Obama had a pre-scheduled meeting with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who briefed him on the Benghazi situation.

At 6 p.m. Woods and his CIA team arrived back at the annex, which they would defend Alamo-style for the next six hours. They would kill an estimated 60 Libyans before the night was through.

At 6:07 p.m. the State Department Operations Center shared a report from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli that Ansar al-Sharia had claimed responsibility for the Benghazi attack. The terror group also called for an attack on the Embassy in Tripoli.

At 7:30 p.m. or thereabouts Obama engaged in an hour-long phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Obama hoped to mend fences with Netanyahu to help secure the Jewish vote in the upcoming election.

After roughly 8:30 p.m., there is no known accounting of Obama’s time or whereabouts.

At 11:15 p.m. Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, another former SEAL, were killed in a mortar assault at the annex. Doherty had just arrived as part of a six-man team from Tripoli.

At 1:40 a.m., having evacuated the annex, the first group of Americans flew out of Benghazi bound for Tripoli. They saw Stevens’ body at the airport and confirmed his death.

Said Pfeiffer to Wallace when asked about Obama’s evening, “He was in constant touch with his national security team and kept up to date with the events as they were happening.”

Wallace then listed all the critical people with whom Obama had little or no conversation – the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the joint chiefs.

Pfeiffer clarified, “He was talking to his national security staff, his National Security Council – people who would keep him up to date as these things were happening.”

“Was he in the situation room?” Wallace asked.

“I don’t remember what room he was in that night,” said Pfeiffer. “That’s a largely irrelevant fact.” No, it is not irrelevant at all.

I cannot say for sure where Obama was that evening, but if the night of July 17, 1996, set a precedent, Obama was likely in the White House family quarters.

For the record, at 8:35 p.m. on that turbulent night in the election year of 1996, President Bill Clinton and wife Hillary left a Washington fundraiser and headed back to the White House by motorcade.

At 8:31 p.m., two FAA veterans at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center observed a target arching and intersecting with Paris-bound TWA Flight 800 as it headed east off Long Island’s south shore.

A manager from that center rushed the radar data to the FAA technical center in Atlantic City, and from there it was faxed to FAA headquarters in Washington and rushed “immediately” to the White House situation room.

It was in this room, “in the aftermath of the TWA Flight 800 bombing,” as Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos unwittingly told Peter Jennings on Sept. 11, 2001, that all key parties converged.

“This looks bad,” said Ron Schleede of the National Transportation Safety Board upon first seeing the data that “suggested something fast made the turn and took the airplane.”

Anti-terror czar Richard Clarke got the message too. By 9 p.m., he was driving in to the White House to convene a meeting of his security group, not at all the norm for a plane crash.

“I dreaded what I thought was about to happen,” Clarke wrote in his best-seller “Against All Enemies.” Clarke called it “The Eisenhower option,” a retaliatory strike against Iran.

When President Clinton met with friendly historian Taylor Branch on Aug. 2, 1996, he also traced the TWA 800 disaster to Iran. “They want war,” Branch quoted Clinton as saying.

On the night of July 17, however, the president chose not to join Clarke and the other agency representatives in the situation room.

Clinton remained holed up in the family quarters with Hillary. Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Robert “Buzz” Patterson and others have confirmed the president’s location that evening.

Patterson was in a position to know. He carried the nuclear football for the president, and he too was in the White House that night, though purposefully kept out of the loop.

The one person Patterson has tentatively cited as being in the family quarters with the Clintons is Sandy Berger, the deputy director of the NSA and the Clintons’ political consigliere.

As it happened, National Security Adviser Tony Lake, Sandy Berger’ boss, was not invited to the family quarters. Lake was known to excuse himself from meetings when they turned political.

That night Berger and the Clintons gathered information from the FAA radar, from the satellite data and from the eyewitness accounts and translated the data into electoral strategy.

By 3 a.m. Clinton had apparently gathered enough information to call Lake with the following message: “Dust off the contingency plans.”

Dust them off, yes, but let’s not get too serious about them. In late summer 1996, with the election comfortably in the bag, war was the last thing the Clintons wanted or needed.

On Sept. 11, 2012, war was the last thing Obama wanted or needed as well. He had already bagged Osama bin Laden, pacified al-Qaida and liberated Libya.

Or so he repeated endlessly. Foreign policy was alleged to be his electoral strong suit. Given the political dynamics, Obama likely retreated, just as the Clintons had, to the family quarters.

As Pfeiffer said, Obama probably did talk to “people who would keep him up to date as these things were happening.”

Obama and certain of these people, the political insiders, would have spent the night translating national security data into electoral strategy.

After all, Obama had a big fundraiser the next day in Vegas. That did not allow much time to establish an alibi that would preserve his carefully crafted bin Laden-slayer narrative.

It was a close call, but with a little help from the media – a special shout-out to CNN’s Candy Crowley! – the alibi worked just well enough to get the man re-elected.

History does repeat itself.

Trayvon, of course, is Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old black youth shot and killed by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman on Feb. 26, 2012, in Sanford, Fla.

The screams in question were picked up on a 911 call from one of the neighbors. They last for 42 seconds. The person on the tape yells “help” over and over. No one can deny the fear and desperation in his voice.

Those screams are George Zimmerman’s. The Sanford Police Department knew it within hours of the shooting and, knowing this, refrained from arresting Zimmerman.

The state prosecutors know it, too. They charged Zimmerman with second-degree murder despite what they knew. In a desperate effort to save face in next month’s trial, they have contracted for some bogus science to bolster an otherwise unwinnable case.

The one team of voice analysts told the state that the voice samples “were not good enough to definitively match either Trayvon or Zimmerman.”

According to these analysts, “Some of the first eight came close to matching Trayvon’s voice,” but others “came close to matching Zimmerman’s.” That was helpful.

The other forensic analyst, Alan Reich by name, wrote that he “believed” the cries came from the younger of the two male speakers due to the “resonant frequency” of the vowel in the last scream.

A year ago, Reich told the Washington Post with a bit more assurance, “The help cries are all Trayvon.” This was nonsense then, and it is nonsense now.

The best refutation of this comes from Zimmerman himself. Just a few hours after the shooting, while at the Sanford police station, he wrote in longhand an account of the incident.

“The dispatcher told me not to follow the suspect & that an officer was on the way,” Zimmerman wrote. “As I headed back to my vehicle the suspect emerged from the darkness and said, ‘You got a problem?’” When Zimmerman answered “No,” the suspect said, “You do now.”

What follows is Zimmerman’s account of the screaming, written long before he knew what the eyewitnesses would report:

As I looked and tried to find my phone to dial 911 the suspect punched me in the face. I fell backwards onto my back. The suspect got on top of me. I yelled “Help” several times. The suspect told me, “Shut the f*** up.”

As I tried to sit upright, the suspect grabbed my head and slammed it into the concrete sidewalk several times. I continued to yell “Help.”

Each time I attempted to sit up, the suspect slammed my head into the sidewalk. My head felt like it was going to explode. I tried to slide out from under the suspect and continue to yell “Help.”

Witness No. 6, the best of the eyewitnesses, had talked on camera to the local TV station the day after the shooting and told the reporter what he told the Sanford PD the night before.

Jack Cashill’s investigative-reporting skills shine in his many books — see them now in WND’s Superstore

According to this witness, there was a “black man in a black hoodie on top of either a white guy … or an Hispanic guy in a red sweater on the ground yelling out help,” and that black man on top was “throwing down blows on the guy MMA [mixed martial arts] style.”

Zimmerman’s broken nose and bloodied head added dramatic confirmation of his and Witness No. 6′s version of events.

The prosecutors knew all of this, and they were obliged to incorporate it into the affidavit for Zimmerman’s arrest on second-degree murder charges in April 2012. They did not.

A day later, America’s pre-eminent defense lawyer, Harvard Law’s Alan Dershowitz, took notice. “It’s irresponsible and unethical in not including the material that favors the defendant,” he told an MSNBC audience that was not happy to be hearing this from a liberal jurist like Dershowitz. “You must put that in the affidavit.”

The state prosecutors were under the enormous pressure generated by the legal/public relations team working ostensibly for Martin’s parents.

A few weeks before Zimmerman’s arrest, Martin family attorney Benjamin Crump produced a chimerical phone witness who seemed to confirm the family’s belief that Zimmerman stalked Martin and shot him.

“Logically, it makes sense that Trayvon Martin was the voice you heard crying on that tape,” Crump insisted at a game-changing March 20 press conference.

As to why those screams should be Martin’s, Crump would have been better off saying nothing. Instead, he volunteered, in his reliably mangled syntax, “You can conclude who is the person crying out for help presumably when they see a gun.”

Crump wanted the media to believe that Zimmerman chased the fitter and fleeter Martin down, held him at gunpoint, caused him to wail like a banshee for 42 seconds at the sight of the gun, and then shot him down “in cold blood” knowing the police – whom Zimmerman himself had summoned – were minutes away.

The state prosecutors ignored the Sanford PD and yielded to the pressure generated by Team Trayvon. According to the arrest affidavit, “Zimmerman disregarded the dispatcher and continued to follow Martin who was trying to return home.”

In this version, “Zimmerman confronted Martin and a struggle ensued.” Trayvon’s mother then “identified the voice crying for help as Trayvon Martin’s.” Zimmerman admitted shooting Martin, and that apparently was good enough for the prosecutors to charge Zimmerman with second-degree murder.

In another move last week, the prosecutors sought to have all of Martin’s damning disciplinary history and troubling social media commentary excluded from the trial.

To convict an innocent man of murder, the prosecutors will have to deny him a fair trial. Apparently, they are prepared to do just that.

Jack Cashill’s book on this case, “If I Had A Son,” will be available soon after the trial.

But O’Reilly – and everyone who tracks the media – recognized one unfortunate fact: When it comes to Hillary Clinton there is a huge difference between “could be” and “will be.”

Hillary has been lying to the American people since her first major TV appearance in January 1992 on CBS’ “60 Minutes.” At that time, she and Bill were scrambling to save his candidacy in the wake of the steamy Gennifer Flowers revelations.

When Steve Kroft asked Bill if he had an affair with Flowers, he answered, “That allegation is false.” Hillary, her hands lovingly intertwined with Bill’s, nodded in affirmation.

Of course, they were both lying, Bill with much greater skill. Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey would later immortalize Bill as “an unusually good liar.”

At this point in the interview, Hillary tried to explain how these allegations emerged. “When this woman [Flowers] first got caught up in these charges,” she said, “I felt as I’ve felt about all of these women: that they had just been minding their own business and they got hit by a meteor.”

“We reached out to them,” Hillary continued. “I met with two of them to reassure them they were friends of ours.” In the lying days to follow, the media chose not to notice that Hillary had just admitted an active role in silencing Bill’s women.

The silencing often got rough. Among the people the Clintons reached out to that year was Sally Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas and Clinton paramour.

The goon that the Clintons dispatched told Perdue, “There were people in high places who were anxious about me and they wanted me to know that keeping my mouth shut would be worthwhile.”

“Worthwhile” meant a GS-11 or higher job with the federal government. If she turned down the offer and talked to the media, “He couldn’t guarantee what would happen to my pretty little legs.”

Jack Cashill’s investigative-reporting skills shine in his many books – see them now in WND’s Superstore

Perdue was the least of the Clintons’ problems in 1992. More potentially troublesome were the women Clinton had criminally assaulted or humiliated – Juanita Broaddrick, Elizabeth Ward Gracen and Paula Jones among others.

Later in the “60 Minutes” interview, Kroft asked Bill if he thought the interview would help quiet the furor. Clinton answered, “That’s up to the American people and to some extent up to the press. This will test the character of the press.”

By Clinton standards, the media would pass the test, ace it even, and at their prompting, so would the public. Clinton had given the media just enough cover to “move on.” This was their turning point.

For the next eight years, Hillary lied as necessary to protect the Clinton brand. At every turn, her co-dependents in the major media enabled her.

Appalled by her performance, the normally restrained William Safire famously designated Hillary “a congenital liar” in a 1996 New York Times op-ed, but Hillary was just learning the art of the lie.

In 1998, she had plenty of opportunity to hone her craft. That year the story of Bill’s sordid sexual history broke into public view despite the major media’s best efforts to conceal it. The emergence of the Internet and sites like the Drudge Report and WND made containment impossible.

Six years and a day after she lied on “60 Minutes” to protect Bill’s candidacy, Hillary lied on the “Today” show to protect his presidency.

“There isn’t any fire,” she told Matt Lauer about the “smoke” surrounding her husband, and Lauer obligingly shifted his inquiry from whether Bill had a sexual liaison with Monica Lewinsky to whether independent counsel Ken Starr’s “30 million dollar” investigation had unfairly targeted the president.

This set-up allowed Hillary to establish the media narrative going forward. ”The great story here,” she said for the ages, “is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”

Hillary would later claim to have learned about Bill’s affair with Monica just before his August 1998 grand jury testimony.

In fact, however, it was Hillary, working through her acolytes, who had Monica booted from the White House before the story went public and branded as a stalker after it did.

The media chose not to know. They savaged the truth tellers – the whistleblowers, the prosecutors, the “bimbos” that erupted – and shifted their protective embrace to Hillary as the future progressive torchbearer.

They allowed the smartest woman in the world to play innocent victim, and this improbable role immunized her from scandal and burnished her political star.

By 2012, the major media had become so comfortable with Clinton lies that not a single one among them pointed out the grotesque irony of having an unrepentant sexual predator keynote a Democratic Convention whose theme was the “Republican war on women.”

So accustomed had Hillary grown to having her lies glossed over that she grew increasingly indignant even at the timid questions Congress threw her way at the January 2013 Benghazi hearing.

When asked by Sen. Ron Johnson about her version of events, Hillary exploded in an outburst destined to be at least as famous as her “vast right wing conspiracy” jeremiad.

Said Hillary, summing up the state of public integrity in 2013, “What difference at this point does it make?” Say what you will, but as recently as January that was a legitimate question.

To be sure, Benghazi will damage Hillary, at least in the short run. But come the Iowa Caucus in 2016, look for the media to champion version 2.0 of the “Comeback Kid.” They have too much emotional equity invested in Hillary to do otherwise.

 
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“We served on a couple of boards together, that was true,” Ayers told the Daily Beast. “He held a fundraiser in our living room, that was true; Michelle and Bernardine were at the law firm together, that was true.”

In April 2013 these revelations had little impact. In the fall of 2008, they could have reshaped the election. The New York Times made sure that they did not.

On Oct. 3 of that year, Scott Shane of the Times wrote the authoritative article staking out the claim that “Ayers was never a significant influence on [Obama.]”

Although he conceded that Ayers hosted a coffee for candidate Obama in 1995 – as so many other neighbors surely had – Shane rejected the more serious charge that Ayers “engineered” Obama’s appointment as chair of the influential $150 million educational reform boondoggle called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC).

Shane suggested that Ayers was first introduced to Obama in the spring of 1995 by two foundation presidents who recruited Obama to preside over the CAC. “In fact,” wrote Shane, “according to several people involved, Mr. Ayers played no role in Mr. Obama’s appointment.”

During the 2008 election cycle, of course, the Times was not unique in its willful ignorance. Ben Smith, then of Politico, had reported as fact Obama adviser David Axelrod’s claim that the Obama-Ayers relationship went no deeper than the happenstance that their children “attend the same school.”

Jack Cashill’s investigative-reporting skills shine in his many books – see them now in WND’s Superstore

True, upon learning that Obama’s oldest child was born 18 years after Ayers’ youngest, Smith added a comically circuitous “update,” but the media shied from chasing the story or even chiding Axelrod.

When ABC’s George Stephanopoulos raised the question of the Ayers relationship during an April 2008 presidential debate, he fueled what the L.A. Times called a “storm of criticism.”

That criticism, of course, was aimed at Stephanopoulos. How dare he confront Obama with “such tired tripe,” demanded the Washington Post’s Tom Shales. How dare he ask Obama about an “obscure ’60s radical,” asked Michael Grunwald of Time magazine.

Stephen Diamond, an impeccably credentialed leftist attorney and political scientist, knew then what the media refused to even explore. In 2008, he tried to convince the New York Times of the same, but its reporters and editors refused to listen.

As Diamond notes on a recent blog posting, he had five separate interviews with three different Times reporters. At the time he presented compelling evidence that Ayers alone had the legal power to appoint Obama to the CAC board and that their relationship was deeper than acknowledged.

Since then, as Diamond notes, Obama biographer and New Yorker Editor David Remnick confirmed Ayers’ role in Obama’s ascendancy, including the appointment to the CAC board.

As further testament to the strength of the Ayers-Obama relationship, Diamond also notes that mainstream biographer Christopher Andersen “explained the key role Ayers played in helping Obama finish his memoir,” an assertion I first made on these pages in September 2008. Curiously, this was one “rumor” Ayers chose neither to confirm nor deny in his Daily Beast interview.

Diamond was particularly intrigued by Ayers’ seemingly casual remark that “Michelle and Bernardine were at the law firm together.” That would be the Chicago firm of Sidley Austin.

“The use of the word ‘together’ by Ayers suggests that Dohrn and Michelle knew each other not just that they were employed by the same entity,” writes Diamond.

As Diamond recounts, Dohrn’s criminal association with the Weather Underground prevented her from becoming a lawyer despite her law degree. Sidley hired her in some unspecified capacity likely as a favor to Tom Ayers, Bill’s father and the chairman of Commonwealth Edison.

The Michelle/Bernardine “together” period at Sidley and Austin lasted from roughly 1988 to 1991 when both left for greener – and in Michelle’s case, easier – pastures. Obama interned at Sidley Austin in summer 1989. It was there that he met Michelle.

As Diamond accurately observes, almost no one has attempted to trace the first connection between the Obamas and Ayers/Dohrn to that Sidley Austin togetherness period. Now Ayers has admitted as much, and the media choose again not to notice.

Diamond himself earlier produced the most credible evidence that Obama and Ayers were associated as early as the 1980s. That was the interview he first conducted with the mailman who remembered meeting Obama when he visited Ayers’ parents’ home in suburban Chicago.

Diamond’s revelations about the relationship between Ayers and Obama take on new a new significance in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing.

We see now that it was no more than a decade after Bill Ayers walked away – “Guilty as hell. Free as a bird.” – from his 1970s career as an underground bomber that he became Obama’s mentor, political adviser and literary ghost.

Like the brothers Tsarnaev, Ayers and company had at least four notches on their belt. Although it seems unlikely now, who knows whether the surviving brother, Dzhokhar, will be palling around with a president a decade or so down the road?

Stranger things have happened.

These, after all, were the kind of ideas espoused by child-killer Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

“He mentioned about how in the war of Afghanistan and Iraq, most casualties are innocent people gunned down by American soldiers,” said one acquaintance of Tamerlan. “He said America was a colonial power trying to take over the Middle East and Africa.”

Upon hearing this, the watcher of TV news was expected to be shocked and appalled. How could someone raised in America think such things?

“He said the Quran spoke more of the truth then the Bible,” another friend reported of Tamerlan. “He said the Bible was used as an excuse to invade other countries.” More shock, more outrage.

As to where the Tsarnaevs absorbed these horrible ideas, Ramzan Kadyrov, president of the Russian republic of Chechnya, had a good idea. “They grew up in the USA,” he said. “Their viewpoints and beliefs were formed there. You must look for the roots of [their] evil in America.”

The chattering classes did not want to hear this. They refused to entertain the idea that the roots of the Tsarnaevs’ rage were to be found somewhere other than Chechnya or in a rogue subversive mosque.

In all the news I watched that week, and it was a lot, no one ventured the idea that the boys absorbed their rage in the very ether of Cambridge, Mass., their adopted hometown.

They may have even picked it up in their high school, Cambridge Rindge and Latin, a school that has produced homegrown anti-colonialists like the wannabe subversive actor Matt Damon.

In 2010, Damon starred in “Green Zone,” a film set in Iraq. Kyle Smith of the New York Post described the film as “one of the most egregiously anti-American movies ever released by a major studio,” and he was being charitable.

“It’s one thing to make a fantasy film laced with snarky jibes at the United States and its military,” Smith continued. “It’s of another order entirely for an American studio (Universal, a unit of GE) to perpetrate, during an ongoing war, such vicious anti-American lies disguised as cheap entertainment.”

Jack Cashill’s investigative-reporting skills shine in his many books — see them now in WND’s Superstore

One wonders what the Tsarnaev brothers learned from “Green Zone.” One wonders too what they learned from their Cambridge neighbor, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.

In July 2009, the reader will recall, Cambridge police officer James Crowley responded to a call that two black men were trying to break into the back door of a Cambridge residence.

This was, in fact, true. Gates had cleverly locked himself out. When Crowley politely attempted to confirm that Gates was the homeowner as claimed, he was repeatedly denounced as a racist. Outside, Gates shouted over and over, ‘This is what happens to black men in America.”

I imagine the Tsarnaevs sympathized. Certainly President Barack Obama did. “I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that,” said Obama at a press conference.

“But I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”

Obama’s later apologies were pure politics. “I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side,” he wrote in his 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father.”

When the powerless, presumably people like Gates, strike back, the powerful respond with “a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware.”

By equating Chicago with the Third World, Obama endorsed the link between racism and colonialism, the presumed motive for America’s involvement in Vietnam.

Later in “Dreams,” Obama makes this point more explicitly when he talks about righteous insurrections in “Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta.” For the left, racism at home parallels colonialism abroad, one or both of which must inevitably underwrite the American adventure.

It is not a stretch to imagine Obama and the Tsarnaevs palling around together if he had been their age. He wrote in “Dreams,” “I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.”

With his new friends, Obama discussed “neocolonialism, Franz (sic) Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy” and flaunted his alienation. The literary influences Obama cited include radical anti-imperialists like Fanon and Malcolm X, communists like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and Stalin-loving fellow travelers like W.E.B. DuBois.

In “Dreams,” Obama gave no suggestion that this reading was in any way problematic or a mere phase in his development. He moved on to no new school, embraced no new worldview.

At least five of the authors he cited – Wright, Fanon, Hughes, Malcolm X and James Baldwin – his terrorist pal Bill Ayers cited in his writings as well.

You see, from Obama’s perspective, bombing and killing did not disqualify a fellow anti-colonial warrior from his friendship. Like the Tsarnaevs, Bill Ayers had four notches on his belt, and yet just a dozen or so years after emerging unrepentant from the underground – “Guilty as hell. Free as a bird” – he was serving as Obama’s political godfather and literary muse.

So chill, Dzhokhar. This anti-terror fervor is just a phase. In a few years, the universities will be celebrating you guys the way they now do your fellow Beantown terrorists, Sacco and Vanzetti.

And who knows, you too may get to pal around with an even more “progressive” president.

Twenty years ago this week, the Clinton administration ordered a tank assault on the Mount Carmel community, killing 39 racial minorities, 26 of them black. The Clintons and the media suppressed the racial data so rigorously that I doubt even Al Sharpton knows about the black dead at Waco.

A year ago Feb. 26, neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., and within a month every sentient person on the planet knew “Trayvon” by name.

What they did not know was Martin’s background. Sanford Police Department (SPD) investigator Chris Serino, for instance, said publicly of Martin, “This child has no criminal record whatsoever.” He called Martin “a good kid, a mild-mannered kid.” The media almost universally sustained this tragically false narrative.

Martin had the seeming good fortune of attending school in the Miami-Dade School District, the fourth-largest district in the country and one of the few with its own police department.

For a variety of reasons, none of them good, elements within the SPD and the Miami-Dade School District Police Department, or M-DSPD, conspired to keep Martin’s criminal history buried.

See Jack Cashill’s stunning work, in “Deconstructing Obama,” “First Strike,” “Hoodwinked,” “Officer’s Oath” and more.

As part of its mission the M-DSPD was allegedly trying to divert offending students, especially black males, from the criminal justice system. As the Martin death would prove, the M-DSPD diverted offending students to nothing beyond its own statistical glory.

The exposure of M-DSPD practices began inadvertently on March 26, 2012, when the Miami Herald, the one mainstream outlet to do real reporting on the case, ran a story on Martin’s background.

The Herald’s headline, “Multiple suspensions paint complicated portrait of Trayvon Martin,” should have caused the other media to seek the truth about the very nearly sanctified Martin.

It did not. What it did do was to cause M-DSPD Police Chief Charles Hurley to launch a major Internal Affairs (IA) investigation into the possible leak of this information to the Herald.

At the end of the day, Hurley rather wished he had not. The detectives questioned told the truth about Martin and about the policies that kept him out of the justice system. Hurley would be demoted and forced out of the department within a year.

We now know what the detectives revealed thanks to a recently fulfilled Freedom of Information Act request filed by the dogged researchers at a blogging collective known as The Conservative Treehouse. The “Treepers” have literally done more good work on the Martin case than all the newsrooms in America combined.

On Feb. 15, 2012, 11 days before Martin’s death, the Miami-Dade County Public Schools put out a press release boasting of a 60 percent decline in school-based arrests, the largest decline by far in the state.

“While our work is not completed, we are making tremendous progress in moving toward a pure prevention model,” Hurley told the Tampa Bay Times, “with enforcement as a last resort and an emphasis on education.”

Hurley’s detectives, all of them veterans with excellent records, told a different story under oath when questioned by Internal Affairs. They knew the shell game was about to be exposed upon first learning that Martin was one of their students and outside agencies would be requesting his records.

“Oh, God, oh, my God, oh, God,” one major reportedly said when first looking at Martin’s data. He realized that Martin had been suspended twice already that school year for offenses that should have gotten him arrested – once for getting caught with a burglary tool and a dozen items of female jewelry, the second time for getting caught with marijuana and a marijuana pipe.

In each case, the case file on Martin was fudged to make the crime less serious than it was. As one detective told IA, the arrest statistics coming out of Martin’s school, Michael Krop Senior, had been “quite high,” and the detectives “needed to find some way to lower the stats.” This directive allegedly came from Hurley.

“Chief Hurley, for the past year, has been telling his command staff to lower the arrest rates,” confirmed another high-ranking detective.

When asked by IA whether the M-DSPD was avoiding making arrests, that detective replied, “What Chief Hurley said on the record is that he commends the officer for using his discretion. What Chief Hurley really meant is that he’s commended the officer for falsifying a police report.”

The IA interrogators seemed stunned by what they were hearing. They asked one female detective incredulously if she were actually ordered to “falsify reports.” She answered, “Pretty much, yes.”

Once the top brass understood that the Martin case had the potential to expose the reason for the department’s stunning drop in crime, they told the detectives “to make sure they start writing reports as is; don’t omit anything.”

“Oh, now, the chief wants us to write reports as is,” said a Hispanic detective sarcastically, “and not omit anything, as we have been advised in the past?”

The IA investigation delved into the paranoid concern that the M-DSPD was sharing information about Martin with other relevant police departments as it routinely did in other multi-jurisdictional cases.

The one detective who sent information to the Sanford PD came under heavy fire. He was appalled. “Currently, our department is functioning and operating out of fear,” he told the IA. “It is tragic to see that I’ve been disciplined at the direction of Chief Hurley.”

As it turned out, Hurley need not have worried about the SPD. As the Conservative Treehouse reports, the information sent by the M-DSPD “disappeared down the rabbit hole and was not included in the final victimology report filed by Sanford Detective Serino.”

Serino was the Martin-friendly detective who had insisted that Martin “has no criminal record whatsoever,” calling him, “a good kid, a mild-mannered kid.”

In Hurley’s defense, school districts across the country had been feeling pressure from the nation’s race hustlers to think twice before disciplining black students. Last year, the White House formalized the pressure with an executive order warning school districts to avoid “methods that result in disparate use of disciplinary tools.”

Jesse Jackson brought this nonsense home to Sanford during a large April 1, 2012, rally. He implied that Martin had been profiled by his high school for being a black male and suspended for the same reason. “We must stop suspending our children,” Jackson told the crowd.

In a way, Jackson was right. Martin should not have been suspended. He should have been arrested on both occasions. Had he been, his parents and his teachers would have known how desperately far he had gone astray.

Instead, Martin was “diverted” into nothing useful. Just days after his non-arrest, he was allowed to wander the streets of Sanford high and alone looking, in Zimmerman’s immortal words, “like he’s up to no good or he’s on drugs or something.”

At the end of the day, Martin had avoided becoming an arrest statistic, only to become a statistic of a much graver kind.

In the days since, many in the media have attempted to interpret the gaffe, but almost all have overlooked the obvious – the relentless celebration of single motherhood in Obama’s America.

As Obama learned early in his candidacy for presidency, there was no reward to be had for identifying single motherhood as a problem to be solved.

In a turning point of his career, Obama told a large church congregation in Chicago on Father’s Day 2008 that too many fathers were “missing,” and nowhere was that “more true than in the African-American community.”

Jesse Jackson promptly used a hot mic on Fox News to let it be known that Obama spoke out of turn. “I want to cut his nuts out. Barack,” said Jackson with impunity. “He is talking down to black people, telling ni–-ers how to behave.”

Obama got the message. From that time on, he used his Father’s Day addresses not to chastise missing fathers but to champion single mothers and to applaud himself as a child of such a circumstance, even if he had to lie to make his point.

In his 2011 Father’s Day speech, for instance, Obama fabricated his background to make himself seem more authentically black. “I grew up without my father around,” he claimed. “He left when I was 2 years old.”

No, Barack Obama Sr. did not leave when Obama was 2. He never lived with the boy and his mother, Ann Dunham. But Obama did not grow up fatherless. Lolo Soetoro filled the void almost immediately and would do so for the next 11 years.

According to Janny Scott, the New York Times reporter who spent years researching Ann’s life, Soetoro began dating Ann in late 1963 right around the time Obama turned 2. There are photos to prove it.

Soetoro was expected to return to Indonesia in 1964, both to comply with American immigration law and to honor his contract with the Indonesian government. He did not want to go.

So he got married. On her 1981 passport application, Ann claims March 5, 1964, as her marriage date. Scott confirms this date in her book, “A Singular Woman”: “[Soetoro] and Ann had married on March 5, 1964, shortly after she divorced Obama.”

According to Soetoro’s INS file, however, he and Ann did not marry officially until March 15, 1965. It is likely that Ann imagined a 1964 marriage to Soetoro for the sake of appearances much as she likely did with Obama three years prior. Then too, a documented marriage to Soetoro might have forced her to give up her fabled food stamps.

In any case, three months after the official marriage, when questioned by the INS, Soetoro did not remember the date. The wedding obviously did not make much of an impression.

Despite the marriage, the pressure was mounting on Soetoro to return to Indonesia. As now seems something of a family tradition, the young couple simply lied about their circumstances.

In July 1965, for instance, Lolo told the INS he could not return to Indonesia because his wife had a stomach ailment requiring surgery.

When questioned, however, Lolo could not name the doctor. When a doctor finally did send a letter to the INS on Soetoro’s behalf, all he offered as an excuse was potential “emotional strain” on Ann.

By 1968, the future president had moved to Indonesia with his mother and stepfather, and his mother listed him on the passport application as “Barack Hussein Obama (Soebarkah).”

Before signing the application, Ann had to attest to several conditions. Most would have no applicability to her son, but one might have.

It reads as follows: “I have not (and no other person to be included in the passport or documentation has), since acquiring United States citizenship, been naturalized as a citizen of a foreign state.”

The application then cautions the signer that if any of these acts apply to anyone named on the passport, “the portion which applies should be struck out.”

Likely after reading this, Ann struck out the name “Barack Hussein Obama (Soebarkah)” with five carefully placed scratch lines. This would seem to strengthen the case that Obama was adopted by Soetoro and became a citizen of Indonesia.

The game playing picks up again in 1972. Ann and her daughter with Soetoro, Maya, returned to Hawaii that year. Her son had returned a year earlier. According to the INS documents, Soetoro returned to Hawaii on Oct. 8, 1972.

What is curious is that in Scott’s allegedly authoritative biography, she has Soetoro in Indonesia for all but a brief time during this second Hawaii period. Writes Scott, Ann was “in effect, a single mother.” Her need for an advanced degree “required that she live apart from Lolo, at least for a time.”

The INS records, however, suggest that Soetoro was in Hawaii during virtually all of this “single motherhood” period. Food stamps, anyone?

Ann returned to Indonesia for fieldwork in 1975 with Maya, but without her 13-year-old son, who remained behind with his grandparents.

Scott says little about Soetoro’s whereabouts during this period, although she notes that Ann and Maya went to live with Soetoro’s mother in early 1976. The couple would not divorce until 1980.

In her treatment of Ann’s two presumed marriages, Scott tries to honor the official Obama narrative. First, she fully manufactures a domestic life for the boy and his mother with Obama Sr. to sustain the multicultural ideal that Obama first spun in “Dreams from My Father.”

Then, Scott subtracts years from the mother and son’s genuine domestic life with Soetoro to advance the “single mother” myth and to suppress any talk of Muslim influences on Obama or Indonesian citizenship.

For Scott, like Michelle Obama, being a “single mother” is a mark of authenticity, and if you have to spin your way to that status, so be it.

In the weeks and months that followed, Hillary honed her arts of deception, delay and double-dealing and tested the media’s tolerance for the same.

What she and Bill had to conclude was that in a year in which a Democrat was running for re-election, a sycophantic media could be very tolerant indeed.

Some background: On April 3, 1996, then-Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 others died when their Air Force plane crashed into a Croatian mountainside.

Brown’s flight left the Tuzla airport in Bosnia, a Muslim country. As in Libya, not everyone in Bosnia was thrilled by America’s intervention, and some were downright hostile to the American presence.

For no good reason, Hillary had made an unanticipated stop in Tuzla – without Bill – just a few days before Brown’s fatal flight.

Unlike with the case of the late U.S ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, however, there is no evidence Islamic terrorists killed Brown. Here is what we know for sure about Ron Brown’s last days.

To protect his son Michael from prison, Ron Brown threatened to expose the White House’s yet unrevealed Asian fundraising scheme, in which Brown played a major role.

Just weeks before his death, Brown started going to church for the first time in ages. He was scared for his life and that of his confidante, Nolanda Hill.

The Croatian government insisted on a Dubrovnik stop an unprecedented 36 hours before Brown’s scheduled landing.

The Air Force called the pilot’s nearly two-mile deviation into a Croatian hillside “inexplicable.” No aircraft had ever drifted inland before at that airport. The AWACS data suggest sabotage of the ground-based navigation system, a line of inquiry the Air Force was not allowed to pursue.

For the first time ever on friendly soil, the White House ordered the Air Force to skip the “safety” phase of the investigation and move directly to the “accident” phase.

There would be no consideration other than accident, even though this airport was near the Bosnian border and in a potential hot fire zone.

Three days after the crash and two days before his scheduled interview by the Air Force, the Croatian responsible for the airport’s navigation system was found dead with a bullet hole in his chest.

A day later, every pathologist who viewed Brown’s body back in America concluded that his head wound, at the very least, looked like a bullet hole.

In a decision that reached the White House, there would be no autopsy. The Brown family was not informed. Nor was there any forensic testing or a search for an exit wound.

The head X-rays that showed a possible “lead snowstorm” were destroyed. Officially, they were lost.

The three Armed Forces pathologists and the forensic photographer who blew the whistle on this case had their careers destroyed.

In silencing these dissidents, the Armed Force Institute of Pathology brass assured the public that Brown died of “multiple blunt force injuries” like the others.

The death certificate says otherwise. It notes that Brown died of “blunt force injuries to the head.” He was the only one of the 35 victims to have a reported head wound.

The Croatian neo-fascist strongman, Franjo Tudjman, who had feared a trip to the Hague as a war criminal, ended up a week after the election at the Walter Reed Army Hospital to have his cancer treated. His son, Miroslav, investigated the death of the navigation chief and ruled it a suicide.

If this were not enough, Brown had gone to Croatia to broker a sweetheart deal between Tudjman and the Enron Corporation. The Enron execs took their own plane.

All criminal charges against Michael Brown were dropped save for a campaign violation wrist slap. He subsequently became vice chairman of finance for the Democratic National Committee.

To keep Nolanda Hill quiet, the Clinton Justice Department indicted her on bogus tax charges. Like video-maker Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, she found herself incarcerated deep in the heart of Texas.

Much as with Benghazi, Hillary Clinton did not want to know the truth about Ron Brown’s death, and she certainly did not want to share what she did know.

The Clintons used a reluctant Air Force and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology to bury Ron Brown as quickly as possible, literally and figuratively. And without an autopsy and a serious investigation, the whole case remained buried.

As with Benghazi, the media chose to remain ignorant. I was the first reporter to secure the Air Force’s 22-volume report and that seven years after the fact. The New York Times could not be bothered even though it had a man onboard.

So accustomed has Hillary grown to having her lies glossed over down through the years that she grew increasingly indignant even at the timid questions Congress threw her way at the Benghazi hearing.

When questioned by Sen. Ron Johnson about her version of events, Hillary exploded in an outburst destined to be at least as famous as her “vast right-wing conspiracy” jeremiad.

Said Hillary, summing up the state of public integrity in 2013 America, “What difference at this point does it make?” We should not have been shocked. She has been saying much the same for the last 20 years.

On social media sites, people wondered out loud when President Barack Obama would denounce this outrage as he did after the Newtown shooting or, more relevantly, as he did after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin a year ago in Florida,

As to “when,” the most likely answer is “never.” As to “why,” the answer is a little more complicated. During his 2008 campaign, Obama showed signs of addressing America’s most vexing domestic problem, black crime and the fatherlessness that has spawned it.

On Father’s Day, June 15, 2008, Obama took his campaign to the 20,000-member Apostolic Church of God in the South Side of Chicago. His message was unequivocal. The New York Times took a day off from worrying about the separation of church and state and headlined its article on the talk, “Obama sharply assails absent black fathers.”

To murmurs of approval from the almost entirely black congregation, Obama preached, “If we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that too many father are also missing.” Lest the listeners think Obama was speaking in general, he added, “Nowhere is it more true than in the African-American community.”

Obama then spelled out the consequences, including the fact that boys who grow up in fatherless homes are “20 times more likely to end up in prison.” Said Obama harshly of absentee fathers: “They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men.”

In most quarters, Obama’s talk was well received. Said one black woman in the YouTube comment section, punctuation be damned, “He kept it real all of those other so called black leaders never touched this subject about fatherless homes reason why one jesse jackson was one of those fathers.”

Jesse Jackson was indeed one of those fathers. As late as 2012, his former mistress, Karin Stanford, was still hectoring him for child support for Ashley, their celebrated love child.

Jackson took Obama’s comments as an insult, both personally and professionally. A few weeks later, awaiting a remote interview with Fox News, Jackson made his feelings known on a hot mike.

“I want to cut his nuts out,” Jackson was widely reported as saying. “Barack, he is talking down to black people.” Almost universally, the media edited out the last part of Jackson’s comment, “telling ni–ers how to behave.” But Obama got the message.

Suzanne Goldenberg, reporting for Britain’s left-leaning Guardian, did a better job than most in the American media of assessing the political ramifications of Jackson’s remarks, not so much for Jackson, as for Obama.

She cited Jackson’s various apologies and his plea that Obama “represents the redemption of our country,” but her headline caught the dynamic behind the dust-up: “Jackson gaffe turns focus on Obama’s move to the right.”

Goldenberg raised the question that many on the left had been asking, “What has happened to Obama since he won the Democratic nomination?”

As she noted correctly, Obama’s focus on individual responsibility upset those on the left who “hold government policies to account for the impoverishment of African-American families,” Jackson chief among them.

Although Goldenberg did not go into detail, she raised a secondary issue that most in the America media chose not to explore, specifically “Obama’s place in the African-American community.”

In his 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” Obama related his own quest to discover “a workable meaning for his life as a black American.” This did not come easy to him.

When he left his white mother and grandparents behind in Hawaii for college in Los Angeles, he knew no more about African-American culture than what he had seen on TV. He described himself accurately as “a would-be black man.”

For all of his seeming gaffes, Jackson had hit Obama where he was most vulnerable – his standing as an authentic African-American. Obama never felt secure in that identity.

Jesse Jackson had no such issues. He walked the walk, including the legendary 1965 Selma to Montgomery march. By contrast, when Obama spoke at Selma in 2007, he did so in faux preacher cadence and contrived a story about how the march inspired his parents’ romance so grotesquely false that the New York Times almost noticed.

In fact, while Jackson was confronting angry white state troopers in Alabama, the 3-year-old Obama was collecting seashells with his white grandfather in Waikiki.

“So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama,” Obama preached. “Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama.”

This fantasy worked well enough on liberal white America, but Obama could not fool himself, and he certainly could not fool Jackson.

After Jackson punched back, Obama never again made as hard-hitting a jab at the heart of the problem afflicting black America as he did in his Father’s Day 2008 speech.

And do not expect him to do so in the future. Aging clown or not, Jesse Jackson still frightens him more than Rush Limbaugh.

A year ago this week, the story of Trayvon Martin’s killing Feb. 26, 2012, was still largely contained in Florida. That would change when Matt Gutman, a “Break-Out News Hottie” according to one gay blogger, entered the scene stage left.

On March 13, 2012, Gutman tweeted, that neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman “shot 17yr old teen bc he was black, wore hoodie walking slowly.” Gutman had clearly established his template before he had seen any evidence.

Three days later, the Sanford Police Department (SPD) released the 911 calls and George Zimmerman’s exchange with the non-emergency dispatcher. Gutman hopped all over it. Based in Miami, he wanted to own this story.

On March 16, Gutman posted a piece on the ABC News site with the inflammatory headline, “Trayvon Martin Neighborhood Watch Shooting: 911 Tapes Send Mom Crying From Room.” The article implies that Martin’s mother left the room crying because she heard her son scream for help on the 911 calls.

In his video piece for “Good Morning America,” Gutman reinforces this insinuation. In the process, he may have set a new record for most mistakes of consequence in a two-minute news piece:

GUTMAN: It was Feb. 25.

EVIDENCE: It was Feb. 26.

GUTMAN: Martin was staying at his stepmother’s.

EVIDENCE: Martin was a staying with Brandy Green, a girlfriend of his father’s. His mother and stepmother lived in Miami.

GUTMAN: Martin left for the store at half-time of the NBA All-Star Game.

EVIDENCE: Martin was dead before the game started.

GUTMAN: The “gunshots” are triggering outrage.

EVIDENCE: There was only one gunshot, and it was the media coverage that was triggering outrage.

GUTMAN: Martin was “100 pounds lighter” than Zimmerman.

EVIDENCE: He was 36 pounds lighter or less.

GUTMAN: “You can hear him stalk Martin.”

EVIDENCE: He doesn’t stalk Martin. When the dispatcher says to Zimmerman, who is following Martin, “OK. We don’t need you to do that,” Zimmerman says, “OK,” and stops. Gutman edits out Zimmerman’s “OK” and follows immediately with his own comment, “But then came the gunshots.”

GUTMAN: Zimmerman had a record – “battery on a police officer and resisting arrest.”

EVIDENCE: The charges had been dropped. Gutman does not mention that.

GUTMAN: Police have been accused of “correcting one eyewitness, while ignoring another.”

EVIDENCE: Yes, but the SPD did so for good reason. On one 911 call desperate cries of “help” are clearly audible for 42 seconds until they promptly stop with a gunshot. The Sanford Police Department knew it is Zimmerman who was crying out. They had interviewed the eyewitnesses.

An hour after the shooting, for instance, Witness No. 6 told the SPD that he saw a “black man in a black hoodie on top of either a white guy . . . or an Hispanic guy in a red sweater on the ground yelling out help.” According to No. 6, the black man on top was “throwing down blows on the guy MMA [mixed martial arts] style.”

Witness No. 13 waited until the fighting ended, went outside and saw Zimmerman walking toward him. “Am I bleeding?” Zimmerman asked. Witness No. 13 answered affirmatively. He also noticed “blood on the back of his head” and took a picture of it.

Gutman likely had not yet heard the audio of these interviews, but witness No. 6 had spoken on camera to a local TV station the day after the shooting. “The guy on bottom who I believe had a red sweater on was yelling to me, ‘help, help,’” the witness said. “I told them to stop and I was calling 911.” As both Zimmerman and the witness confirm, Zimmerman appealed directly to this man for help.

The one witness Gutman does present is Mary Cutcher, a local schoolteacher. Cutcher appears in this piece at a Team Trayvon press conference where she says confidently, “We know it’s not self-defense.”

As Gutman suggests, Cutcher is one of the witnesses the SPD corrected or ignored, but he does not mention that on her 911 call Cutcher insisted that there was “a black guy standing up over [the shooting victim].” The SPD could not take this information seriously.

In an interview with the SPD four days after the shooting, Cutcher claimed, “I didn’t pay much attention to [the altercation]. I didn’t hear any words. It sounded like someone was struggling or hurt or something.” She clarified that to say, “I heard nothing but a little kid scared to death or crying.”

In her defense, Cutcher could be forgiven for thinking that Martin was, in fact, “a little kid.” Team Trayvon had been feeding the media only child-like images of Martin, and the media had been spreading them uncritically.

Gutman uses a half dozen of them in his “Good Morning America” piece. When talking about “the struggle” between Martin and Zimmerman, ABC shows the viewer the photo of a thuggish, heavyset Zimmerman from 2005 countered by an Onion-worthy photo of an innocent young Martin actually hugging a baby.

Over the next few days, Gutman’s reporting would grow more reckless and inflammatory. The FBI was now investigating the case as a hate crime. Why? Zimmerman, in his call to the dispatcher, had used a “possible racist remark.” Gutman never specifies what that remark was because there was none.

Now, according to Gutman, even more damning evidence had emerged that the police had inexplicably ignored, and, better still, Gutman was exclusively allowed to hear it.

As Gutman related, Team Trayvon had interviewed a “16-year-old girl.” She had been on the phone with Martin in his last minutes. The viewer hears the girl say, “He said that this man was watching him so he put his hoodie on.”

Gutman adds, “Suddenly Martin was cornered.” He then cuts back to the girl who recounts Martin saying, “What are you following me for?” Then, the girl continues, “The man said, ‘what are you doing around here.’” Then, says the girl, “Somebody pushed Trayvon.” The line then goes dead and, says Gutman, “Seconds later Zimmerman shot Martin.”

The girl, who was 18 at the time, will not testify in court because she and Team Trayvon were lying about what she knew from the beginning. The case is falling apart. Gutman and pals have already started modifying their reporting, but at the end of the day, the more excitable parts of America may not be in a mood to listen.

Note: Jack Cashill is currently working on a book for WND Books, “If I Had A Son: Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman.”