VOLUNTARY UNDERBUSSING: State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, regarding the murder of Ambassador Stevens: “Look, I’m generally dumber than most of the rest of the government. I mean, that’s what I’m paid to be.”

Gee, that’s reassuring. On the other, it brings to mind one of Mark Steyn’s favorite riffs:

When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dumped some of his closest cabinet colleagues to extricate himself from a political crisis, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe responded: “Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life.”

Or as Steyn writes in his column today:

Liberals are always going on about the evils of “outsourcing” and “offshoring” – selfish vulture capitalists like Mitt Romney shipping jobs to cheap labor overseas just to save a few bucks. How unpatriotic can you get! So now the United States government is outsourcing embassy security to cheap Welshmen who, in turn, outsource it to cheaper Libyans. Diplomatic facilities are U.S. sovereign territory – no different de jure from Fifth Avenue or Mount Rushmore. So defending them is one of the core responsibilities of the state. But that’s the funny thing about Big Government: the bigger it gets, the more of life it swallows up, the worse it gets at those very few things it’s supposed to be doing. So, on the first anniversary of 9/11 in a post-revolutionary city in which Western diplomats had been steadily targeted over the previous six months, the government of the supposedly most powerful nation on Earth entrusted its security to Abdulaziz Majbari, 29, and his pal, who report to some bloke back in Carmarthen, Wales. In the days before the attack, Joe Biden had been peddling his Obama campaign slogan that: “Bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.” The first successful terrorist attack on U.S. sovereign territory since 9/11, and on the very anniversary and by al-Qaida-linked killers, was not helpful to the Obama team. And so the nature of the event had to be “politicized”: Look, over there – an Islamophobic movie! “Greater love hath no man than this,” quoth the President at Chris Stevens’ coffin, “that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Smaller love hath no man than Obama’s, than to lay down his “friend” for a couple of points in Ohio.

Currently on tap: where to outsource the aftermath of the Libya debacle.