Uhm…what? This is some weapons grade derp.

The news cycle that will follow Hillary Clinton’s appearance on Capitol Hill is entirely predictable.

Instead of getting any closer to the truths about Benghazi or Clinton’s homebrew spy-friendly email system or the obvious conflicts of interest with the Clinton Foundation, we’ll be treated to tiresome and politically ineffective theater from the Clinton cheer squad and hapless Republicans who don’t understand Hillary Rules.

The coming wave of conventional-wisdom stories reflects the GOP’s many mistakes. And her inevitable escape from legal and political jeopardy will have been aided and abetted by Capitol Hill Republicans who wouldn’t know a media strategy if it bit them on their well-fed asses.

It’s not because Chairman Trey Gowdy hasn’t done yeoman’s work trying to build a careful, non-political case of the handling of Benghazi and in Clinton’s subsequent email scandal. It’s because members of Congress not directly involved in the process ran their mouths without a plan, without a message, and without the discipline that many of us begged them to exercise.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and others got sloppy, and forgot there is no zone of latitude when it comes to Republicans vs. the Clintons. GOP members playing to either the right or left side of the bleachers gave the Clinton team the sword they needed to cut off all our heads, letting an already complicit media frame the hearings precisely as they desired.

They helped the Clinton team draw the Benghazi hearings into the most familiar battle lines in the minds of the Acela corridor’s chroniclers of Hillary. We’re in their most comfortable happy zone where Republicans are the bad, stupid party and Clinton is the embattled, beleaguered feminist icon.

Or, shorter…WAAAAAAAHHHHHHH! Those mean (and super smart) democrats and their media lapdogs! WAAAAAHHHHH! Christ.