Softly, I will leave you softly
For my heart would break if you should wake and see me go
So I leave you softly, long before you miss me
Long before your arms can beg me stay
For one more hour or one more day.

Hillary Clinton departed the State Department -- in those words of crooner Frank Sinatra -- softly. Her departure path is being strewn with palm fronds by a press corps that has always found her to be good ink and good think.

We should, at this leave-taking, give credit where credit is due. She was part of the Obama team's successful raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan. That raid was a masterpiece of military and diplomatic coordination. She was certainly right not to tell the Pakistanis what we intended to do. The quick burial at sea of Osama bin Laden's body was exactly the way to handle that matter. Even Winston Churchill would have approved.

We should also thank Madam Secretary for gaining the release of Chen Guangcheng and his family from cruel captivity in China. Chen has been a leading critic of China's One Child Policy, which has led to forced abortion and female infanticide. We do not share the criticism of others that the Obama administration has failed to give Chen a platform.

President Reagan did not give a platform to Russian Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He understood, as Secretary Clinton does, that to do so would guarantee no other dissidents would taste freedom.

There, the kudos end, unfortunately. We have been unsparing in criticizing the rest of the Mrs. Clinton's record at the State Department. Relations with Russia have worsened under this administration. Apart from Chen's release, China has proceeded with the real war on women -- mothers and their unborn children -- with little or no reaction from this administration.

Iran has been funding and equipping terrorism around the world. Sec. Clinton was part of this administration's failed "open hand" policy toward the mullahs in Tehran. She has backed "crippling sanctions" and "sanctions that bite" only to find the administration's own record limping and toothless toward these inventors of suicide bombing.

And her testimony on Benghazi was truly appalling. "What difference does it make?" wowed the wowable press corps, but it was a morally bankrupt reply to the deaths of four brave Americans in Libya.

We cannot allow this chapter in her career to be closed without pressing the point on one vital matter. As First Lady in 1994, her failed health care plan would have forced every county in America to set up an abortion facility -- even though 89% of our counties did not have these centers. Her husband's administration sent the infamous Red Cable to every U.S. Embassy in the world, ordering all our diplomats to pressure their host countries to legalize abortion-on-demand.

Still, he claimed only to want abortion to be "safe, legal, and rare." The only place they made it rare was in Antarctica. They even demanded that military hospitals be involved in the lethal business of abortion.

Nonetheless, Hillary Clinton told Newsweek magazine (October 31st) that year that abortion was "wrong." Ironically, that statement, as so many other Clinton statements, has disappeared down the memory hole.

If she really thought it was wrong to kill unborn children, then why did she not speak out when Kenya was forced to legalize abortion in its new Constitution?

If she didn't think abortion was wrong, why didn't she "walk back" her statement in Newsweek? Or claim they misquoted her?

Lincoln faced a similar situation with for it while against it Democrats of his time.

You say that you think slavery is wrong, but you denounce all attempts to restrain it. Is there anything else that you think wrong that you are not willing to deal with as wrong? Why are you so careful, so tender, of this one wrong and no other? You will not let us do a single thing as if it was wrong;

Doesn't this describe Hillary's attitude toward the "wrong" thing that she somehow manages to push around the world? She publicly tongue-lashed Canada's Conservative government for not making abortion part of their most compassionate program to aid young mothers in East Africa.

She is clearly headed for a sabbatical. She'll write a book. She'll lose those bulky glasses and get a fashion makeover. She'll return to the political scene ready for that 3 AM phone call she boasted about in her `08 campaign.

We wish her a happy and healthy retirement, the longer the better. And we pray she will come to understand that the basic human right is the right of humans to be born, to have a loving mother and father, and to be given a fair chance in the race of life. By 2016, we hope that Americans will require this of their leaders.

Ken Blackwell and Bob Morrison are senior Fellows at the Family Research Council, in Washington, D.C.