"For me, this is not just a matter of policy. It's personal," said a verklempt Hillary Clinton choking back the tears at Wednesday's Benghazi hearing. "I stood next to President Obama as the Marines carried those flag-draped caskets off the plane at Andrews. I put my arms around the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, and the wives left alone to raise their children."

Hillary may well have been sincere, but with the Clintons you never know. A classic maudlin moment during Bill Clinton's presidency occurred immediately after a 1996 memorial service for Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. Brown, a sworn enemy of the Clintons in his final days, died in what the U.S. Air Force called an "inexplicable" plane crash in Croatia.

As Clinton and the Reverend Tony Campolo were walking back to the White House from the service, they were discussing, as Campolo later told me, the typically joyous black funerals they had attended in the past, and the conversation turned mirthful.

As Clinton leaned back to laugh, he suddenly locked on to an ABC News camera and reflexively downshifted to a funereal gear, dropping his head in seeming sadness and wiping an imagined tear from his eye. Campolo attributed the mood switch to a shift in conversation, claiming he confronted the president with the issue of the partial birth abortion bill recently passed by Congress. As I pointed out to Campolo, however, he kept on talking and laughing. Rush Limbaugh's commentary on this video is a hoot.

Campolo may at some point actually have talked to Clinton about the partial birth abortion bill but apparently without success. Immediately after the burial the next day, the president retreated to the White House. There, in the media shadow of Brown's funeral, in a move that was cynical even by his own standards, he vetoed the partial birth abortion bill that had been sitting on his desk for the past two weeks. The Senate would sustain the veto, and the grisly practice would continue.

Whether this veto helped him secure the designation "father of the year" by the National Father's Day Council remains as mysterious as Chris Steven's death in Benghazi or Ron Brown's death in Croatia for that matter. But, as Hillary might say, "What difference does it make."