In a political culture of any rectitude, Representative Trey Gowdy's House appointment as the chairman of the new Select Committee to investigate the Benghazi debacle might create misgivings among more than a few of our governing eminences (e.g., Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and an array of State Department, White House, CIA, and DOD apparatchiki).

But Barack Obama's political culture -- and who could have foreseen any worse than Bill and Hillary Clinton's? -- has so forsaken rectitude that Trey Gowdy's Select Committee may not make many Benghazi waves greater than the gentle swells Darrell Issa's regular House Committee already has.  With a brainwashed media shamelessly covering every leftist politician's derriere, a Justice Department run by an administration fixer (himself in contempt of Congress), and a politicized Federal leadership right across the bureaucratic board, any serious desire to arrest the governing venality may amount to nothing more than pissing in the political wind.

And while Trey Gowdy seems serious, John Boehner seems more akin to a Republican stooge for Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the Democratic establishment. Besides, even were the House Republican leadership serious about Benghazi, IRS political targeting, Fast and Furious, NSA privacy invasion, agency militarization,  Presidential arrogation, crony capitalism, influence peddling, vote shopping, voter fraud, and functionally perjurious misinformation on a more or less daily basis, or the mushrooming remainder of this Administration's male fides, what would it matter anyway with a Justice Department whose partisan purpose seems to be sneaking its Federal clients past the bar of justice and otherwise punishing their enemies wherever possible?

The most we can expect from this may be John Boehner scantily brushing up his conservative imposture (Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton seem politically untouchable in any event), Harry Reid hectoring us some more about the Koch brothers, and Nancy Pelosi moaning about the War on Women or whatever other spontaneous nonsense might spring from her political amygdala.

The thing about the broken-window syndrome is it progressively disorders the whole neighborhood until anomie rules its streets and its comity lies discarded in its gutters. The myriad windows now broken in our political neighborhood signal a growing disorder of governance whose unjustness may ultimately yield to little short of police-state intervention.  This is a serious prospect which an adult commonweal can neither long ignore nor willingly suffer.