The Hearing

At the hearing, there were acute questions and ludicrous ones, genuine concern and disingenuous grandstanding, florid preening and runaway egos, which is to say that many politicians were crowded into one room. There was verbiage so oblique it barely qualified as English, which is to say that government officials testified. Front and center was the head of the Secret Service, Julia Pierson, who behaved in the manner of so many beleaguered bureaucrats before her. She pledged reviews, reports, inquiries and assessments — a brimming thesaurus of self-examination — and tried to run out the clock.

- re an enquiry into how a nutter got into the White House