Hillary Clinton's Benghazi testimony, in all its layered meaning, overpowers cogent analysis and even neutral description. It was unsettling, strange, riveting—and without any true precedent: A front-runner for her party's presidential nomination, and the first woman ever to be a serious contender for the job, interrogated, often with unconcealed hostility, for the better part of a day, with breaks for in-studio score-keeping, followed by postmortems, and spin on all sides. Even as committee Republicans took hard hits—"disturbing" (David Gergen on CNN), gripped in "psychosis" (David Brooks on PBS NewsHour)—conservatives dug in: "Hillary Clinton is corrupt, and vomits up lies," Mark Steyn said on Hugh Hewitt's radio program.

 "You can hear the contempt in her voice when she answers questions, she believes she is above questioning."

Either way, it has been Hillary Clinton's most vivid and accomplished public moment, eclipsing her solid performance in the first debate. Great politicians, Murray Kempton once observed, "are capable of as many roles as there are sins to commit." Hillary proved herself the Mirren or Streep of the political witness stand—cast as defendant, an all-too familiar role in our politics. After so many years, both Clintons evoke many feelings, but the strongest is of déjà vu. And in Hillary's case each new controversy or scandal or pseudo-scandal—we're never sure— arrives trailing gusts of previous ones. We—and she—have been here before. Nothing about the Benghazi theater was routine, but it was familiar nevertheless. She brought along her troupe as well. There was David Kendall, the Washington lawyer whose collaboration dates back to the Whitewater investigations, seated behind her in the hearing room, impassive as ever. And there was Sidney Blumenthal, Hillary's voluble e-mail buddy, not seen but quoted with almost comical zeal by Trey Gowdy and company.