Desperate contest.

The defense secretary and the secretary of state were each eager to out-deplore, out-lament and out-bewail the other, playing for the cameras a ferocious game of “can you top this?” Mr. Panetta said what the Marines did was “utterly deplorable.” It’s hard to get beyond “utterly,” but Mrs. Clinton called in her crack linguistics team at the State Department—where plain speech is utterly frowned on—and she soon pronounced herself in “total dismay” on hearing the news, and was sure that the “vast, vast” majority of “American military personnel” would never, ever do what those awful Marines did.

"Total dismay"? Total dismay is what you experience when you come home and find a burning 747 where your home, wife, and children used to be.

Or when a cryptomuslim who traveled to Pakistan as a youth on a passport yet to be identified, had an undercover communist operative as his mentor, kicked off his campaign for the Illinois senate in the living room of two communist terrorists, had a 20-year relationship with a Farrakhan-worshipping pastor who calls on God to damn America, has a forged birth certificate, and won't salute when the national anthem is played gets elected to the presidency.

THAT, Muchachos, is @#$%g total dismay.

The Honorable H.R. Clinton, however, would be "totally dismayed" if she broke a fingernail or her soup was cold.

"Another grovel, not a rebuke." By Wesley Pruden, Washington Times, 1/17/12.