One week before the 2012 election, as it stood apparent that President Obama would easily defeat challenger Mitt Romney, I wrote a column cautioning that re-election would not insulate the Obama administration from accountability for the massacre in Benghazi two months earlier.

Then in May of last year, I wrote a column insisting that Congress must establish a Watergate-style joint committee to investigate the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans working for the State Department in Libya. I said then that it had long been plain that forces in the government — the U.S. government, not the Libyan government — were dissembling about what took place on Sept. 11, 2012, and that both the media and the public were complicit in allowing the government to get away with its multiple falsehoods.

Having witnessed the Watergate hearings as a teenager, I also knew that good men in the government had the capacity to right the worst wrongs done in the name of “we the people,” and so I pleaded for honesty, accountability and a fair reckoning.

“Just like a jury, the select committee must hear all the evidence and draw conclusions about why the full story about the terrorist attack in Benghazi has still not been told to the American people. Someone must be held responsible. It is not enough to just say mistakes were made.”

Those words haunt me now, because what, after all, has happened in the intervening seven months? Nothing more than just to say “mistakes were made.” Incredibly, it is almost as if Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been vindicated for her callous Senate testimony when she said, “What difference at this point does it make” why Ambassador Stevens and three others died.

Clearly, the only difference it could make is if there were going to be some kind of accountability, and plainly there is not.

This week, we got a “long-delayed” bipartisan Senate report on Benghazi, and as a measure of just how meaningless the report is, consider this: It does not even name Hillary Clinton, the Cabinet officer who was responsible for security in Benghazi and who helped shift the blame to a “spontaneous” protest over a YouTube video, which (we were told repeatedly) “just happened” to occur on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

This is a coverup in plain sight. The original phony story about Benghazi was put out two months before the presidential election, and it served its purpose by obfuscating and obscuring the truth long enough to ensure the re-election of Barack Obama.

Now, I suppose, the goal is to put the story to rest by acknowledging that “mistakes were made” without ever holding anyone truly responsible. That lets President Obama leave office without taking responsibility for the scandal, and just possibly opens the door for Hillary Clinton to attain the presidency by airbrushing her out of the picture.

The Associated Press article on the report noted that “the senators took the administration to task for failing to bring the attackers to justice more than a year after the attacks.”

That’s all well and good, but who is going to hold “the administration” responsible for its role in allowing the attacks to happen in the first place, and then covering up the truth thereafter? Who indeed. I am starting to think perhaps no one.

Obviously not the Senate. Not the House of Representatives. Not the media. Not the electorate. Nope, Benghazi just disappears into Orwell’s memory hole, never to be seen or heard from again.

When I was a kid growing up back in those halcyon Watergate days, there was a game show on TV that my grandmother used to like to watch. It was called “Truth or Consequences.” But the political game we are all watching these days is a spinoff called “No Truth and No Consequences.”

Welcome to 21st century America.