Listening
to John McCain and that little, whiny twerp, Lindsey Graham, drives me right up
the wall. McCain doesn’t make any sense at all. Both of them are acting like
junior-high-schoolers rather than U.S. Senators.
by Charlie
Leck
I suppose the
last thing in the world I should be worried about right now – what with the
devastating war breaking out between Israel and the rest of the Middle East –
is John McCain’s very petty criticism of our UN Secretary, Susan Rice. Yet, I
hate bullies and McCain is acting like a petty and deranged bully right now.
“They should
come after me,” the President challenged them in his news conference yesterday.
No, that would
be too tough a target. McCain and Graham will stick to challenging the nice
lady – as bullies often do. The two Senators – who are both too big for their
britches and too light in the brain department – are complaining that Susan Rice’s
statement at the United Nations after the tragic attack on our embassy in
Benghazi was untruthful and misleading. In point of fact (something McCain
cares little about), Ambassador Rice was restating information that had been
provided to her by the State Department. Ms. Rice, like many other government
officials, said that the attack was in response to an amateur film about the
Prophet Muhammad that had gone quite viral. That was the standard response from
the government for nearly the first 24 hours after the attack. It was at about
that 24 hour point that more reasonable explanations began to emerge –
specifically that the attack was a direct and planned attack by terrorists on
the Embassy proper and its personnel. The terror plot used an upheaval about
the film as protective cover.
McCain’s charge
is that Ms. Rice purposefully misled the American people!
Oh, my! How
short do McCain and Graham think our memory is, anyway? If you’ll remember, it
was President George W. Bush’s Secretary of State, who argued in 2005 that we
had to advance a war again Iraq because of that nation’s possession of weapons
of mass destruction. There were never any found. The claim was bogus. Senator
Lindsay Graham was one of Secretary Condoleezza Rice’s biggest supporters and
defenders. In fact, Secretary Rice was merely reporting on intelligence
information provided her much as Ambassador Rice was in the case of the
Benghazi violence.
In fact,
if you carefully read
the transcript of the announcement that McCain and Graham are talking about –
on Bob Schieffer’s Face the Nation show
– you’ll find just how straightforward and honest Ambassador Susan Rice really
was. At one point, she said this…
SUSAN RICE: Well, Bob, let me tell you what
we understand to be the assessment at present. First of all, very importantly,
as you discussed with the president, there is an investigation that the United
States government will launch, led by the FBI that has begun.
SCHIEFFER: But they are not there yet.
RICE: They are not on the ground yet but they have
already begun looking at all sorts of evidence of various sorts already available
to them and to us. And they will get on the ground and continue the
investigation.
So we'll want to see the results of that investigation to draw any
definitive conclusions. But based on the best information we have to date, what
our assessment is as of the present is in fact what — it began spontaneously in
Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo,
where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our
embassy sparked by this hateful video.
But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in
Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined
in that effort with heavy weapons of the sort that are, unfortunately, readily
now available in Libya post- revolution. And that it spun from there into
something much, much more violent.
SCHIEFFER: But you do not agree with him
that this was something that had been plotted out several months ago?
RICE: We do not — we do not have information at present
that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.
Now, if you want
to waste money on a special congressional investigation based on that clear
statement, you are truly out of your frigging mind – as per Senator McCain.
UPDATE (16 November 2012, 5:41 PM CST): Rachel Maddow’s
blog of 16 November, Spontaneously Inspired, does a great job of explaining the
time sequence here; and, after this extraordinary outline of the events, it
leaves John McCain with egg on his face, a rather frequent happening, and I
imagine he is now going to keep his big trap closed (but, of course, he is
awfully like Rush Limbaugh and probably won’t learn a thing from this). Read
this short blog by Rachel and you’ll get a very clear picture of what Ms.
Rice said what she did when she did!
I can't imagine that McCain will keep up his demands to have Ms. Rice testify before Congress.
___________________
Just for the record,
Susan
Rice is a brilliant and highly regarded graduate of Stanford University, from
which she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in
1986. She attended New College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar and received both a
Masters Degree and doctorate in philosophy. In the early 90s she worked for McKinsey
& Company, a global management firm, in their Toronto office. She served in
the Clinton administration from 1993 to 1997. Rice has been closely mentored by
former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. She joined the Brookings
Institute in 2000 and worked there until she went to work in the Obama
administration in 2008. She was nominated as U.N. Secretary on December 1,
2008. Obama upgraded the position to a cabinet level. She serves on many
distinguished boards and among them is a directorship with the Bureau of
National Affairs (Bloomberg BNA) a wonderful company for which I once toiled.
_________________________
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