"The GOP’s Absurd Attack on Susan Rice Over Benghazi" at the Daily Beast

[applegrove]

The GOP’s Absurd Attack on Susan Rice Over Benghazi

by Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/20/the-gop-s-absurd-attack-on-susan-rice-over-benghazi.html?obref=obinsite

"SNIP.............................................

There would seem to be little connection between Nate Silver and Susan Rice, but hear me out. The New York Times electoral savant was said to be “controversial.” No one adduced a lick of factual evidence for why he should have been thought to be so, but people on the right just didn’t like his electoral predictions, so they tried to make him controversial. With respect to Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, much the same is true. In reality land, she’s done nothing that ought to be considered all that controversial. But again, conservatives don’t like the outcome—Democrats having the upper hand on foreign policy and national security—so they’re trying to make her controversial.

.................

So Rice was just being a good team player. She said what she was told by intelligence agencies to say. If you look over her remarks, they were invariably carefully couched, to each host: “the best information we have at present,” she said to NBC’s David Gregory. So it was. As The Wall Street Journal and others have reported, the intel assessments were changing the day she was on those shows, but she didn’t yet know that.

..................


But most middle Americans recognize Benghazi for what it was—a terribly sad tragedy, but the kind of thing that, in a dangerous world, happens. And yes, many middle Americans would consider it a smudge on the administration’s security record, but most middle Americans also know that record is otherwise rather impressive. It seems to me someone just ran for president trying to argue otherwise, and he lost pretty handily.


And finally and maybe most of all, McCain and others are furious that the Republicans have lost their “natural” advantage on national-security issues. They are desperate to change that, and the quickest way to start doing so is to get Rice’s scalp.


.............................................SNIP"

[applegrove]

1. It is like the first hit in an ice covered puddle. That first hit

has to pierce a hole so that subsequent hits will break up the ice. If you don't manage a big hole in the ice, subsequent hits just leaves cracks in the ice, but it doesn't break up. This is the opening shot of the GOP trying to dismantle Obama's foreign policy supremacy. They've got to make this a hole in the narrative.

[kentuck]

2. They do it because they always do and they always have been able to get away with it.

Because the Democrats are too damn weak to stand up for her.

[applegrove]

3. To be fair Obama is probably up to his neck in fiscal cliff strategy and negotiations.

McCain has admitted he knows nothing about economics so he is free to attack Obama on foreign policy. I'm sure we will hear a more vigourous attack now that McCain has shown his true partisan colours. He's not a maverick; he's a hack.

[gulliver]

4. She should have left them dangling in the wind

Going to meet with the Republicans in private was a mistake. She should have met them on camera. I know she thought it would be a good way to clear the air, be mature, win people over, help them climb down and change their minds... But she didn't take into account that these are humiliated Republicans she is dealing with, and they don't back off.

Their response after the meeting was preordained. They pretended they saw reasons to believe what they pretend to believe, that Rice is somehow troubling. If the meeting were on camera, they would have been humiliated and kicked to the curb, either by Rice herself or by their own transparent fraudulence.

Rice tried to give them a break, and they used it to bite her. Republicans.