A tip of the Editor’s hat to Gretchen for the story.
Is Rice Cooked?
By MAUREEN DOWD | Published: November 17, 2012
(Washington) Our Rice is better than your Rice.
That’s the argument Democrats are aggressively making against Republicans.
And it’s true. Condi Rice sold her soul. Susan Rice merely rented hers on the talk shows one Sunday in September.
Ambitious to be secretary of state, Condi jilted her mentor, Brent Scowcroft, who publicly opposed the Iraq invasion. In 2002, she bolted to the winning, warmongering side with W., Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, helping them twist intelligence and getting Foggy Bottom in return.
Ambitious to be secretary of state, Susan Rice wanted to prove she had the gravitas for the job and help out the White House. So the ambassador to the United Nations agreed to a National Security Council request to go on all five Sunday shows to talk about the attack on the American consulate in Libya.
“She saw this as a great opportunity to go out and close the stature gap,” said one administration official. “She was focused on the performance, not the content. People said, ‘It’s sad because it was one of her best performances.’ But it’s not a movie, it’s the news. Everyone in politics thinks, you just get your good talking points and learn them and reiterate them on camera. But what if they’re not good talking points? What if what you’re saying isn’t true, even if you’re saying it well?”
As one would expect, Miss Dowd got her facts wrong. She wrote that President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld “twist(ed) intelligence” concerning possible weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as though it is some sort of established fact. As it happens, your Editor bought and reviewed the book by Valerie Plame Wilson, the exposed CIA operations officer, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, and in it noted that the CIA agent who had the greatest reason to hate President Bush and his Administration told the readers that in her branch, the Counterproliferation Division within the Directorate of Operations, the Agency believed that Iraq had WMD at the time.1
But Miss Dowd’s article gets more amusing as it goes forward. She had tried to claim that Dr Condoleezza Rice had “sold her soul” to obtain the job of being Secretary of State — ignoring the fact that she was already the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, a top-level job, that there were two more years left in President Bush’s first term, and that the then-current Secretary, Colin Powell, was not about to be fired — when it turns out that the President and his minions were busy hanging Ambassador Rice out to dry.
Some have wondered if Rice, who has a bull-in-a-china-shop reputation, is diplomatic enough for the top diplomatic job. But she would have been wise to be more bull-in-a-china-shop and vet her talking points, given that members of the intelligence and diplomatic communities and sources in news accounts considered it a terrorist attack days before Rice went on the shows. (The president and his spokesman also clung to the video story for too long.)
Rice should have been wary of a White House staff with a tendency to gild the lily, with her pal Valerie Jarrett and other staffers zealous about casting the president in a more flattering light, like national security officials filigreeing the story of the raid on Osama to say Bin Laden fought back. Did administration officials foolishly assume that if affiliates of Al Qaeda were to blame, it would dilute the credit the president got for decimating Al Qaeda? Were aides overeager to keep Mitt Romney, who had stumbled after the Benghazi attack by accusing the president of appeasing Islamic extremists, on the defensive?
The lovely Miss Dowd then tells us that the President has both harmed Ambassador Rice’s reputation, and may feel compelled to appoint her to succeed retiring Secretary Hillary Clinton, just to prove that he can’t be pushed around. “Their” Dr Rice would probably be better served if she declined such an appointment, because if John McCain and Lindsey Lohan Graham, two of the more centrist Republicans in the Senate, and members of the so-called “Gang of 14” are inclined to filibuster her nomination, she will not be confirmed.
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- This is documented extensively in the linked book review. ↩
The truth of this story has yet to be revealed, even after the testimony by Petraeus to Congress behind closed doors:
Therefore, jumping to conclusions by partisans is as yet unjustified by the facts, which remain obscure.
You ought to have noticed: it was a Democrat who claimed that “there was no politicization of the process, no White House interference or political agenda.”
Well, someone changed the story given to Ambassador Rice, and there sure weren’t any Republicans in a position to do so; perhaps you think it was possibly edited by gremlins?
Why, one wonders, would the facts “remain obscure” on this, if there really was no political agenda? The President has been re-elected, and that can’t be changed now, so why not just come out with the truth, in public, and get it over with, if there wasn’t something smarmy at the bottom, of it all?
Face facts: when even a liberal partisan like Maureen Dowd believes that Ambassador Rice was sandbagged by the White House, it isn’t just us wicked Republicans.
You, of course, believe anything good about the President because you want to believe everything good about the President. As far as I am concerned, he is a lying sack of [insert vulgar slang term for feces here], and this is just more evidence of it.
The election is over, President Obama won, and will never face the voters again; he can actually afford to tell the truth now. One wonders why he doesn’t.
Dictator Obama could come out and outright state he lied and WW would still blame the GOP somehow.
When Barack Obama and his WH team of unindicted co-conspirators cynically concluded that a coordinated PR campaign of lies and deceptions would succeed in passing off the preplanned and coordinated Islamic terrorist attack in Benghazi on 9/11, which resulted in the murder of a sitting US Ambassador and 3 others, as the inevitable result of an obscure and mysterious anti-Muslim video tape (at least, that is, till the elections were over) they committed a gross violation of the trust of the American people, and in the process disqualified themselves from holding high office, elected or appointed. Barack Obama arrogantly opened the door to his own impeachment trial.
Incarceration not Inauguration!
What, the god-king admit that he failed? or, worse yet, lied?? That will happen when the proverbial pigs start flying …
Maurine Dowd gives no credible evidence for her opinion, nor do you Mr Editor. Let us wait patiently for the partisan smoke to clear, before jumping once more to the version you prefer.
Here is where we are right now with this story, and with Representative Chaffetz’s (R-UT) unsubstantiated allegations: Two Pinocchios:
The FACT of the matter is that it was blatantly obvious that the attacks were terrorism — al Qaeda-inspired. Yet, the WHITE HOUSE insisted that the YouTube video be made the scapegoat. The White House.
The question is … why? We’ve yet to get any straight answers, and the “answer” that it “was the best intel we had at the time” is utter horse crap.
How very unfortunate for your excuse-making:
NBC has been in the Democrats’ pocket for decades, so when even NBC tells you that the President and his Administration were lying through their scummy teeth, you ought to believe it.
Of course, unless President Obama himself stood up and said, “Yeah, we lied, to protect the campaign,” you’d never believe it, and you might not even believe it then.
Even if “they kept their unclassified talking points for Rice vague to avoid compromising future legal proceedings,” why did they send Ambassador Rice out to tell the world that we did know what was going on, and that it was a reaction to some wicked ol’ filmmaker’s work? Why couldn’t they have said, “We aren’t certain yet” or “We don’t know for sure?” As I said before, as far as I am concerned, he is a lying sack of [insert vulgar slang term for feces here], and this is just more evidence of it.
That’s exactly what I don’t get, Editor. It would have been MUCH easier to just claim “We don’t know yet — we’re still looking at all the evidence” than to blame that silly video over and over and over again.
To any clear-thinking people, it’s obvious that Dictator Obama wanted to avoid ANY perception that his Libya policy was a shambles, and that al Qaeda isn’t exactly decimated.
Our Editor continues:
You’ve made your belief crystal clear, Mr Editor, as you attempt to express your ideological impulses and post-election emotions.
The NBC quote you posted indicates that there may have been strategic reasons for the way the administration (and Ambassador Rice) handled this Benghazi disaster. Moreover, it is a fact that Candidate Romney intended to make a political issue out of this incident well before any more than the first sketchy details were known, and Republican opponents of the administration have continued to expand/politicize this issue, without all the pertinent facts being known.
Here is what a prominent House Republican said on Meet the Press this past Sunday:
I understand that you deeply distrust and probably even hate President Obama, but that does not give you license to substitute ideologically based fantasy for the facts, before said facts have been made public!
Uh huh. I recall similar things being said about President Nixon.
Perry, the facts are these: Either the administration is grossly incompetent, such that one hand didn’t know what the other was doing, and this went on for weeks, or someone was lying. Either they knew it was the video (which it clearly was not) and they didn’t know better, or they made the whole thing up.
Also, there are the free speech implications of this. To appease radical Muslims, they threw an innocent filmmaker under the bus (and in jail) just because he had bad taste. What happened to the old liberal principle of “I may hate what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it”?
Eric, you are speculating without additional facts. House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers (R-MI) refrained from doing what you just did. Who is the more credible?
WW, every time you try to make excuses for the Obumble Administration, the news cycle advances and drags your excuses through the toilet. In your zeal to defend our indefensible President, your memes keep failing.
No, Perry, I just laid out the facts. Either it was incompetence, or someone lied. Take your pick.
Precisely! If the admin was so zealous not to jump to conclusions, why the haste in blaming a video which in no way was to blame??
CBS story is questioned:
And, BTW, if “reliance on the intelligence at the time” is Perry’s standard, it’s ironic (no, not really) that this standard did not exist when George W. Bush relied on “the intelligence at the time” to justify his invasion of Iraq. Indeed, in that case, President Bush was LYING!!!!!
The Dims have deemed anything said about Susan Rice is RACIST. MLK said to judge by the content of their charater, not by the color of their skin 40 years ago. Today’s Dims say any comment about a person of color is racist. Just ask Debbie Does the DNC about it.
So by process of elimination, according to Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss, it was the WH which changed the talking points. No competent lawyer would ever make such a conclusion by process of elimination. This is not evidence, except to a nasty ideologue.
In addition to Ambassador Stevens and his companions who lost their lives in this disaster, the other victim, made so by rabid Republican idiots, ends up being UN Ambassador Susan Rice, who merely went forward with the information she was given by our intelligence people.
I’m looking for an apology from Republicans, especially John McCain and Lindsey Graham.
And by the way, James Clapper is not the White House!
The bottom line to date is that
Yes, considering how much “sense” you were making, not to mention outright ignoring the very legitimate questions posed above, your ending line perfectly encapsulates your thinking processes: ceasing in mid-function.
You always look for such. And never offer any of your own.
WW wrote:
Actually, any competent attorney would make such an argument. The information given to Ambassador Rice was changed, and only a limited number of people could have changed it. Senator Chambliss noted that everyone who was in a position to have made the changes was there, testifying, with the exception of White House staff.
So, who did deceive Ambassador Rice? (And yes, deceive is exactly the right term.) Directors Petraeus and Clapper both testified, under oath, that they did not. The Secretary of State wisely stayed away. Either one of the Directors perjured himself, someone high up in the White House made the changes, or somehow gremlins sneaked in and did it.
There are your three possibilities; there really are no others. At this point, you have to be in denial to defend the White House on this one. And the truly sad part is that you know it just as well as Eric does, just as well as I do.
This is the most hilarious thing I’ve seen yet. Susan Rice wasn’t given false information by the Republicans, and Susan Rice didn’t go out and spread the Administration line at the behest of Mitt Romney or Mitch McConnell. Ambassador Rice was put on the firing line by the Obama Administration, quite deliberately, and then given a false story to tell everybody who watched. The people who victimized Ambassador Rice were the people who set her up with a knowingly false narrative.
Your position is ridiculous. Susan Rice was sent out to deliver the Administration’s story, she was deliberately given a lie to tell, and you are blaming not the people who lied to her, but the people who caught the fact that her story was a lie.
What difference does it make what Progressive changed the wording. All you need to know is bimBO is Terror adverse. Remember, he got Bin Laying, therefore the man made disaster is over. No amount of proof is accepted that terrorism still exists, and bimBO is in total denial. But then again everyone who voted for him, and every mechanic that rigged a ballot machine for him is in denial too.
No Mr Editor. What is ridiculous is the behavior of your side of the aisle on this issue, beginning with Candidate Romney’s decision to politicize the event before any significant information was available. You’ve made fools of yourselves. Well it backfired, all the way down to John McCain’s and Lindsey Graham’s vilification of Susan Rice, the messenger. But this is what you people do, such that a majority of American voters have rejected your approach. You folks have yet to learn that lesson. Let us now see what you do about the fiscal cliff, taxes, and crazy Grover Norquist.
Wagonwheel wrote:
So, when it was pointed out that your position, that we somehow don’t know that Ambassador Rice was lied to by the White House, was ridiculous, you change the subject.
Of course, it turns out that we were right: since the events, we have learned that top military officials were watching, in real time, and did nothing. Since the incident, we’ve learned that the CIA knew, virtually immediately, that it wasn’t some sort of demonstration run amok, but a planned terrorist strike. Since the incident, we’ve learned that the high-ranking dupe sent forth by the Obama Administration to tell the story was deliberately deceived.
But, it certainly worked for just as long as it needed to work, until after the election. The American people were lied to, and, unfortunately, the lie worked.
So, what of the participants? Secretary of State Clinton? Retiring. Secretary of Defense Panetta? Retiring. General Carter Ham? His relief named early, and, not being appointed to another O-10 position, forced to retire. Director Petraeus? Resigned. Only the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will remain in his position for any length of time, and I’d bet that, rather than the traditional re-appointment to a second two-year term, he’ll be retired as well.
The only one of the participants remaining? President Obama. Kind of amazing when you think about it.
That’s all Perry has left, Editor.
Notice that Perry continues to avoid what has been asked/brought up in this thread:
1) Who, exactly, told Ms. Rice (and everyone else who claimed it) that the YouTube video was to blame for the attacks?
2) If “terrorism” wasn’t used because we “were waiting” until all the intel was in, then why — again — was the YouTube vid so quickly blamed?
3) For Perry, Obama et. al. made statements and acted “based on what the intel agencies told them.” Of course, when the previous administration did just this, Perry and other radicals the country-over claimed that the president was lying.
Instead, we read the GOP’s behavior has been “ridiculous,” and have been “made fools.”
Let’s face it: Had Dictator Obama admitted from the start that this was an al-Qaeda-inspired attack, he would have opened himself up to a potential political attack from Romney that the president’s claims about al-Qaeda “being on the run” and “decimated” weren’t entirely true. That, and an attack on his “budding democracy in Libya.” However, it is highly doubtful this line of attack would have made much headway. Americans recognize that we’re in this “war” against radical Islam for the long haul. There would have little political danger in stating exactly what took place in Libya; indeed, had Obama reacted more forcefully in response to what really took place, and admitted precisely what occurred, he’d have no hassles now. The American people aren’t going to blame an administration for a radical group’s attack (see as far back as Reagan and Beirut), but they can smell bullsh** a mile away.
Is it not about time that we deal with the truth, instead of the fictions that the right-wing media, press, and blogosphere are intent on screaming and yelling?
From the LA Times:
The facts, to the extent that they are known, do not warrant outrageous statements like this from our Editor, similar to those of Senators McCain and Graham:
No, we weren’t “lied” to by the White House, and Ambassador Rice is not a “dupe”. But this is your narrative, in black and white, and you’re committed to stick to it regardless of the facts as they become available. Your comments say more about you than they do about the WH or Ambassador Rice, and it is not very honorable looking at this point in time.
Indeed! And the questions/points continue to remain unanswered. Why is this, Perry? Why do you refuse to address them? It apparently must be repeated time and time and time again (just like previously posted cites, it seems):
Quit offering excuses and obuscations, Perry. And quit pretending that Susan Rice is a poor, innocent “Victim” in all of this. She’s an adult woman in a high level government job, quite ambitious by reports and eager for an even higher level government job, Secretary of State. She can stand on her own, thank you very much, which means she should take full responsibility for her role in this affair.
The facts are obvious. She and the Obama Admin peddled a lie about the Libya attack. The lie was about the video and they continued to peddle it for weeks, including Obama at the UN, even long after they knew (or should have known) that it was a terrorist attack. The question on the table is – why did they lie, and for so long? Neither you nor any of your left wing cohorts has an answer to that.
Citation please, because your opinion cannot be trusted, Eric! I’ve already provided credible citations.
Rice lied her ass off to get Obama past the election. She knew exactly what she was doing and she knew it would probably blow-up in her face, but she did it anyway because Obama needed cover.
He was desperate, Hillary wouldn’t take the fall for him and he couldn’t face the voters with the blood of 4 dead Americans on his hands. He had arrogantly refused to authorize the use of military force to rescue the Americans trapped in Benghazi, and everyone in the Situation Room knew it.
So, like a loyal partisan Susan Rice exchanged her integrity for the promise of the appointment to head the State Department. Hillary was finished and the job would be open soon anyway. With Obama’s back against the wall, Rice might have even got it in writing.
Now, if people would just stop asking silly questions and move on.
No you haven’t. Your citations fail to ask/note just what Editor and myself have asked about — namely WHY was the YouTube video immediately (and constantly) blamed if “the intel was still coming in” and more importantly: WHO made the YouTube vid the “culprit?”
So stop with the BS and address these questions. Otherwise, you’re just boring the hell out of us.
WW wrote:
OK, here are the facts, which even Wagonwheel cannot deny:
Ambassador Rice presented the Administration line, which the President and his minions knew to be false. This leaves two, and only two, possibilities:
So, was she a dupe, or was she a liar? Pick one, or pick the other, but there is no third alternative.
On a related issue, Senator John McCain had the following to say: