Betcha the White House wouldn’t have made this regrettably necessary if Susan Rice was a white dude:
Video of @chucktodd reporting the White House’s “swift boat” Bergdahl comment at @FreeBeacon –> http://t.co/Nnp5UhPCuf
— Cuffé (@CuffyMeh) June 4, 2014
It’s very much a bro-ganization over there these days, huh?
Via Ed Driscoll comes something I hadn’t considered: Susan Rice as National Security Advisor means that Barack Obama thinks that he can claim executive privilege to keep her from testifying.
A Google News search on [“Susan Rice” “executive privilege”] (typed exactly as indicated between brackets) returns two stories. The main one is at Fox News, where K.T. McFarland pointed out that President Obama, now that he has appointed Susan Rice to be his National Security Adviser, can invoke executive privilege to keep her from testifying before Congress. The second is at Mediate, and notes that McFarland said the same thing to Fox News Channel anchor Martha MacCallum earlier today.
So I think that we have established here that the President is hiding something about Benghazi; we’re now just trying to figure out what Barack Obama is hiding*.
Continue reading Barack Obama unilaterally tries to recuse Susan Rice from #Benghazi testimony.
[UPDATE] It may be – probably is, in fact – that it’s the Hagel attackers who are cutting ads, not his defenders. It still looks like the Administration is going to bat for Hagel, though. Gay-baiting, and all.
Isn’t it amazing that Obama would do this for Chuck Hagel, and not, say, UN Ambassador Susan Rice? From Politico:
In an unusual move designed to deflate another public strafing like the one that wounded Susan Rice, the Obama administration is coming to the defense of a potential nominee who has not yet been chosen: former Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Republican who is the leading candidate to succeed Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, did not get a swift defense from a network of supporters around Washington when she came under fire for her initial comments about the attack in Benghazi. Hagel allies, however, are jumping to his defense at a time when critics, especially strong supporters of Israel, are attacking him on the Hill, in the press and — beginning today — in ads on cable-news stations.
Wow? TV ads? Susan Rice never got the administration to cut TV ads for her, I think. Then again, Susan Rice did make the apparently career-fatal miscalculation of being born without a penis. And to non-white parents. And apparently she didn’t slam Israel nearly often enough. So I guess that it’s really her fault that Obama hung her out to dry, then?
Moe Lane
*…Sorta kinda not really no, actually, you can have him.
To sum up Breitbart (by way of Hot Air): Susan Rice’s partisans are pretty much infuriated at… somebody. Take your pick: John Kerry’s partisans; the Republican party; the Obama White House; or all of the above. Said Rice partisans feel that Ambassador Rice was chopped off at the knees (she was) by the administration over Benghazi (it did) unfairly (actually, no, it was eminently fair)… they’re also not very happy about the fact that apparently the GOP has collectively made the cold calculation that freeing up John Kerry’s Senate seat is worth letting John Kerry be Secretary of State for a couple of years*.
I know. How dare we. Continue reading Faction squabbles in the Obama White House.
Not much point, though: everybody else has already. Honestly, this one was doomed the second it got really established that she was on the wrong rhetorical side in the Rwandan Genocide (i.e., the side that didn’t care). A good rule of thumb here is, The American people may not pay attention to policy, but they do pay attention to movies. And they kind of paid attention to Hotel Rwanda (“That was the flick about that guy who had to save all those people from getting killed because the UN ran away”).
Just the way it goes.
Frank Fleming, on the Susan Rice pushback:
I thought it was common knowledge that people who are good at things get jobs in the private sector, and those who are ambitious but not particularly useful find jobs in politics. So our expectations are similar to when we give small tasks to toddlers: As long as they don’t screw things up too badly, we consider them successes.
Frank is cruel. And undiplomatic.
Via Instapundit.
…And, well, there’s a lot, really.
Well, well, well. It turns out that UN Ambassador and prospective Secretary of State nominee Susan Rice (she’s a multimillionaire, by the way) has some rather interesting financial ties to numerous foreign energy companies that still do business with that oppressive, misogynistic, homophobic, and downright barking mad insane regime currently controlling Iran. The most interesting one of those is Royal Dutch Shell, which has about a billion dollars’ worth of interest (literally) in getting Iran’s sanctions lifted; Rice has also invested in at least two other companies that are operating in Iran against the wishes of pretty much most of the West.
Hmm. Let’s scroll through some of her other investments:
Continue reading Susan Rice’s Iranian oil connection? …And Canadian oil connection?
He’s not really down on her being the next Secretary of State.
Even in a town that rewards sharp elbows and brusque personalities, Rice has managed to make an impressive array of enemies — on Capitol Hill, in Foggy Bottom and abroad. Particularly in comparison with the other person often mentioned for the job, Sen. John Kerry, she can be a most undiplomatic diplomat, and there likely aren’t enough Republican or Democratic votes in the Senate to confirm her.
That paragraph, by the way, is Establishment DC for You can go ahead and torpedo this nomination, guys: we won’t give you too much of a hard time for it. Makes you wonder what Susan Rice has done to the media…
…there are other issues with Rice’s record, both as U.N. ambassador and earlier as a senior Clinton administration official, that are all but certain to come out at any confirmation hearing, many of them concerning her performance in Africa. Critics say that since her failure to advocate an intervention in the terrible genocide in Rwanda in 1994 — Bill Clinton later said his administration’s unwillingness to act was the worst mistake of his presidency — she has conducted a dubious and naïve policy of looking the other way at allies who commit atrocities, reflecting to some degree the stark and emotionless realpolitik sometimes associated with Obama, who is traveling this week to another formerly isolated dictatorship: Burma.
Most recently, critics say, Rice held up publication of a U.N. report that concluded that the government of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, with whom she has a long and close relationship, was supplying and financing a brutal Congolese rebel force known as the M23 Movement. M23’s leader, Bosco Ntaganda, is wanted by the International Criminal Court for recruiting child soldiers and is accused of committing atrocities. She has even wrangled with Johnnie Carson, the assistant secretary of State for the Bureau of African Affairs, and others in the department, who all have been more critical of the Rwandans, according to some human-rights activists who speak with State’s Africa team frequently.
Continue reading …Susan Rice has a habit of being chummy with Congolese, Rwandan strongmen?
Who.
Was.
It?
Let me summarize this bombshell from the Daily Beast – and yes, the term ‘bombshell’ qualifies:
Within 24 hours of the 9-11 anniversary attack on the United States consulate in Benghazi, U.S. intelligence agencies had strong indications al Qaeda–affiliated operatives were behind the attack, and had even pinpointed the location of one of those attackers. Three separate U.S. intelligence officials who spoke to The Daily Beast said the early information was enough to show that the attack was planned and the work of al Qaeda affiliates operating in Eastern Libya.
If this is true, then one of two things happened: either UN Ambassador Susan Rice lied to the American people the Sunday after the attack… Continue reading #rsrh *Somebody* in this adminstration lied to the American people about the Libyan Embassy attack.