Bizarre GOP attacks on Susan Rice begin to backfire

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Arizona's angry old man Sen. McNasty, Sen. John McCain, and his puppet boy sidekick Sen. Lindsey Graham, have been leading the bizzare GOP attacks on U.N. Secretary Susan Rice that began when Willard "Mittens" Romney attempted to politicize the attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, even before it was reported that U.N. Ambassador Christopher Stevens had been killed in the attack.

Wild ass conspiracy theories surrounding the attack in Benghazi have become a staple of FAUX News Fraudcasting and other purveyors of conspiracy theories in the right-wing noise machine since the attack.

As more information has become available, the wild ass conspiracy theories of FAUX News Fraudcasting and the right-wing noise machine have been refuted time and again. The whole right-wing conspiracy mongering over Benghazi has now been reduced to one of semantics: "spontaneous" and "al Qaida."

That's because they were local Jihadists, you idiots, NOT al Qaida, as the New York Times reported at the time of the attack, Election-Year Stakes Overshadow Nuances of Benghazi Investigation – NYTimes.com, and confirmed by the Washington Post's national security pundit David ignatius. CIA documents supported Susan Rice’s description of Benghazi attacks.

These local Jihadists were opportunists who took advantage of protests in the Muslim world over the Internet video "Innocence ofMuslims" on September 11, 2012. It was NOT a well planned terrorist attack months in the making directed by al Qaida central in Pakistan to coincide with the anniversary of September 11, as right-wing conspiracy theorists badly want to believe. Opportunism by definition is "spontaneous."

The L.A. Times editorializes Fog of politics on Benghazi:

Some Republicans aren't giving up on the claim Mitt Romney floated in the second presidential debate: that the Obama administration, for political reasons, downplayed the possibility that the deadly attack on a U.S. facility in Libya in September was a well-planned terrorist operation.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has suggested that Susan Rice, the U.S. representative to the United Nations, is "not qualified" to serve as secretary of State because, in television interviews five days after the attack, she said that "the best assessment we have today" is that the attack in Benghazi began as a spontaneous response to earlier protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo related to the video "Innocence of Muslims."

* * *

It's now clear that Rice's comments in several TV interviews on Sept. 16 faithfully tracked "talking points" that were assembled by intelligence officials and only slightly edited by the White House and State Department. (A reference to the Benghazi site changed from "consulate" to "diplomatic facility," hardly evidence of a political cover-up.) The talking points said that there were indications that "extremists participated in the violent demonstration," which "evolved into a direct assault." But they didn't indicate that officials had begun to suspect that groups affiliated with or modeled on Al Qaeda were involved.

Should the talking points have included that information? Perhaps, but in her appearance on "Face the Nation," Rice did say that "it's clear that there were extremist elements that joined in and escalated the violence. Whether they were Al Qaeda affiliates, whether they were Libyan-based extremists or Al Qaeda itself, I think is one of the things we'll have to determine."

Both Rice's comments and the talking points on which they were based apparently erred in portraying the attack in Benghazi as a spontaneous reaction to the protests in Cairo. [Not according to reporting by the New York Times reporters on the ground in Benghazi.] But the charge that she knowingly misled her interviewers or the country is, as President Obama rightly said at his news conference last week, outrageous and utterly unsupported by any evidence.

On Sunday's "Face the Nation," McCain suggested that Rice might return to his good graces "by publicly coming back on this show and saying, 'I was wrong, I gave the wrong information on your show some several weeks ago.' That might be a beginning." No, the beginning would be for the senator to apologize to the ambassador.

And then McCain should apologize to the American people for his unacceptable and outrageous behavior and resign from office. If someone is "not qualified" to serve because they said something not entirely accurate on the Sunday morning bobblehead shows, Sen. McCain is the world record holder for inaccurate and misleading statements on these programs — pot meet kettle. Rachel Maddow has destroyed Sen. McCain in two segments this week detailing McCain's penchant for inaccurate, misleading and outright false statements on the Sunday morning bobblehead shows.

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The Washington Post editorializes today that the GOP shows a blatant disregard for the facts in The GOP's bizarre attack on Susan Rice:

SINCE THE Senate is solely responsible for the confirmation of
Cabinet officers, it’s not often that members of the House of
Representatives jump into a debate about the nomination of a secretary
of state — particularly before there has been a nomination. That’s one
of the reasons a letter sent to President Obama
this week by 97 House Republicans [Note: includes Arizona congressmen Paul Gosar, David Schweikert and, of course, Trent Franks], challenging his potential choice of
U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for the State Department job, is remarkable.

Another is blatant disregard of established facts. Drawn up by Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), the letter alleges
that “Ambassador Rice is widely viewed as having either willfully or
incompetently misled the American public” about the Sept. 11 attack on
the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. But as congressional testimony
has established, Ms. Rice’s comments on several Sunday television talk
shows on Sept. 16 were based on talking points
drawn up by the intelligence community. She was acting as an
administration spokeswoman; there was nothing either incompetent or
deliberately misleading about the way she presented the information she
was given.

* * *

But if there was a White House conspiracy to cover up the truth,
Republicans have yet to produce any evidence of it — much less a
connection to Ms. Rice, who had no involvement with the Benghazi attack
other than those television appearances.

Nor was her account of
what happened as far off the mark as Republicans claim. Though
investigations are not complete, what has emerged so far suggests that
the attack was staged by local jihadists, not ordered by the al-Qaeda
leadership in Pakistan. Officials believe that it was inspired in part
by demonstrations that took place that day in Cairo. That is not so far
from Ms. Rice’s explanation that “this began as a spontaneous . . .
response to what transpired in Cairo.” Republicans claim that Ms. Rice
“propagated a falsehood” that the attacks were connected to an
anti-Islam YouTube video. How then to explain the contemporaneous
reports from Western news organizations quoting people at the burning
consulate saying that they were angry about the video? [see Election-Year Stakes Overshadow Nuances of Benghazi Investigation – NYTimes.com]

The oddity
of the Republican response to what happened in Benghazi is partly this
focus on half-baked conspiracy theories rather than on the real evidence
of failures by the State Department, Pentagon and CIA in protecting the
Benghazi mission. What’s even stranger is the singling out of Ms. Rice,
a Rhodes scholar and seasoned policymaker who, whatever her failings,
is no one’s fool.

Could it be, as members of the Congressional
Black Caucus are charging [see Dozen House women angrily defend Rice on Libya, suggest GOP attack racist, sexist], that the signatories of the letter are
targeting Ms. Rice because she is an African American woman? The
signatories deny that, and we can’t know their hearts. What we do know
is that more than 80 of the signatories are white males, and nearly half
are from states of the former Confederacy. You’d think that before
launching their broadside, members of Congress would have taken care not
to propagate any falsehoods of their own.

Ah, but that's not how GOPropaganda works in their alternate reality world.

UPDATE: Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina told POLITICO:

“To call her incompetent, a Ph.D., Rhodes scholar being called incompetent
by someone who can’t hold a candle to her intellectually, by someone who
said — and Sen. McCain called her incompetent, as well — but he told us
that Sarah Palin was a very competent person to be the vice president
of the United States,” Clyburn (D-S.C.) said on CNN’s “Starting Point.”
“That ought to tell you a little bit about his judgment.”

* * *

“You know, these are code words,” he said. “We heard them during the
campaign … These kinds of terms that those of us, especially those of us
who were born and raised in the South, we would hear these little words
and phrases all of our lives and we’d get insulted by them. Susan Rice
is as competent as anybody you will find.”

UPDATE: Words of wisdom from McCain's old media villager buddy Joe Klein:

"[H]e's now a political caricature, severely
debilitated by anger and envy. His trigger-happy foreign policy beliefs
have always been questionable, but this Benghazi crusade has put in the
weird circle inhabited by nutcases and conspiracy theorists like Michele
Bachmann and Allen West. He should honor the memory of those who lost
their lives that terrible night by putting a cork in his disgraceful
behavior immediately."