Are Washington Republicans Starting to Look a Little Desperate?

 

Instead of slinking off into a clandestine retreat with their party’s leadership to regroup after their November 6, 2012 thumping at the polls, John McCain and Lindsey Graham are looking foolish by continuing the right’s obsession with bringing down the Obama administration.

There have been several OS bloggers who have gone on record believing the President would meet his waterloo with Benghazi-gate.  The above-mentioned Senators have even called for a Watergate-like investigation of what caused the beleaguered U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to refrain from calling the incident a terrorist attack the Sunday after the U.S. consulate in Libya was attacked and four Americans were murdered.

Not that it will stop the Republican sour grapes any time soon, but this morning CNN reported that Ms. Rice’s talking points used on Meet the Press and several other Sunday morning talk shows had, in fact, been altered by the intelligence community before they were passed on to Ambassador Rice.  The version she was approved to use had been edited to delete any direct reference to al-Qaeda’s involvement in the tragedy.

In its report Monday night CNN stated:

The intelligence community - not the White House, State Department or Justice Department - was responsible for the substantive changes made to the talking points distributed for government officials who spoke publicly about the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, the spokesman for the director of national intelligence said Monday.

The unclassified talking points on Libya, developed several days after the the deadly attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, were not substantively changed by any agency outside of the intelligence community, according to the spokesman, Shawn Turner.

Susan Rice, who recently celebrated her 48th birthday, was asked to make the Benghazi presentations that Sunday because U.S. Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton was exhausted from a week of consoling families of the Americans who perished in the attack, according to the New York Times. 

Both John McCain and Lindsey Graham have gone before media microphones and declared Susan Rice unqualified to be considered for Mrs. Clinton’s replacement as Secretary of State.  Do they make that claim solely on the basis of what they have apparently misperceived as a cover up of the al-Qaeda involvement in the attack?  It seems so.  Otherwise, they are simply insane.

Susan Rice is a Rhodes Scholar who earned her undergraduate degree from Stanford University and did her graduate work at Oxford.  Despite her reputation for being somewhat blunt and maybe even officious --

“Susan had a reputation, fairly or not, as someone who could run a little hot and shoot from the hip,” said John Norris, a foreign-policy expert at the Center for American Progress. “If someone had told me that the biggest knock on her was going to be that she too slavishly followed the talking points on Benghazi, I would have been shocked.”

-- The New York Times has written that at the United Nations, and in posts in President Bill Clinton’s administration, Ms. Rice has earned a reputation as a blunt advocate, relentless on issues like pressing the government in Sudan or intervening in Libya to prevent a slaughter by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Is she “diplomatic” enough in her demeanor to handle the tricky details of communicating among leaders from all parts of the world?  That’s a question the President has undoubtedly entertained.  Whether he chooses Susan Rice or not, it appears the Republicans are going to have to get used to the idea that they lost the White House and find some of “the people’s work” to get busy on.  Fiscal cliff, anyone?