Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Tossing Susan Rice Under The Bus

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Trying to make some sense of the Susan Rice fiasco is like trying to make some sense of how the most incompetent and the most corrupt presidential candidate in American history managed to get himself reelected. It probably can’t be done. But, just for the sake of argument, it might be interesting to engage in a bit of conjecture about how Susan Rice got picked to go under the bus.

First some background. On Sunday morning, September 16, five days after an Islamic terrorist group, Ansar al Sharia, attacked the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, killing U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, Barack Obama sent U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to appear on all five Sunday morning network talk shows. Rushing from one broadcast studio to the next, Rice appeared on ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, CNN’s State of the Union, Fox’s Fox News Sunday, and NBC’s Meet the Press, and all within a time span of just two hours.

The tale that Rice told at each stop was typical of what she stated on ABC’s This Week, where she said, “Our current best assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous – not a premeditated – response to what had transpired in Cairo… In Cairo, as you know, a few hours earlier, there was a violent protest that was undertaken in reaction to this very offensive video that was disseminated. We believe that folks in Benghazi, a small number of people came to the embassy to – or to the consulate, rather – to replicate the sort of challenge that was posed in Cairo. And then as that unfolded, it seems to have been hijacked, let us say, by some individual clusters of extremists who came with heavier weapons… And it then evolved from there.”

So the question arises… and persists… why was the U.N. Ambassador chosen to deliver such a whopper to the American people when, in fact, she had no connection to and no responsibility for the consulate in Benghazi?

The most logical pecking order of people who should have been called upon to answer for what happened at Benghazi is, in order of importance: Barack Obama, President and Commander in Chief; Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State; Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense; General James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence; Michael Morrell, Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; Tom Donilon, National Security Advisor; and General David Petraeus, former Director of Central Intelligence.

As the principal architect and political beneficiary of the Benghazi fable, Barack Obama was not about to go on record as the bearer of what everyone would soon know was a false narrative. But because he had hopes of explaining away the Benghazi terror attack in a way that would not damage his “al-Qaeda-is-on-its-heels” narrative two months before the November election, he had to have a patsy to carry his tale to the American people who was not only credible, but also expendable. The one person who fit that description was U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. And who is the only person who could make that decision, and who is the only person who could tell her exactly what to do and what to say? Ambassador Rice is not in Hillary Clinton’s chain of command, so the order could have come from only one person: that would be Barack Obama.

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