The Anger Blog, Double Standard on Nominating Rice

Double Standard on Nominating Rice. Senate Republicans are once again showing us that they are still the party of obstructionism and hypocrisy. Has anyone told them that President Obama won the election? Before he has even had a chance to nominate a replacement for the Secretary of State position that will be vacated by Hillary Clinton, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham took to the warpath. Firing off a pre-emptory warning, they gave notice that, if the President was thinking of nominating U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to become Secretary of State, they would go to hell and back to keep this from happening. Their rationale for blocking her nomination was that she gave misleading statements regarding the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya on September 11th of this year. Rice, however, was only the spokesperson for the administration and was reiterating information given to her by the Central Intelligence Agency. Senator McCain even has the audacity to question her competence. This casting of doubt on her judgment coming from someone who picked Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate seemed ludicrous and extremely ironic to me.

Susan Rice was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University from which she holds a Ph.D. in International Affairs. And her credibility goes a long way beyond her educational training and includes such noteworthy associations as the Brookings Institute and Stanford University Medical School. What really angers me, though, is that these attacks on Ambassador Rice for 'misleading' the American public are being waged by the same Republicans who wholeheartedly endorsed Condoleeza Rice for Secretary of State during the George W. Bush administration. You might recall that she was fear mongering to the world about Iraq's having nuclear capabilities, as she warned of a "mushroom cloud."

When confronted with this hypocrisy, the GOP response was that most other countries believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction too. According to this kind of logic, it must be acceptable to distribute incorrect information, if other powers share your belief. The whole thing seems like a double standard to me.

Why are the same Republicans who simply overlooked misleading statements of Condoleeza Rice now demanding that the Obama administration give a full accounting of the Libyan incident within hours of the event? Are they willing just to say "to hell with" the sensitive matters of national security? During the eight years George W. Bush was President, almost any request for information was denied, because (as they alleged) they didn't want to compromise our national security.

Let's compare the two (Libya, 9-11-2012 and NYC/DC/PA, 9-11-2001) and try to determine if Senators McCain and Graham have a double standard when it comes to selecting a Secretary of State. Libya, 4 killed, UN Ambassador Susan Rice reports information provided by CIA after attack. NYC, 3000 killed, National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice had prior information in a report that terrorists planned to fly airplanes into buildings in NYC.

So you could say that the events that took place on 9-11-2001 may have been prevented if National Security Advisor Rice had handled her job responsibilities more effectively. Those events in turn instigated the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, where we've had approximately 7,000 American soldiers killed, 50,000 wounded, and who knows how many coming back with TBIs and PTSD. Furthermore, there have been hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi and Afghanistan citizens killed as "collateral damage."

Why would Advisor Condoleeza Rice be resoundingly endorsed in the Bush era by the same senators who are currently trying to block UN Ambassador Susan Rice's nomination to the same position? Any reasonable person would have to assume it's either politics or stupidity, or possibly both.