And Now A Rice Has To Pay The Price?



They seem deadly earnest- but could John McCain and Lindsey Graham really be serious?   Or is this just some kind of joke?

On CBS' This Morning on Wednesday, the Arizona senator asserted "the American people deserve the truth" because the "consulate in Benghazi was turned into a death house and somebody has to be held responsible."   He pledged to block any nomination of U.N. ambassador Susan Rice to head the Department of State, accusing her of "not being very bright, because it was obvious that this was not a 'flash mob' and there was additional information by the time she went on every news show...in America."

Graham also addressed yesterday Rice's possible appointment, maintaining during a press conference

Somebody has got to start paying a price around this place.   I don't think she deserves to be promoted. There are a lot of qualified people in this country the president could pick, but I am dead-set on making sure we don't promote anybody that was an essential player in the Benghazi debacle.

Acceptance of blame.   Responsibility. Accountability.  Thank goodness some people are looking out for these virtues.

The pair, joined to the hip in foreign policy, are new to the game.    When in 2005 President Bush nominated National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to be Secretary of State, McCain charged

Also, I thought that some of the remarks — and I’m not going to mention my colleagues’ names — some of the remarks aimed at her during the hearings challenged her integrity. We can disagree on policy and we disagree on a lot of things, but I think it is very clear that Condoleezza Rice is a person of integrity. And yes, I see this, some lingering bitterness over a very tough campaign. I hope it dissipates soon.

When Minnesota Senator Mark Dayton identified Ms. Rice as a "liar," Graham responded "Yes, that's even more unfair. Because it was all in terms of weapons of mass destruction and misleading us about the war and what was in Iraq. Well, every intelligence agency in the world was misled. And to connect those two to say that she's a liar is very unfair, over the line."

Oh, how easily they forget- or at least pretend to.      In his State of the Union address in January, 2003, President Bush- as part of the ongoing effort to gin up support for the attack on Iraq- infamously claimed "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."   With the White House likely aware that the British intelligence was inaccurate, Bush's remark was probably a lie. Moreover  

Then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet said on July 11, "These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the President .This was a mistake." On July 22, Deputy National Security Advisor Steven Hadley said that he deleted a reference to Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium in Africa from President Bush's October 7, 2002 Cincinnati speech based on a telephone call from DCI Tenet and two CIA memos sent to himself-one of which was also sent to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Hadley said that this second memo detailed some weakness in the evidence, the fact that the effort was not particularly significant to Iraq's nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already had a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory. The memorandum also stated that the CIA had been telling Congress that the Africa story was one of two issues where we differed with the British intelligence . . . based on what we now know, we had opportunities here to avoid this problem. We didn't take them . . . having been taken out of Cincinnati, it should have been taken out of the State of the Union.

(Sarcasm Alert) Ever forthright, Rice in April of 2007 "rejected, on grounds of executive privilege, a House subpoena regarding the prewar claim that Iraq sought yellowcake uranium from Niger."

In her post-conservative but pre-Huffington Post Days, Arianna Huffington noted on Salon

Condoleezza Rice has been the worst offender. Now that we know that Tenet personally warned Rice’s deputy, Steve Hadley, not to use the yellowcake claim back in October, and the role NSC staffers played in manipulating the State of the Union, Rice’s widely publicized claim that at the time of the State of the Union, “maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery” has been revealed for what it is: A bald-face lie.

And even now as the truth comes flooding out, Rice continues to play fast and loose with the facts — and stand by her man. “The statement that he made,” she said on Sunday, speaking of the president, “was indeed accurate. The British government did say that.”

Condoleezza was a liar and terrible foreign policy official in the Bush administration.  Susan Rice, fortunately, has a long way to go before living down to the record of the other Rice.




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