The Rice Diversion
By Matthew Vadum
After U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice lied her way through a tense meeting with Republican lawmakers yesterday about her role in the Benghazi scandal, the mainstream media escalated its attacks on those Republicans who continue daring to question the official account of that bloody day in September.
A short time after meeting with Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), Rice released a statement indicating that she had incorrectly described the attack at the U.S. consulate in Libya when she appeared on five Sunday TV talk shows days after. At the height of the election season in mid-September she peddled the Obama administration’s fairy tale in which a spontaneous demonstration over an anti-Islam video somehow led to the killing of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens.
Rice said her comments were based on intelligence available at the time. “Neither I nor anyone else in the administration intended to mislead the American people at any stage in the process,” said Rice, who attended the meeting with acting CIA director Michael J. Morell.
Rice contradicted the testimony of former CIA Director David Petraeus who told lawmakers Nov. 16 he never believed the Obama administration’s claim that the attack was a mob action prompted by a video. Petraeus said that he believed all along that Islamic terrorists attacked the diplomatic mission on the 11th anniversary of 9/11.
The senators were not moved by Rice.
“It is clear that the information that she gave the American people was incorrect when she said that it was a spontaneous demonstration triggered by a hateful video,” said McCain. Echoed Graham, “Bottom line: I’m more disturbed now than I was before.”
Graham and Ayotte indicated they plan to block Rice’s nomination as secretary of state if President Obama names her to replace Hillary Clinton.
But because the senators won’t cave in to pressure, media figures are smearing them at every opportunity.
McCain, Graham, and Ayotte are engaged in a “Benghazi witch hunt,” according to Martin Bashir, one of MSNBC’s most ardent Obama worshipers.
The senators are grasping at straws, refusing to let go of their “ginned up controversy” even after meeting with Rice and other administration figures, said the tabloid journalist known for his interviews with Diana, Princess of Wales and singer Michael Jackson.
After White House press secretary Jay Carney said the senators were suffering from an “obsession” about Rice’s comments on the Sunday shows, the Huffington Post website helpfully put together a video painting McCain and Graham as obsessed.
Other journalists have leapt to the defense of Rice.
Working with the White House and congressional Democrats, journalists invented the false side story that McCain and a group of Republican lawmakers were targeting Rice not because she lied to the American people but because she is black.
A Washington Post editorial supports the left-wing Congressional Black Caucus’s wild contention that Republicans are out to get Rice “because she is an African American woman.” Perhaps the editorial writers forgot that President George W. Bush’s secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, an immensely popular figure in the GOP, was also a black woman.
The newspaper then implies that Republicans are secret members of the Ku Klux Klan, citing a recent letter signed by 97 House Republicans questioning Rice’s fitness for the post of top U.S. diplomat. The paper casually opines that “[M]ore than 80 of the signatories are white males, and nearly half are from states of the former Confederacy.”
Like defense lawyers for an obviously guilty client, these left-wing journalists are working overtime to confuse the public about what happened in Benghazi, Libya, the Obama administration’s role, and what it all means. Democrats and the mainstream media are trying to obstruct progress in the investigation by misdirection, grabbing at any shiny object within reach.
But despite the leftist spin, the ugly truth remains: Four Americans were sacrificed to prevent President Obama’s pro-Islamist foreign policy from becoming a major issue in the closing weeks of the recently concluded election. President Obama let Americans die in order to secure reelection. On Sept. 11 President Obama rolled the dice, jetting off to Las Vegas for a fundraising event. He knew the media would cover for him.
The Obama administration concocted an anti-Islam video cover story that was plausible enough not to alarm voters. The U.S. Embassy in Cairo released a bizarre statement on Sept. 11 condemning “the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” Expressing the views of many Americans, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney said it was “disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”
Stateside, the Obama-worshipping media pilloried Romney for days for speaking truth to power and standing up for the First Amendment.
In the end, the media vanquished Romney but not the story of what happened in that northeastern Libyan city.
Now that they realize that the Benghazi scandal isn’t going away anytime soon, these left-wingers are scrambling to regain control over the narrative.
As journalist Josh Marshall, a reliably partisan Democrat, huffed in a recent tweet while watching television, “Weird. Everyone on this Fox panel agrees Benghazi scandal is becoming really big deal.”
No kidding.
Other left-wing journalists are spending a lot of time lying in order to protect the Obama administration. The media establishment has been busy characterizing anyone who doesn’t follow the official line as kooks and sore losers shell-shocked at Romney’s surprising defeat.
Salon.com’s senior fabulist Alex Pareene refers to Benghazi as “an entirely made-up scandal” and accepts as Holy Writ whatever account the Obama administration offers at any given moment.
Because Sens. McCain and Graham had the impertinence to question the White House’s obvious lies about the Benghazi saga, Pareene calls them “buffoons.” McCain is a “petulant loser” and Graham is his “reviled sidekick,” writes the young man whose career high water mark was working as a gossip columnist at Wonkette.com.
Leftist academic Dominic Tierney claims the Benghazi scandal is proof that Obama’s foreign policy “is fairly successful.” Benghazi “is what a ‘scandal’ looks like when there aren’t any real scandals to talk about.”
“Republicans are desperate to assail Obama for something, and they chose Benghazi as their best shot,” Tierney writes.
Smug leftist Paul Waldman at the American Prospect, belittles “harumphing” Republicans for seeking the truth about what happened.
Republicans have “scandal envy,” Waldman quips. “Republicans are indescribably frustrated by the fact that Barack Obama, whom they regard as both illegitimate and corrupt, went through an entire term without a major scandal.”
In fact Obama has had several potentially major scandals in his first term but so-called journalists like Waldman have refused to take them seriously. Benghazi is the Obama scandal with the largest American body count.
They include the NEA taxpayer-funded propaganda scandal, the wrongful termination of AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin, the appointment of self-described “communist” Van Jones as White House green jobs czar, Pigford, Obama’s ties to the criminal group ACORN, the handling of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case, Obama’s unilaterally granted immigration amnesty, Obama’s intimidation of Supreme Court members during a State of the Union address, the Justice Department’s refusal to enforce electoral integrity laws and attempt to intimidate the Gallup polling company, Solyndra, the Reichstag fire-like Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal, the administration’s failure to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act (DoMA), and Obama’s ongoing appeasement of Islamofascists around the world. (This is not an exhaustive list.)
And although Republicans happen to have the facts on their side this time, they should never underestimate the power of the Left to transform a potential GOP triumph into a crushing political defeat.
The media have convinced a good-sized chunk of the population that Obama critics, and particularly, Tea Party supporters, are racist, mouth-breathing imbeciles and lunatics.
During the Bill Clinton impeachment process, impeachment advocates in Congress such as the late Congressman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) cited the Magna Carta and high-minded constitutional principles while Democrats regurgitated lies over and over and over again. The Left engaged in character assassination, taking the case of a president lying under oath, obstructing justice, and abusing his power to escape the civil consequences of sexual harassment, and transforming it into a case of sex-obsessed Republicans desperate to hunt down a Democratic president with an inspiring life story.
This was accomplished not by the force of their arguments but largely by repetition. They wore people down and got them to believe the lies. It wasn’t that hard to do given that the public liked Clinton.
In a 2004 case already largely forgotten outside Capitol Hill, Democrats were able not only to distract from their wrongdoing but also to claim the head of a top Republican congressional staffer in the process.
Manuel Miranda was counsel to then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) until Republicans forced him out. During a battle over judicial confirmations, Miranda produced memos proving Democrats were taking orders from left-wing groups determined to defeat President Bush’s nominees. The groups included People for the American Way, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
As Kathryn Jean Lopez wrote at the time, “[o]ne memo referred to Bush White House judicial candidates as ‘Nazis.’”
The memos were found on an open computer network but somehow Democrats were able to turn the media’s guns around and aim them at Republican staffers, accusing them of unethically accessing computer files to obtain internal documents.
Miranda said that “no unauthorized hacking was involved” in accessing the Democrats’ memos. He added, “I considered and studied the propriety of reading these documents. I knew that in legal ethics there is no absolute prohibition on reading opposition documents inadvertently disclosed.”
President Obama’s legal team, schooled in the ways of Chicago, consists of ruthless lawyers like Robert Bauer.
Like the administration’s many supplicants in the media, Obama’s team won’t make uncovering the truth about Benghazi easy.
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