Eric Boehlert at Media Matters has found what you might call the "smoking gun" of Fox News hypocrisy in its Susan Rice hysteria: In 2005, Charles Krauthammer wrote a column in support of Condoleezza Rice's appointment as Secretary of State despite her role in promoting the invasion of Iraq: "(Democratic Senator) Mark Dayton of Minnesota accused her of lying in order to persuade the American people to go to war -- a charge that is not just false but that most Americans don't believe. Rice was not a generator of intelligence. She was a consumer -- of a highly defective product."
Of course, these days, Krauthammer is singing a very different tune about the nature of being a "consumer" of "highly defective" intelligence.
Today, Rice's sin in the eyes of Krauthammer and Fox News is that she relayed what the intelligence community told her about Benghazi. For that, she's guilty of incompetence or being misleading, in the words of Krauthammer. But in 2005, Krauthammer stressed that Condoleezza Rice should not be held responsible for relaying what the intelligence community told her about Iraq because she didn't generate it.
It goes without saying that the sprawling Iraq War was a far more important, costly and deadly event than the "small firefight" that engulfed the Benghazi consulate, as national security writer Tom Rick's described it. And it goes without saying that as national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice had a much more direct and influential role in initiaiting the Iraq War than United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice had responding to the terrorist attack in Libya.
And yet, despite all the teeth-gnashing and finger-pointing on Fox News against Susan Rice, they still don't care about Condoleezza Rice's intelligence sins. In fact, Condi Rice was a guest of "hold me to the same standards" Greta Van Susteren not long ago to discuss Benghazi and Van Susteren didn't ask a single question about the faulty intelligence that led up to the war in Iraq, much less Condi Rice's role in the whole matter. Van Susteren never asked about Condoleezza Rice's famous "nobody could have predicted" someone would hijack a plane and use it "as a missile" despite warnings of exactly that. Even though Kurt Eichenwald presented a devastating assessment of the Bush administration’s negligence over intelligence warnings shortly before 9/11 in a New York Times editorial on September 10, 2012, one day before the Benghazi attacks.
If any guest should be rude enough to bring up this hypocrisy - before getting kicked off the air - Fox will surely come up with some excuse to explain away the differences in their reactions. But any savvy news consumer will know the real difference to the Foxies: One Rice is a Republican, the other a Democrat.
I truly appreciate your optimism but Obama will only be in charge for another FOUR years. After that is truly anybody’s guess. (Of course, I’d much prefer continued Dem control of the White House for the next few decades but I have to bow to reality and recognize that’s not likely to happen—unless the GOPers continue to run Presidential candidates who are so woefully out-of-touch with average Americans who AREN’T brain-dead FoxNoise viewers or racist teabaggers.)
He doesn’t have the first friggin’ clue what he’s talking about on anything, and it’s asking too much for him to even know where the first clue is on Benghazi. He’s just there to pick up the slack when the usual suspects play it safe for a few days.
Tee-hee