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Originally posted by Jaellma
reply to post by bknapple32
Petreaus pretty much told the same story she told in his original story before he changed it. She stuck to hers even though it was tainted and ended up under the bus.
At the end of the day, it was the best thing for her to not be in consideration anymore for the position.
Condoleezza Rice is an American political scientist and diplomat. She served as the 66th United States Secretary of State, and was the second person to hold that office in the administration of President George W. Bush
Instead, the GOP and supporters are happy to crucify Susan, just because she was a choice of President Obama, and perhaps could it be that she was black too?
As Seth Mandel notes over at Commentary, the controversy over Rice’s potential nomination wasn’t strictly partisan, and wasn’t all about Benghazi:
Republicans on the Hill had basically limited their critique of Rice to her misleading statements following the Benghazi attack. Liberals, on the other hand, made it personal. Dana Milbank suggested Rice had an attitude problem. Maureen Dowd said Rice was too ambitious and unprincipled for her own good–or the country’s. Yesterday at the Daily Beast, Lloyd Grove launched a bizarre attack on Rice that accused her of having a personality disorder. The left has also been driving the less personal attacks as well. Howard French said Rice’s Africa legacy is the further empowerment of dictators. Human Rights Watch’s Tom Malinowski knocked Rice for essentially enabling atrocities in Congo.
Meanwhile, it should not go unnoticed that Hillary Clinton made her opposition to Rice clear to officials in Washington, which may explain the avalanche of leaks and criticism and personal sniping that came from the left as soon as the battle commenced.
But the Libya debacle aside, Rice was under increasing scrutiny over her record of militarism, including her support for the invasion of Iraq, her backing of authoritarian African leaders and her description of her post as ambassador to the UN as being intended to provide "unwavering support for Israel".
Rice served in Bill Clinton's administration as a national security adviser and an assistant secretary of state for Africa. She was out of office by the time of 9/11 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. But she backed the Bush administration's claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, the false pretext for the invasion.
Rice has also come under strong criticism over her positions on Africa, most recently for trying to suppress a UN report that was strongly critical of the Rwandan government's arming and other support for rebels in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
As a national security official in the Clinton White House, Rice played a part in the US's failure to act against the 1994 genocide of Rwanda's Tutsis. She has said that was a searing experience and has vowed to push intervention to prevent similar atrocities in the future. But in practice that translated into unswerving support for authoritarian leaders she saw as a bulwark against genocide, even if they too had blood on their hands.
Rice has been an unrelenting supporter of the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, who as a Tutsi rebel leader put a stop to the genocide. But that support has continued in the face of a growing body of evidence that his forces are bound up with years of war crimes in Congo that have contributed to millions of deaths.
Liberals are not congresspersons. They have a right to say whatever they wish.
Note also that the Republican opposition was based specifically on Rice's misleading statements in the wake of Benghazi. It was her critics on the left, in contrast, who highlighted gauzier, more personal issues, characterizing Rice as someone afflicted with a supposed "personality disorder" (Grove), who is "ill-equipped to be the nation's top diplomat" because of her "shoot-first tendency" and "pugilism" (Milbank), with a "bull-in-the-china-shop reputation" (Dowd).
The effort to pin the race/gender card on the GOP had already begun, with Ben Smith writing about why the Repubilican "war"on Susan Rice held political risk, and after her withdrawal, the predictable Andrea Mitchell (below) pulling out the stops: