Tag Archives: Susan Rice

June 13, 2013 · 5:00 AM

Why conservatives can’t whitewater Obama

President Obama has so far been able to emerge from "scandals" relatively unscathed.

President Obama has so far been able to emerge from “scandals” relatively unscathed.

The Week

The Republican Noise Machine is falling on deaf ears

Twenty years ago, conservative media mavens seemed able to turn any minor flap into scandal gold, be it a decade-old land deal that lost money or a mundane replacement of White House travel office staff. They even pressured Bill Clinton, early in his first term, to accept an investigation led by an independent special prosecutor, which years later led to his own impeachment. Liberals, in disturbed awe of the Right’s ability to control the media narrative, dubbed the conservative media the “Republican Noise Machine.”

Yet today, no matter how loud conservatives scream “Benghazi,” “Solyndra,” “Fast and Furious” and even “Intim-O-Gate” (Glenn Beck’s failed attempt to brand the IRS and leak investigation controversies), President Obama glides past. His poll numbers remain relatively stable.

There is not really a “what did the president know” drumbeat, and no suggestion he warrants independent investigation. Calls for Attorney General Eric Holder’s resignation died downfollowing his meeting with Washington media bureau chiefs. Benghazi lightning rod Susan Rice just got a promotion, and her Republican antagonists are pledging cooperation.

What happened to the Republican Noise Machine? Here are three reasons it’s sputtering:

1. Liberals finally learned how to fight back
When the 1988 George H. W. Bush presidential campaign derided Gov. Michael Dukakis with smear after smear, the Democrat fatally believed he could simply ignore it because “nobody’s going to believe it.” In the 1990s, Bill Clinton naively believed naming a special prosecutor wouldput to rest any doubts about his real estate dealings. In 2004, Sen. John Kerry thought he could wait a few weeks before responding to the “Swift Boat” attacks on his war record and avoid inadvertently spreading false smears.

But in 2008, the Obama campaign aggressively fought off smears, sometimes with high-profile speeches, sometimes by quietly getting factual responses in the hands of the media. And newly established outside groups like Media Matters provided big assists.

Today, the forward-leaning approach continues. Democrats are quick to challenge the credibility of chief Obama antagonist Rep. Darrell Issa. The work of left-leaning reporters thatdebunk hysterical conservative charges is rapidly shared, minimizing the echo chamber effect of smears being repeated by traditional media outlets for days and accepted as fact before any belated corrections materialize.

2. Conservatives have cried wolf too many times
Conservative firebrand Michelle Malkin futilely tried to tag Obama as fostering a “culture of corruption” in a book published merely six months into his presidency. Breathless charges of cronyism in the Solyndra matter proved to be baseless. You will not be surprised to learn that “Fast and Furious” was not a deliberate plot by Obama to ship guns to Mexican drug cartels, maximize cross-border gun violence, and con the public into accepting draconian gun control.These are a mere few examples of smears gone bust in the Obama era.

In turn, conservative muckrakers don’t get the benefit of the doubt anymore. Granted, the traditional media still lets conservatives stir the pot, happily broadcasting initial charges. But the media has been less inclined to let conservatives dump the pot all over the front pages with wild speculation, day after day after day.

3. When something does go wrong, Obama is quick to take care of business
Martha Johnson, resigned. Robert Peck, fired. David Chaney, resigned. Greg Stokes, indefinitely suspended without pay. Louis Caldera, resigned.

Don’t know who those people are? That’s because President Obama got rid of them fast enough to prevent their minor scandals from being exploited by Republicans and becoming extended media soap operas.

The itchy trigger finger has its downside: Agricultural Department state-level director Shirley Sherrod was infamously and prematurely whacked before it could be proven she was the victim of a dishonestly edited video charging her with anti-white racism. Liberal Obama detractors accused Obama of cowering in the face of right-wing bullying.

However, Obama’s overall record shows he is quite willing to fight back when he is standing on firm ground, yet also willing to jettison problem staffers when he sees their actions as indefensible. Sherrod’s ouster was just one mistake out of haste. But Obama’s basic approach of speedy decision-making has served his purposes of preventing low-level scandals from metastasizing.

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May 19, 2013 · 7:53 AM

Bill Maher, ‘The Obama administration isn’t dirty. The air is dirty.’ (Warning: Language is “dicy”…Hey, it’s Bill Maher!!!)

Truly one of Bill Maher’s best “New Rules” segments…

PoliticusUSA

Bill Maher summed up the difference between the bogus Obama scandals that are being pushed and the real scandal of conservative climate change denial, ‘The Obama administration isn’t dirty. The air is dirty.’

Here’s the video:

Maher said,

Please don’t tell me that freedom died because Susan Rice broke the sacred bond between citizens and talk shows. In a poll this week, four in ten Republicans said Benghazi is the worst scandal in history. Second worst, Kanye West snatching the mic from Taylor Swift.

If you think Benghazi is worse than slavery, the Trail of Tears, Japanese internment, Tuskegee, purposefully injecting Guatemalan mental patients with syphilis, WMDs, and the fact that banks today are still foreclosing on mortgages that they don’t own, then your hard on for Obama has lasted for more four hours, and you need to call a doctor.

And while the press has been occupied with scandal, the biggest scandal, and the most important story of the century so far happened last week. Scientists reported that the level of carbon dixoide in the atmosphere has passed the long feared milestone of 400 parts per million, and unless you’re a chimney sweep, that’s bad news. Because humans have never lived through it.

You think Susan Rice gave bogus talking points about Benghazi? What about the bulls**t talking points the entire Republican Party has been spewing on climate change since the 90s? I wanna see the emails to find who came up with the talking points that global warming is just a theory, and that it needs more study, and that climate change is hoax.

The Obama administration isn’t dirty. The air is.

The fact that Republicans are more interested in chasing imaginary Obama scandals than doing something about climate change isn’t a coincidence. The right’s talking points on climate change came directly from the fossil fuels industry. In 1991, The New York Times reported, “Coal-burning utility companies and coal producers, disturbed by public acceptance of the idea that burning fossil fuels will change the climate, are deciding whether to go national this fall with an ad campaign they tried in three markets earlier this year…The goal of the campaign, according to one planning document, is to “reposition global warming as theory” and not fact.”

The debate over climate change isn’t really about science. For Republicans, and the special interests who fund them, the climate change issue is all about money, and maintaining our dependence on fossil fuels. From 2002-2010, conservative billionaires spent $120 million to fund a network of more than 100 climate change denial organizations. The purpose of the effort is to deny the human role in climate change, and to oppose environmental regulations.

The air is dirty because Republicans are taking dirty (dark) money. Until people connect the dots, and demand that special interest money be removed from our politics, our planet will continue to die. The Obama scandals are a smokescreen to cover up the fact that Republicans would rather destroy the planet to enrich the few.

The air is definitely dirty, and Republican greed is the reason why.

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May 17, 2013 · 12:15 PM

5 Major Scandals The Media Isn’t Obsessing About

If it looks like Obama might have caused the scandal, then it’s NEWS…if not, it falls by the wayside.

Think Progress

This week, the national media has focused on the three different scandals surrounding the White House, devoting hours of coverage to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) improperly targeting conservative groups applying for tax exempt status, the talking points Susan Rice used in the aftermath of the attacks in Benghazi, and the Justice Department’s subpoena of phone records from the Associated Press as part of an investigation into a national security leak. The around-the-clock coverage comes even as a new Gallup poll finds that interest in the ongoing controversies is “lower comparable to major news stores in the past.”

And while these stories raise serious concerns about money in politics, embassy security, and freedom of the press, they aren’t the only problems impacting the American people. Here are five big stories the media isn’t obsessing about:

1. Carbon pollution reaches historic highs, threatening human existence. The concentration of climate warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “has passed the milestone level of 400 parts per million (ppm),” scientists estimate. “At the beginning of industrialisation the concentration of CO2 was just 280ppm,” said Prof Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “We must hope that the world crossing this milestone will bring about awareness of the scientific reality of climate change and how human society should deal with the challenge.” The last time the Earth saw carbon dioxide levels that high, humans did not exist. The West Antarctic ice sheet also did not exist, and sea levels were as much as 82 feet higher than they are today. During an earlier period when CO2 levels were this high, temperatures were 5° to 10°F warmer globally.

2. The devastating impact of sequestration on kids, cancer patients and first responders. On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the budget deficit will shrink to its smallest level since before the Great Recession in 2013, and it will continue to decrease through 2015. But despite the smaller deficits, Republicans remain focused on spending reductions — even as the most recent round of cuts has kicked children out of preschool, left cancer patients without needed screenings, undermined public health and fire safety, and gutted programs that help low-income Americans in a variety of ways. Those cuts have also threatened to derail the economic recovery, which has sputtered along despite the headwinds created by a consistent focus on deficit reduction.

3. Massive cuts to food stamps for the most vulnerable Americans. The House Agriculture Committee approved a farm bill late Wednesday night that would cut federal food stamps by $20.5 billion — more steeply than any legislation since the welfare reforms of the 1990s. Earlier this week, the Senate Agriculture Committee also agreed to a $4.1 billion reduction. The program keeps hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Americans out of the deepest pits of poverty, and even as the Great Recession swelled SNAP rolls, the program continued to push its erroneous payments rates to record lows.

4. 1100 workers die in garment factory collapse in Bangladesh and most American retailers plan business as usual. Since a factory collapsed in Bangladesh, killing 1,100 clothing industry workers, American retailers have been hesitant to adopt safety plans that could prevent similar tragedies. Abercrombie & Fitch announced it would sign a safety upgrade plan that has been approved by six major European retailers and one other American company, but many other manufacturers — including Walmart and Gap — are holding out. Although some retailers fear the costs of upgrades, they could pass them on entirely to consumers and only raise prices by 10 cents per garment.

5. 4,000 gun deaths due to gun violence since Newtown. A crowdsourced effort to count every person killed by a gun in the United States since the Newtown tragedy is currently being hosted by Slate. As of this writing, the count is 4,150. The Senate rejected gun safety legislation in April and has not yet set a date for reconsidering the measure.

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May 12, 2013 · 12:50 PM

Congressman Tears Into Fox News Host For Obsessing Over Benghazi Talking Points

As Daily Kos reminded us…If it’s Sunday, It’s Benghazi All Day Long…

Think Progress

Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) tore into Fox News’ Chris Wallace and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) for obsessing over the talking points U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice used when talking to the media in the days following the attack in Benghazi, Libya rather than focusing on identifying the perpetrators of the killings. “I think the desire of the Republicans to create a scandal here has really undermined any ability to have a credible look at what actually happened,” Smith said during an appearance on Fox News Sunday alongside Rogers.

While acknowledging that the administration’s initial assessment of Bengazi did not reflect what officials later learned about the incident, Smith criticized Fox for suggesting that that Rice’s remarks on five Sunday news shows presented a definitive picture of the events of Sep. 11, 2012.

“[The administration] didn’t reach conclusions the way you just presented that was that by the Sunday afterwards that the administration said here is what happened, here is our conclusion,” Smith explained. “But the president never said, no terrorism, no Al Qaeda. There was a dispute about how soon to lead to specific conclusions that now is being made into Watergate and Iran-Contra.” Watch it:

Indeed, during multiple appearances on the Sunday shows Rice said that the attacks were in part a response to the anti-Islam video that had spurred protests across the region, but did not offer a definitive answer as to what exactly took place in Benghazi and predicated the administration’s assessment as “based on the information that we have at present.” The CIA and State Department did initially believe that the attack was spontaneously inspired by the protests in Cairo, Egypt.

Still, in the days after the attack, both Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary Clintondescribed the events in Benghazi as an “act of terror” and pledged justice against the perpetrators.

Wallace responded to Smith pointing out that intelligence officials changed Rice’s talking points at least 12 times, taking out references to prior attacks and specific terrorist groups. “We’re talking about talking points,” Smith reminded the host. “There was no question this was a it terrorist attack. They didn’t deny it. I would much rather get into investigation of the groups that threatened the U.S., figure out how they are, and how to stop them instead of debating how one memo was put together in the immediate days after the attack.”

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May 11, 2013 · 9:54 PM

Rand Paul: Benghazi should preclude Hillary Clinton from higher office

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Sen. Rand Paul Delivers Immigration Address Hispanic Chamber Of Commerce Conference

The most likely character to oppose Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2016, Sen. Ron Paul, claims she shouldn’t run because of Benghazi.  It’s Amazing just how dense those guys really are.  Hillary hasn’t even announced that she’s running at all, but they’re so afraid of her supposed momentum from both Democratic and Republican women voters, that they are trying to stop her before any announcement.

MSNBC

If Rand Paul sees himself as the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential nominee, it’s clear he’s prepping for Hillary Clinton to be his Democratic opponent.

A full three and a half years out from the next presidential election, the Kentucky senator spoke before the Iowa Republican Party Friday night in a speech that rivaled a campaign rally. He latched onto the GOP’s latest rallying cry against the Obama administration’s handling of the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead last September, to focus his criticism on the former secretary of state.

“First question to Hillary Clinton: Where in the hell were the Marines?” he asked.

This week saw a resurgence in the GOP-led crusade to surface what some in the party have called a massive “cover-up.” Their efforts were already successful in blocking Obama’s hand-picked nominee to succeed Clinton at the State Department, U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice, leaving Clinton herself as next-in-line to be cast with blame.

“It was inexcusable, it was a dereliction of duty, and it should preclude her from holding higher office,” Paul said.

Paul was coy in expounding on his presidential ambitions, telling reporters Friday that while he had not ruled out gunning for the party’s nomination, he would not make a decision until 2014. Clinton has largely avoided addressing 2016 chatter, though a number of polls matching her up with an array of hypothetical opponents show Americans see her as a favorite to lead the Democrats in the next election cycle.

The roughly 500 attendees at the state GOP’s annual Lincoln Dinner seemed keenly aware of Iowa’s electoral influence in the early presidential landscape. “The process of selecting the next leader of the free world begins in Iowa, and it’s already begun,” GOP Rep. Steve King said earlier in the evening.

Paul, who joined the theme of Obamacare-bashing seen throughout the annual event, said that after the Republican loss in the last election—largely due to lacking appeal with minority voters—the party needed to adjust how it treated Hispanic voters and work toward a deal on immigration reform.

“We have to change the way we’re talking about it and who we are if we want attract the Latino vote,” he said.

“If kids think we’re hostile toward them, they’ll never vote,” he added of appealing to young people. ”We’re an increasingly diverse nation, and I think we do need to reach out to other people that aren’t like us, don’t look like us, don’t wear the same clothes, that aren’t exactly who we are. We’re going to have to do something.”

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January 24, 2013 · 12:21 AM

Videos: Hillary Clinton on the Hill

Politico

Hillary Clinton is pictured. | AP Photo

Video: Hillary Clinton on the Hill

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January 3, 2013 · 4:06 PM

The wingnut trifecta

The wingnut trifecta

In this instance, Joan Walsh says what most pundits won’t…

Salon

Crazy GOP claims that Hillary Clinton is faking her illness slur the country’s three most popular Democrats

Right-wing claims that Hillary Clinton faked illness to avoid testifying about the Benghazi tragedy would be funny if they weren’t so ugly. It’s the wingnut trifecta, smearing our most popular past Democratic president, Bill Clinton, along with our current president, Barack Obama, and the current 2016 front-runner, all with one shot. Imagine birtherism crossed with the worst of the hateful anti-Clinton lies, like the “Vince Foster was murdered” claim. That’s Hillary-health trutherism.

But so far right-wingers claiming that Clinton somehow faked her concussion have gone virtually unchallenged on Fox News and right-wing sites like Newsbusters and the Daily Caller. Everyone from Charles Krauthammer to Sean Hannity to Laura Ingraham and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton have gotten into the act. Even after reports that Clinton also suffered a dangerous blood clot between her brain and skull, Bolton not only failed to apologize, he suggested that she was dodging Benghazi questions in order to protect her 2016 chances.

This is crazy. Obviously, the Benghazi-coverup stories began as a way to hurt Obama, by alleging that he wasn’t telling the truth about Libya because he didn’t want to reveal that al-Qaida was a factor in the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens, especially at the height of election season. After the election, the claims continued, and they mainly focused on the Sunday-show statements of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. They managed to torpedo Rice’s chances to succeed Clinton as secretary of state.

Now they’re going after Clinton herself, and no doubt some of it is designed to hurt her 2016 chances, even though she herself insists she won’t run. It’s remarkable to me how few mainstream, respectable Republicans have come to Clinton’s defense.  The Washington Post’s  Kathleen Parker did so today, in a column that declared “the attacks on Clinton during her illness, essentially attacks on her character, have been cruel and unfair.” But Parker is the rare Republican known for fairness and honesty (she was an early public critic of Sarah Palin, when others merely trashed the V.P. nominee anonymously).

It would be nice to see the three amigos, Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte, who cruelly and vindictively railroaded Susan Rice, get together and tell their wingnut friends the same thing. But tolerating Clinton health trutherism is like tolerating birtherism for the GOP: You don’t necessarily share in the craziness (and in the case of birtherism, the racism) that inspires it, but you benefit from its toxic half-life nonetheless.

I talked about the crazy Benghazi allegations on “Hardball” today and I was surprised to find myself in strong disagreement with the Daily Beast’s Lauren Ashburn. Ashburn acted shocked at the Clinton slurs; I argued they’re just the latest outbreak of Clinton-Obama derangement syndrome. But even more significant, Ashburn tried to declare that both sides are somehow equally to blame for the “incivility” of our current political debate, claiming that someone (she didn’t say who or where) had wished death on former President George Bush when the news broke that he was in the intensive care unit.

I’m on record, often, saying that false equivalence about haters on the right and left is dangerous. To equate Democrats and Republicans on this front, you’d have to imagine, say, Susan Rice suggesting something that crazy, not to mention unethical, about Mitt Romney’s secretary of state, had the 2012 race ended differently. And you can’t equate some random commenter on the HuffPost with people like Krauthammer and Hannity who have regular perches atop Fox News. That would be like Chris Matthews wishing death on the former president; it would never happen.

Watch my segment with Ashburn and Michael Smerconish…

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December 15, 2012 · 5:36 AM

Blog Roundup Saturday 12-15-2012

The Fox Delusion Continues

Zero Dark Thirty: An Update

Obama’s Statement on the Shootings

In Public ‘Conversation’ on Guns, a Rhetorical Shift

Mythbusting: Israel and Switzerland are not gun-toting utopias

GOPer Mike Huckabee blames shooting on lack of prayer in school

Earth to the Pundits: Scott Brown Lost Big and Would Lose Big Again

Lie of the Year: the Romney campaign’s ad on Jeeps made in China

Limbaugh Delivers Sexist Remark About Making A “Real Woman” Out Of Hillary Clinton

Geraldo Rivera: ‘Angry, Old, White Men’ Made Susan Rice the ‘Minimum Price’ for Benghazi

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December 13, 2012 · 7:59 PM

Susan Rice: A Victim of GOP Hypocrisy?

I reject the notion that the three Senators who questioned UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s professional competence as the next Secretary of State was racially motivated.

I do believe it was unabashedly partisan in nature.  It seemed to be a new angle toward side-lining the President’s political agenda for the next four years.

Mother Jones

[...]

The outrage expressed by Republican lawmakers—spurred by the ambassador reciting intelligence-community-generated talking points that turned out to be partially inaccurate—is very different from their response to another administration official named Rice who was accused of misleading the American public on a matter of national security.

That, of course, is Condoleezza Rice. When George W. Bush nominated Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, some of the same Senate Republicans who are currently attacking Susan Rice supported Condi wholeheartedly, despite her role in helping to make the case for war in Iraq based on bogus intelligence. Back then, Republicans were much more willing to chalk up Condoleezza Rice’s parroting of flawed intel to well-intentioned mistakes as opposed to outright deception, even when the evidence said otherwise. Here’s how some of Susan Rice’s most vocal critics responded to the Bush administration’s disastrous handling of pre-war Iraq intelligence and the nomination of Condoleezza Rice.

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· 4:54 PM

Susan Rice withdraws from consideration for secretary of state



This should make Senators McCain, Graham and Ayotte quite happy.  I’m not…

The Washington Post

U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice withdrew her name from the list of candidates for secretary of state Thursday afternoon, ending a weeks-long fight with Republicans over statements she made on television talk shows shortly after the attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11.

In a letter to President Obama, Rice said: “I respectfully request that you no longer consider my candidacy at this time.T he position of Secretary of State should never be politicized. . ..I am saddened that we have reached this point, even before you have decided whom to nominate. We cannot afford such an irresponsible distraction from the most pressing issues facing the American people.”

Obama, who had defended Rice on several occasions in recent weeks, accepted her decision and issued the following statement:

“Today, I spoke to Ambassador Susan Rice, and accepted her decision to remove her name from consideration for Secretary of State. For two decades, Susan has proven to be an extraordinarily capable, patriotic, and passionate public servant. As my Ambassador to the United Nations, she plays an indispensable role in advancing America’s interests. Already, she has secured international support for sanctions against Iran and North Korea, worked to protect the people of Libya, helped achieve an independent South Sudan, stood up for Israel’s security and legitimacy, and served as an advocate for UN reform and the human rights of all people. I am grateful that Susan will continue to serve as our Ambassador at the United Nations and a key member of my cabinet and national security team, carrying her work forward on all of these and other issues. I have every confidence that Susan has limitless capability to serve our country now and in the years to come, and know that I will continue to rely on her as an advisor and friend. While I deeply regret the unfair and misleading attacks on Susan Rice in recent weeks, her decision demonstrates the strength of her character, and an admirable commitment to rise above the politics of the moment to put our national interests first. The American people can be proud to have a public servant of her caliber and character representing our country.”

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