Last night, Daily Show host Jon Stewart skewered U.S. Sen. John McCain’s ongoing war with U.S. Ambassador the United Nations Susan Rice, which we covered in this week’s Skinny column.
Over at Slate, Fred Kaplan notes:
So far five GOP senators have objected to the idea of President Obama nominating Rice to be the next secretary of state. Two of those senators—John McCain and Lindsey Graham—are party leaders on foreign policy and frequent visitors to TV news studios. This is what makes the campaign particularly bizarre. Their case against her is not just unusually flimsy and transparently partisan; It also shines a glaring light on their own brazen hypocrisy (something most politicians do all they can to avoid).
At CNN, international security reporter Peter Bergen knocks down McCain’s arguments:
Second, it was the intelligence community, not officials at the White House or State Department, that eliminated from the talking points used by Rice after the Benghazi attack the suspected involvement of the Libyan jihadist group, Ansar al-Sharia.
According to accounts of former CIA director David Petraeus’ closed door testimony about Benghazi to congressional intelligence committees earlier this month, the intelligence community eliminated references to Ansar al-Sharia in the talking points so as not to tip off members of the terrorist group that the CIA believed that they were responsible for the attack.
The conspiracy therefore was not to mislead the American public but to mislead America’s enemies.
If Rice had gone beyond her unclassified talking points and said that Ansar al-Sharia was suspected to be behind the Benghazi attacks, no doubt she would now be being hounded for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.
This article appears in Nov 29 – Dec 5, 2012.
The John McCain game here, Jim Nintzel, is to make Obama ditch Rice and default to Sen. John Kerry and thereby open up that senate seat. A profoundly hurt, bitter and angry, man that John McCain. Time for USA to stop indulging him?
So an extreme left wing entertainer says something negative about a Republican and you consider it newsworthy?
Senator McCain is grasping for any relevence he can muster. His service, some would say, misservice to his country, has peaked and is in painfully evident decline. His choices of issues to persue, as well as, running mates, signify a measurable lack in his sense of reality, service to his constituents, the American People, and grasp of what is really vital to this country. He should follow his fellow Senator, Jon Kyle, into retirement, and hopefully, a long happy oblivion
McCain told the commies every thing they wanted to know in order to obtain his release.
This man has no morals what so ever.
Problem is, he will have to retire or Arizonans will continue to vote for him. But he is representing his constituents well, as they are also shallow, partisan hypocrites, and that is what representative gov’t is about.