“The Pimp And His Pendulum”: Grover Norquist Still Calling Cadence In The GOP Ranks
At times, it has seemed that Republican lawmakers eyeing a fiscal compromise with President Obama were moving closer to a public split with Grover Norquist, author of the famous no-new-taxes pledge that has defined conservative politics for decades.
Yet Norquist, whose influence in the conservative movement spans well beyond his well-known fixation on taxes, remains an unwavering force in the GOP debate — and even some of the most prominent lawmakers publicly flirting with a break from Norquist have assured him in private that they remain loyal soldiers in the anti-tax cause.
Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), for example, might have seemed a perfect illustration of the trend away from Norquist’s hard-line views when he said recently that policies backed by Norquist would lead to more debt.
“I care too much about my country — I care a lot more about it than I do Grover Norquist,” the senator told a Georgia TV station.
But five days later, on the phone with Norquist, Chambliss was sounding a conciliatory tone. As Norquist read aloud a transcript of Chambliss’s earlier remarks, item by item, Norquist recalled later, the senator repeatedly assured him on each one that he did not mean to imply they had major differences when it came to GOP principles on taxes.
“He said he’d wished he hadn’t invoked my name and wished that he’d been clearer,” Norquist recalled from the Monday conversation.
Norquist said he came away from the conversation with this understanding of Chambliss’s position: “If he’d get a jillion dollars of spending cuts, he’d be willing to get rid of a deduction or two.”
Chambliss’s office said he was unavailable for an interview. A Chambliss aide later said that the purpose of the call was “most definitely not an apology.” In a written statement to The Washington Post, the senator said he and Norquist agree on “the vast majority of fiscal policy,” including that tax rates should not rise and spending should be reined in, though he added: “Grover disagrees with my longstanding position of using some revenue from closing special-interest loopholes to pay down our national debt, which is something I’ve never apologized for.”
For two decades, Norquist, 56, has been the most ardent enforcer of the Republican Party’s anti-tax theology. And Republicans have dutifully hewed close to that dogma.
But humbled by last month’s election results, and facing a determined President Obama in deficit-reduction negotiations with tax rates set to rise Jan. 1 for all Americans as part of the “fiscal cliff,” several Republicans in recent days have expressed a willingness to compromise. Some have suggested striking a deal with Obama to raise tax rates on higher-earning Americans, as the president has pushed for, or rolling back tax credits and closing loopholes as a way to increase revenue — stances that could well violate the Norquist pledge.
The debate over the fiscal cliff presents a test for Norquist, whose influence is likely to rise or fall depending on how the fight plays out in the coming weeks — and what punishment, if any, Norquist can exact on GOP lawmakers he views as transgressors.
“There are going to be some people who took that pledge that vote for tax increases, and the way he handles that will either preserve his influence or diminish it,” said Charlie Black, a veteran Republican lobbyist and strategist. Still, for now, Black acknowledged, “he is as influential as ever.”
More evidence of Norquist’s enduring influence in the GOP came last week in the way conservatives closed ranks around him during an unusually packed session of the regular meeting of activists and GOP officials Norquist hosts every Wednesday at his Americans for Tax Reform offices near Metro Center.
One after the other, participants rose to congratulate Norquist for his multiple television and radio appearances defending the tax pledge, and to assure the crowd that Republican activists and lawmakers would stand firm against Obama’s call to raise taxes. Attendees included emissaries from House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
“The fact they’re attacking Grover really shows the impact of what he’s doing,” Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), incoming chairman of the conservative caucus in the House known as the Republican Study Committee, said as the room burst into applause and cheers. Scalise then declared himself “proud to be a pledge signer.”
Norquist says he will not hesitate to support 2014 primary challenges against Republicans who violate the pledge. His group spent $15.7 million in the 2012 election, mostly against Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The threat of a primary fight is unnerving for many Republicans, and it helps explain why even some of Norquist’s apparent critics in the GOP — such as Chambliss, who is up for reelection in 2014 — want to smooth over any apparent tensions.
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) told ABC last week that Norquist was wrong to oppose finding new revenue by capping deductions and that “I will violate the pledge, long story short, for the good of the country, only if Democrats will do entitlement reform.”
The remarks did not faze Norquist. In an earlier private telephone chat, Norquist said, Graham had assured him that he would compromise on taxes only if Democrats agreed to entitlement changes “on a massive scale” — prompting Norquist to tell Graham that he would “never be tempted” to raise taxes because the left would never make such a concession.
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), who caused a stir when he urged House Republicans to consider letting taxes rise on the highest-earning Americans to preserve lower rates for others, later told CNN that “I admire Grover Norquist, I think he’s doing a lot of good,” and that he was “honored” to have signed the tax pledge. Cole said he did not think his idea violated the pledge.
Norquist said he also has had private conversations with Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who said Sunday on “Meet the Press” that he was “not obligated to any pledge other than my oath.” Norquist, appearing on the same program, said Corker had been “seduced into thinking, well, maybe I’ll have a small, tiny tax increase and have real reform and we’ll move forward.”
Norquist’s influence extends beyond the famous anti-tax declaration. In addition to heading Americans for Tax Reform, which he launched at the behest of President Ronald Reagan to lobby for White House priorities during the 1986 tax debate, Norquist is closely aligned with some of the GOP’s most well-heeled and politically active groups.
He sits on the board of the National Rifle Association, for instance.
Americans for Tax Reform does not disclose its donors, but The Post reported in April that Crossroads GPS, the political organization co-founded by Karl Rove, gave Norquist’s group $4 million in 2010.
Norquist also has built clout among key activists and politicians in Washington and around the country through his regular Wednesday meetings. His focus on fiscal policy, a unifying issue across all facets of conservatism, has helped Norquist take on the additional role of a sort of orchestra conductor for the political right.
The meetings, begun in 1993 with a small group rallying opposition to President Bill Clinton’s health-care plan, now bring together fiscal hawks, social conservatives, tea party followers, home-schoolers, gun enthusiasts, opponents of same-sex marriage — even Republican gays and abortion rights backers — for invitation-only strategy sessions. Top GOP officials or their staff members attend each meeting, as do key conservative group leaders. During the George W. Bush presidency, the White House regularly dispatched senior aides to attend.
“I’ve never seen anyone who understands coalitions more fully,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which raises money to elect women who oppose abortion rights, and a regular Wednesday attendee. “I’m in there with pro-choice Republicans.”
The off-the-record meetings have been replicated in 48 states. Norquist and his staff help coordinate those gatherings, giving him frequent and direct access to governors, state legislators and key activists on the ground far outside the Beltway — and in the back yards of GOP lawmakers considering a break from the tax pledge.
In 2009, Americans for Tax Reform moved locations, and Norquist custom-designed a meeting space with stadium seating and a giant glass wall to allow for sidebar conversations among participants who come to network as much as to listen to presenters.
At the 11 / 2-hour meeting, an intern counts participants every 15 minutes so Norquist can monitor the level of attendance throughout each session. Last week, with Norquist at the center of the fiscal-cliff debate, there were as many as 205 attendees.
Norquist used characteristically colorful language to warn Republicans that should they agree to raise taxes on wealthy people, pressure will mount for them to give even more ground. “The reason you don’t want your fingerprints on the murder weapon,” he said, “is that someone will ask you to use it again.”
Heads nodded in approval.
By: Peter Wallsten, The Washington Post, December 2, 2012
“Appearances Are Deceiving”: Vastly Overblown, Susan Collins Is No Independent Moderate
I have always thought that Maine Senator Susan Collins reputation as a moderate voice of bi-partisan reasonableness was vastly overblown. That prejudice was confirmed again this week as Collins prostituted her credibility as a centrist to the gang bang Republicans, led by John McCain and Lindsey Graham, are waging against UN Ambassador Susan Rice.
According to Think Progress, the presumably independent-minded Collins repeated GOP talking points when she announced she’d have a hard time supporting Rice as the next Secretary of State if President Obama nominated her after comments she made on the Sunday talk shows two days after the Sept. 11 Benghazi terror attacks.
“It’s important that the Secretary of State enjoy credibility around the world, with Congress and here in our country as well,” said Collins, “and I am concerned that Susan Rice’s credibility may have been damaged by the misinformation that was presented that day. That’s one reason, as I said, that I wish she had just told the White House no, you should send a political person to be on those Sunday shows.”
Collins had no misgivings about confirming Condoleeza Rice when she was nominated by President George W. Bush to be the nation’s top diplomat, as Think Progress notes, despite the political role she played misleading the American people during the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq.
According to Think Progress, Collins “hammered home various GOP talking points” about concerns that Rice may have acted overly political in providing an overview of the Obama administration’s knowledge in the aftermath of the attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, and said that damaged Rice’s credibility to be the top State Department official.
Susan Collins is the political equivalent of the Great White Hope – that ever-elusive Republican who at least appears to be open towards working with Democrats on the other side. But appearances can be deceiving, and in our rush to anoint Collins as another Great Compromiser in the tradition of Webster, Clay and Calhoun we may fail to recognize the partisan wolf who resides in a moderate sheep’s clothing.
I learned that the hard way two years ago when I attended an awards dinner in Boston honoring historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and Maine Senator Susan M. Collins.
I’d gone to the dinner along with 1,400 of New England’s movers and shakers to hear Goodwin, one of my heroes, reminisce about the joys of historical story-telling. But it was Collins who left the biggest impression with remarks that opened a window into the civil war currently raging for the soul of the Republican Party.
Collins has a reputation as an independent-minded moderate in a party that’s become ever more extreme over the past 15 years, a distinction she will briefly share with the two other New England “moderates” departing the Senate in the next Congress — Olympia Snowe of Maine and Scott Brown of Massachusetts.
Collins said all the right things to this New England audience about what makes our region’s politics unique: the retail style of living-room campaigning, the Town Meeting history of direct citizen involvement, the premium New Englanders place on no-nonsense Yankee problem-solving, and the hands-across-the-aisle tradition of bi-partisanship.
I did find it telling, though, that the only senators Collins mentioned by name were Lieberman, Dodd, and Kennedy: a turncoat, a lame duck and the dearly departed.
Given Collin’s reputation “as a thoughtful, effective legislator who works across party lines to seek consensus on our nation’s most pressing issues” (as the dinner’s program intoned) it was not surprising that Collins would be introduced by our evening’s host as the person who had followed in the footsteps of that other famous free spirit from Maine, Senator Margaret Chase Smith.
Smith, who detested Senator Joseph McCarthy from the start, is perhaps best known for the ringing “Declaration of Conscience” she delivered on the floor of the Senate on June 1, 1950, which earned her the epithet “Moscow Maggie” from McCarthy and his staff.
Her gauntlet was thrown less than four months after McCarthy’s own infamous Wheeling, West Virginia speech, in which he announced he had in his possession a list of Russian agents in the employ of the US government.
Smith’s Declaration attacked both the HUAC communist witch hunts then underway as well as laid out what Smith believed were the basic principles of “Americanism:” the right to criticize; the right to hold unpopular beliefs; the right to protest; and the right of independent thought.
Smith was a loyal Republican who said the Truman Administration had “lost the confidence of the American people” and should be replaced. But in words that now form an indelible part of American political history, Smith also said that to replace Truman “with a Republican regime embracing a philosophy that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to this nation. The nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny – Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.”
In her speech, Collins showed she has a long way to go if she wants to wear Maggie Smith’s mantle of patriotic, public-spirited statesmanship. Collins complained about the toxic partisanship poisoning politics in the nation’s capital, the loss of civility eating away at personal relationships, the extremism overtaking both major parties, and the vilification that awaits anyone (a.k.a. Collins herself) who tries to walk and work across party lines.
“I don’t know who first described politics as the ‘art of compromise,’ but that maxim, to which I have always subscribed, seems woefully unfashionable today,” said Collins. “Too few want to achieve real solutions; too many would rather draw sharp distinctions and score political points, even if that means neglecting the problems our country faces.”
Noble sentiments, all. But then you realize that the person who wants to “draw sharp distinctions” and “score political points” while neglecting “the problems our country faces” is Collins herself.
Rather than leverage her moderate standing to call out the bad behavior she claims to loathe, as Maggie Smith once did, Collins would rather trade on her reputation for evenhandedness in order to advance the Republican Party’s partisan prospects — whether it was in the 2010 mid-term elections two years ago or to pile on against Ambassador Rice today.
The great tragedy in America today is that there are so few leaders — in politics, the media or public life — who have the credibility to stand above the fray and be heard across partisan lines.
Every game needs it umpires and politics is no exception. However much we might genuflect to the Will of the People, we still need those adults who stand ready to mediate our disputes and differences, whose commitment to honesty, impartiality and disinterestedness is so obvious and so deep that we trust them implicitly to call balls and strikes and tell us “and that’s the way it is.”
Susan Collins was among those few we looked up to for an unbiased appraisal of current conditions – or as unbiased as is humanly possible in these hyperpolarized times. And that is why it was so dispiriting to find her making such patently self-serving remarks.
The far right of the GOP obviously got to her. That’s the most charitable explanation I can give for her obscene assertions that she’s never seen such “divisiveness and excessive partisanship” in the Senate before – ever. Or that partisan rancor is why the American people are so angry with incumbents — “particularly those who are in charge.”
Or that the reason Republicans “overuse the filibuster” is that Republicans are routinely shut out in a Senate that “used to pride itself on being a bastion of free and open debate.” Or that the way to promote greater harmony between parties is with “divided government and a more evenly split Senate.”
That’s right, to get along better what the county needs most is to elect more Tea Party Republicans who would see their own party spontaneously combust rather than see someone other than a far right extremist get elected. And those are South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint’s words, not mine.
Collins devoted her speech two years ago to New England’s political values and traditions. So, it’s only fitting, I think, to point out that while New England may indeed be the home of the elitist East Coast Establishment, with its Blue Bloods and Boston Brahmins who care more for the pedigree of one’s forbearers than the pedigree of one’s ideas, the New England ruling classes were also able to develop, however grudgingly, a tradition of public-spirited public service that contrasts sharply with the kind of narrowly ideological leadership historically found in other regions of the country, most notably the hierarchal, self-serving plantation-owning South, whose feudal ways have always made it the natural antagonist of scrappy, inventive New England.
New England’s WASP establishment did react with alarm, if not horror, to the invasion of Irish Catholics and others in the middle decades of the 19th century. And the nativist Know-Nothing Party that sprung up in reaction at that time (much like the Tea Party today) remains a black stain on the region’s legacy.
But from that experience, and the simple need to get along, New England’s conservative political elites gradually adopted the habits of a responsible leadership class, one rooted in the genuinely conservative values that promoted social peace and harmony by mediating differences between their community’s competing ethnic groups and classes.
The fact that New England is now considered the most liberal region of the country shows how easily certain American understandings of liberalism and conservatism can overlap. And this is the origin of New England’s liberal, nobblesse oblige brand of “Rockefeller” Republicanism that is now virtually extinct, whose leadership traits were unlike those habits developed by the ruling elites in other regions of the country, like the South, where the political establishment there found it expedient to preserve its privileges and power through divide and conquer politics that, rather than mediate differences, sought to provoke antagonisms within the population instead.
Much the same dynamic is playing out within a Republican Party today as it finds itself divided between those few moderates who see the connection between the responsibilities of national leadership and the need for cooperation and compromise — understanding that the only sustainable society is an inclusive one — and those rigid ideologues of the radical right who view compromise as a sign of betrayal to both cause and party, while they wall themselves up in their gated communities of body, mind and spirit.
Extremism is on the march everywhere, wrote Walter Lippmann during the calamities of the 1930s as civilization itself seemed to be coming apart because the liberal democracies had been tried and found wanting – both in their “capacity to govern successfully in this period of wars and upheaval but also in their ability to defend and maintain the political philosophy that underlies the liberal way of life.”
Yet, who is ready to stand up for the liberal way of life now? In 1950, a Republican Senator from Maine stood on the floor of the US Senate to denounce her own kind for shamelessly exploiting “the Four Horsemen of Calumny – Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.”
Sixty years later, her successor stood before New England’s elite and embarrassed her region, its governing traditions and herself when she shamelessly exploited impartiality and civility itself for a few more votes.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon, November 30, 2012
“Torture Queen”: Kelly Ayotte Did Something For Us All To Be Proud
So who is Kelly Ayotte anyway, to be threatening to place an unprecedented (in modern times) hold on a secretary of state nominee? She hasn’t done much yet in the Senate, but the one thing she did really try to do was to pass an amendment that could have permitted the United States to torture suspects again.
This all unfolded in late 2011, and the amendment didn’t become law. But it’s instructive anyway. After Obama limited interrogation techniques to those found in the Army Field Manual, some on the right started barking about how since the field manual is available online, terror suspects would know what they might be subjected to, and somehow of course this added up to appeasement and so forth. Adam Serwer reported at the time for Mother Jones:
“When a member of Al Qaeda or a similar associated terrorist group, I want them to be terrified about what’s going to happen to them in American custody,” said Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), explaining his support for the amendment. “I want them not to know what’s going to happen, I want that the terror that they inflict on others to be felt by them as a result of the uncertainty that they can look on the Internet and know exactly what our interrogators are limited to.” In an exchange with Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Ayotte acknowledged that part of her goal was to reauthorize some Bush-era “enhanced interrogation techniques” other than waterboarding.
Great. Something for us all to be proud of. No wonder she picked up where Lieberman left off. Quite a “worthy” successor to him as the third amigo.
She also became known, while her name was briefly on some short lists to be Mitt Romney’s veep choice, for parrotting the “apology tour” lie. PolitiFact destroyed her in this post over the summer. Demagogic nonsense, which American voters handily rejected.
I want to emphasize again what a new low in partisan warfare it would be to place a hold on a secretary of state nominee. If there’s one cabinet post that just has to be filled, it’s that one. State was the first cabinet agency created by Congress, meaning that the secretary of state is the oldest cabinet position, and to most people it’s the most venerated and important post of all of them (Treasury logs a few votes).
For one senator, especially a relatively junior one, to deny a reelected president his choice to head State would be rather amazing. I see that some on the right are calling such a potential move payback for what the Democrats did to John Bolton. Not an insane point, but three responses to that.
One: The UN ambassador (which Bush nominated Bolton to) ain’t the secretary of state by a longsihot. Two: Bolton had a particularly incendiary history of attacking the UN, the very body before which Bush wanted him to represent our country (which he ultimately did, as a recess appointee).
Remember this quote?: “The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” I know all our wingers will say that’s true, but wingers, imagine a Democrat nominating to head the Pentagon someone who said the building could lose the E ring and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.
Third: Opposition to Bolton was hardly limited to liberal senators. Fifty-nine former diplomats from both parties signed a letter urging Bush not to name Bolton. The day Rice faces that kind of opposition, then the two cases will be parallel. Until then, not so much.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 28, 2012
“Unicorn’s And Other Fables”: Grover Norquist’s Latest Plot To Drown Government…Monthly Debt Ceiling Fights
There’s two ways to look at Grover Norquist. He’s either the most powerful unelected man in the world or an amazing self-promoter who is about to be proven obsolete. Norquist obviously feels he’s the former. For nearly two decades, he’s held Republicans to a pledge to never raise taxes. Now he wants them to force the president to cede to their wishes on a monthly basis.
The President of Americans for Tax Reform is urging Republicans to use the debt ceiling to exact spending cuts or continue the Bush tax cuts for incomes over $250,000.
“The debt ceiling that Obama’s plans bump into every month or so for the next four years provides plenty of ‘leverage’ for the GOP to trade for spending cuts — as done in 2011 — or continuing the lower rates,” Norquist wrote Wednesday in The Hill.
Nearly 6 out of 10 Americans want to end the Bush tax breaks for the rich. But enough Republicans in the House and Senate have signed Norquist’s American Taxpayer Pledge that he’s certain that the negotiations on the so-called “fiscal cliff” can end without taxes going up.
After an electoral college landslide, many — including the White House — believe that the president has the leverage in negotiations. But the debt ceiling, which we will hit in February, does give Republicans a chance to make demands on the president.
When President Obama asked Speaker Boehner to raise the debt limit, Boehner reportedly said, “There is a price for everything.”
In 2011, Republicans, for the first time ever, used the debt limit to force cuts — something they never asked for in the dozens of times they raised the limit for the last three Republican presidents.
Though senators Lindsey Graham, Saxby Chambliss and other Republicans have said they would break their pledge with Norquist, the lobbyist seems unfazed. He told Slate’s Dave Weigel that he has no concerns that his pledge is about to crumble.
“I’ve talked to Lindsey Graham on the phone after some of his pronouncements, and he’s said, ‘Oh, I would need 10-1 [ratio of cuts to tax hikes], and it would have to include permanent, unalterable entitlement reform.’ I said, ‘Lindsey, if that’s what it’s going to take to get you to raise taxes, I’m not going to worry about you,” Norquist said. “You are not in danger of being offered a silver unicorn, because unicorns don’t exist.”
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent keeps insisting that the GOP is just trying to present an appearance of compromise. Some Republicans are making news with their alleged willingness to buck Norquist — but votes speak louder than words.
Unlike many Republicans, Norquist would be pleased if the so-called sequester goes into effect. He’s a Republican who believes the Department of Defense isn’t sacred when it comes to spending cuts.
The question is, how many Republicans would be willing to risk the cuts to Defense along with responsiblty for a middle-class tax increase by holding out for a deal that honors Norquist’s pledge?
And if the president won’t agree, will they doom the United States’ credit and cause unprecedented “uncertainty,” which Republicans claim to hate, by holding the debt limit hostage on a monthly basis?
Even if Republicans were to go down that path, the president would have to adopt a strategy advocated by former president Bill Clinton often called “the 14th Amendment option.”
The amendment includes the sentence, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payments of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion shall not be questioned.”
In 2011, Clinton said that “without hesitation” he would invoke the 14th Amendment “and force the courts to stop me.”
President Obama nixed that plan, saying his lawyers didn’t see the validity in it. But if Republicans decided to use the debt ceiling to keep him on an “allowance,” it wouldn’t be hard to imagine him deciding that it was worth going to court.
Norquist has never been shy about his disdain for government. He’s often joked,” I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” But he’s never faced a predicament like expiring tax cuts and a president with the political capital to fight to keep some of them expired.
Soon we’ll find out how much power he actually has.
BY: Jason Sattler, The National Memo. November 28, 2012
“An Unpatriotic Strategy”: In Their Baseless Persecution Of Susan Rice, Republican Reputations Are Sinking
With the Republican right persisting in baselesss persecution of Susan Rice, the UN Ambassador who may replace departing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, they have left President Obama little choice but to move ahead with her nomination. If he backs away from Rice, in the face of what he has called false accusations against her, that display of weakness would undermine his second term before it begins.
The opposition to Rice is cobbled together from the remnants of a failed “October Surprise” election gambit, which began when Mitt Romney sought to smear the president by using the tragic attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. In the election’s aftermath, Senate Republicans have fixated on Rice, whom they accuse of misleading the public in television appearances several days after the Sept. 11 incident.
Rice’s supposed offense was to downplay the likelihood that the attack had been perpetrated by al Qaeda terrorists or their local allies, while underlining the idea that it had been inspired by an anti-Muslim video on the Internet. On ABC News’ This Week, she repeated almost precisely the talking points provided to her by the CIA:
Our current best assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous — not a premeditated — response to what had transpired in Cairo. In Cairo, as you know, a few hours earlier, there was a violent protest that was undertaken in reaction to this very offensive video that was disseminated. We believe that folks in Benghazi, a small number of people came to the embassy to — or to the consulate, rather, to replicate the sort of challenge that was posed in Cairo.
And then as that unfolded, it seems to have been hijacked, let us say, by some individual clusters of extremists who came with heavier weapons, weapons that as you know in — in the wake of the revolution in Libya are — are quite common and accessible. And it then evolved from there. We’ll wait to see exactly what the investigation finally confirms, but that’s the best information we have at present.
In those remarks, Rice clearly warned against drawing any conclusions from the preliminary information then available. Nevertheless, Senate Republicans led by John McCain (R-AZ) have sought to defame her as a liar, a fool, or worse. The latest insult came on Tuesday from Senator Kelly Ayotte, a junior Republican from New Hampshire with no significant national security experience and little evident grasp of the facts. Tagging along with the embittered McCain and his reliable sidekick Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Ayotte made an unprecedented threat to put a “hold” on Rice’s nomination if Obama sends it up to the Hill – the first time in memory that a senator has deployed that privilege against a prospective nominee to head the State Department.
Exactly what the right suspects about Benghazi isn’t clear. Initially, Republicans seem to have hoped that talking up al Qaeda would somehow help Romney and damage Obama. Not the most patriotic strategy, but that was their plan. What they supposedly suspect now remains obscure. Graham mutters darkly that he is “disturbed,” while McCain claims to be “troubled.” The blustering Ayotte has now locked herself in a bunker with these volatile characters, whose motives and behavior are hardly above suspicion.
Whatever their problem, knuckling under to such a puerile challenge would represent an unacceptable defeat for the newly re-elected Obama.
Properly, the Benghazi incident is under investigation by the FBI and the CIA as well as Congressional committees – and what those probes appear to have established so far is that the security arrangements at the consulate never came within the specific purview of the White House. The CIA almost certainly made mistakes and omissions in protecting the consulate, and sadly paid for those errors with the lives of courageous agency officers who died there trying to protect the State Department staff when the compound came under sustained assault from heavily armed jihadi militants.
The notion that Rice or any other administration official intentionally misled the public already has been thoroughly debunked by David Petraeus, the resigned CIA director. Petraeus told a closed-door hearing on Capitol Hill, attended by McCain, that Rice had faithfully followed the declassified talking points provided by US intelligence agencies. (McCain promptly fled from reporters when that hearing ended.) Although the president himself had referred to the Benghazi attack as an “act of terror” in the White House Rose Garden, specific information about potential terrorist suspects remained classified for sound investigative reasons.
It isn’t hard to imagine what McCain would say if Rice had accidentally blurted out classified details of the Benghazi probe prematurely on television. In fact, it isn’t necessary to imagine, because not so long ago, he angrily accused the White House of revealing classified information. But in fact, the only damaging leak in the Benghazi matter emerged from the hyperactive mouth of Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Government Reform Committee.
Perhaps McCain, Graham, and Ayotte should instead spew their bile on Issa, who has actually abused his authority and trifled with national security. They would be better off, because their reputations — and not Rice’s — will be irreparably damaged if they continue to pursue this vendetta when the president sends up her nomination.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, November 28, 2012
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