The Susan Rice hysteria of the nutters has reached the point where even the Washington Post Editorial page is calling it out:
The oddity of the Republican response to what happened in Benghazi is partly this focus on half-baked conspiracy theories rather than on the real evidence of failures by the State Department, Pentagon and CIA in protecting the Benghazi mission. What’s even stranger is the singling out of Ms. Rice, a Rhodes scholar and seasoned policymaker who, whatever her failings, is no one’s fool.
Could it be, as members of the Congressional Black Caucus are charging, that the signatories of the letter are targeting Ms. Rice because she is an African American woman? The signatories deny that, and we can’t know their hearts. What we do know is that more than 80 of the signatories are white males, and nearly half are from states of the former Confederacy. You’d think that before launching their broadside, members of Congress would have taken care not to propagate any falsehoods of their own.
Somehow all of this is good news for John McCain.
So how about another open thread.
Also, too: football.
Cheers
Cassidy
Not much longer before we decide which SEC team wins the NC.
Handy
Good news for McCain! lol
D. Mason
It’s a dog whistle.
Origuy
@D. Mason: They’ve given up on dog whistles, they’re using air horns.
Yutsano
@Cassidy: Does that mean I can stop paying attention? The only game I was really concerned with happened last night with positive results for me and YellowJournalism. Gwangung might be in mourning, but he just works there. :)
Maude
I am hoping Dr. Rice becomes SoS.
She would do this country a lot of good.
McCain has to pay a price for saying that she’s not too bright.
Cassidy
@Yutsano: Prettymuch. The Dawgs and Bama will be playing for the privilege of beating Notre Dame on television.
Ben Franklin
Forget it, Jake. It’s Texas.
mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Shopper-who-pulled-gun-at-San-Antonio-mall-within-4060598.p…
Cassidy
@Maude: It’s McCain. Every woman is not too bright to him.
Ben Franklin
This guy died of a heart attack in 1989….now polonium weighs in.
todayszaman.com/news-296892-late-president-ozal-died-of-poisoning-daily-claims.html
He worked toward solving the Kurdish problem.
Arafat to be exhumed next week.
I don’t see the synchronicity.
balconesfault
It’s not that Susan Rice is black that REALLY bothers them. They were fine with that other Rice woman, after all.
It’s that she’s working for a black boss in the White House. They are never going to be happy about that.
Ruckus
Could it be, as members of the Congressional Black Caucus are charging, that the signatories of the letter are targeting Ms. Rice because she is an African American woman?
That’s not possible!
No way would racists say racist things, how can you imply such blasphemy?
Maude
@Cassidy:
True dat.
Yutsano
@Cassidy: For personal reasons I say Roll Tide. But the really important detail is the humiliation of the Papists.
geg6
@balconesfault:
Disagree. It’s that she’s a black woman working for the black guy in the White House and she isn’t a GOPer.
As for the obvious racism we’ve seen over the last 4-5 years, I am told in the previous thread that the only racism one can find in all of America is right here on Balloon Juice. Only us Juicers are racists. Against white people. If it wasn’t for Balloon Juicers, there would be no racism at all and all the white men like Timmeh and his new bestest friend on that thread wouldn’t have to trouble their beautiful minds about it.
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
It may be Rice herself to some extent but even a white male SoS candidate would get dirtied in the attempt to smear Obama with Benghazi mud. It’s not personal, it’s just a weapon to make a Dem pres look weak.
MattF
I think Gramps McCain is losing it. Also, it’s not just Hiatt, Joe Klein is unhappy:
swampland.time.com/2012/11/20/the-benghazi-circus/
Also, if anyone really needs convincing that Rice is an experienced, capable professional who would make a fine SoS, and that McCain is a doddering idiot, there was a contrarian item in Slate (no linkee) claiming that Rice was losing the PR battle on the Sunday talk shows, and thereforesomethingshutup.
Yutsano
@geg6: Calling out racism is MEEEEEAAAN!! How DARE we pierce their perfect white privileged bubbles? Better to ignore the treatment of minorities because hey, it doesn’t affect THEM, amirite?
TG Chicago
Members/allies of the Obama administration to be targets of crazed, hateful conspiracy theories or mudslinging:
Susan Rice
Valerie Jarrett
Van Jones
Eric Holder
Huma Abedin
Steven Chu
Sonia Sotomayor
Lisa Jackson
FLOTUS
POTUS
Members/allies of the Obama administration who have NOT been targets of crazed, hateful conspiracy theories:
Joe Biden
Hillary Clinton (not in the last 4 years, anyway)
David Axelrod
David Plouffe
Elena Kagan
Timothy Geithner
Rahm Emanuel
Leon Panetta
Can you think of anything else that differentiates the first list from the second?
Please remind me if I’m forgetting anything that targeted members of the bottom list.
Some caveats: Janet Napolitano has gotten her share of right wing hate, and she’s white. Hilda Solis and Ken Salazar are Hispanic and have gotten some degree of hate, but not sure if it’s enough to put them on the first list. But overall, it’s a fairly clear pattern.
MattF
@TG Chicago: Would it be mean to point out that the first list has two Nobel Prize winners on it?
WaterGirl
@MattF: Wow. Smackdown!
The last paragraph at your link is a thing of beauty :
Another Halocene Human
@geg6: Racist against white people since 1996! Boo-yah!
The proper term is race traitor. Wear it with pride.
Another Halocene Human
Famous Race Traitors:
Moses
Jesus
Sacagewea
Abraham Lincoln
FDR
King Christian X
Sarek and Amanda
Another Halocene Human
@RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist: It may be Rice herself to some extent but even a white male SoS candidate would get dirtied in the attempt to smear Obama with Benghazi mud. It’s not personal, it’s just a weapon to make a Dem pres look weak.
Yup. They know they can’t block his appointments now so they tried to stir up shit to make it impossible for him to choose his own appointments anyway.
I just love the fact that it’s not going to work.
Todd Dugdale
The Right really needs a “win” right now. That’s why they’re focused on Susan Rice. If they can keep her from being confirmed, they ‘prove’ their awesome power, at least in their own minds. They become “a force to be reckoned with”, instead of delusional losers tied to a fading demographic.
Really, how is Rice in the U.N. more comforting to the Right than Rice as SoS?
I’m not a fan of Susan Rice, but if she is the denied the SoS position, it will be built up into “how the GOP saved Western civilisation”.
Another Halocene Human
FYWP… I tried to edit my comment and it was marked as spam. Just some comments about R___ Em_____l. Da hell?
Another Halocene Human
@TG Chicago: Could you bring me up to date on the Stephen Chu conspiracy?
Maybe I just hang around too many nerds, but to me he’s the first rockstar at DOE. He told some creationist fuckers off, even though he’s this skinny nerd. Love him.
Another Halocene Human
@MattF: Good piece, although it’s Klein, so I keep waiting for the other foot to drop.
Wag
@TG Chicago:
Nicely laid out and as an overarching idea, quite sound. Some of the details may not be quite as clean, but overall an excellent point.
Thanks
gorram
@TG Chicago: You forgot Shirley Sherrod, but that just proves your point…
Citizen_X
Impossible! Why, when Condi Rice came here and lied through her teeth, we believed everything she said, no matter how preposterous!
Er, wait a minute, let me try that again…
Schlemizel
Lets pretend it isn’t racism – hell it might not be, these assholes might oppose Pat Boone if President Obama nominated him. It may just be the sort of horse ass politics the GOP has been practicing since the Gingrich de-revolution. But its racially insensitive in a way that would offend anyone who actually pays any attention to the impact of race on America.
It may not be racism but is so tone deaf if it isn’t racism that it easily explains why the GOP has no real friends with people of color
Steve Crickmore
Isn’t this rather a knee- jerk response, charging McCain with being a racist? The McCains after all, have been very proud of their adoptive daughter who is as black, if not blacker than Obama’s daughters or Susan Rice.
gorram
I think it’s actually a very specific type of racism at play in the hearings. Yes, anyone nominated for the position would get a ridiculous cross examination for daring to be an ostensible part of Obama’s administration, but that paranoia fuses with racist values. It’s doubly hard to convince them that you’re not part of some crypto-Black Panther coup when you’re a person of color though, because the right has for years been talking about a race war or whatever.
I hate Condi, but she is a smart woman. She knows the easiest way to deal with it is to tell them exactly what they hear and believe it too.
Yutsano
@Steve Crickmore: Bridget is from Bangladesh. Your move to explain how that makes her blacker than the Obamas.
gorram
Ack, “what they want to hear” I meant. Sorry…
Cassidy
@Yutsano: once the Gators are out of the mix, I’m a supporter of whichever SEC team is playing for the NC. The wife’s a Bama fan, though, and hasn’t let me forget the past few year’s ass kickin’.
Steve Crickmore
@Yutsano: Here is photo of her at the 2008 Republican Convention.
Steve Crickmore
@Yutsano: Here is photo of her at the 2008 Republican Convention.
Anya
@Yutsano: Maybe he means darker skin. Which is a true statement.
Gin & Tonic
@Steve Crickmore: I may not always be up on the vernacular, but here in the US, when referring to a person, “black” is vanishingly seldom used to refer to people of Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan or south Indian ancestry, even if their skin happens to be darker than the average African-American’s.
Yutsano
@Gin & Tonic: This. Thank you.
@Anya: Maybe it’s a subjectivity thing, but I think Michelle is darker in skin tone. However Bridget also didn’t defeat Grandpa Walnuts in an election.
Villago Delenda Est
McCain continues to shit on the uniform he once wore.
The man is an utter disgrace.
Steve Crickmore
Gin & Tonic, that may be so but to paint the the Republicans as almost prima facie racist for criticizing Susan Rice ‘s possible nomination as Secretary of the State is incoherent. The GOP’s last two Secretary of State appointments were what is commonly termed black or African-American: Condi Rice and Colin Powell. Susan Rice’s father, Emmett Rice, was a governor of the Federal Reserve System and her mother, Lois Dickson Fitt, is an academic scholar whose parents, (like Powells) were born in Jamaica. I think it’s their Democrats politics they object to, in these cases, not from where they were from or the pigment of their skin.
Hal
Does anyone know what exactly it is that Rice is supposed to have done that is so horrible and makes her ineligible to be SOS? The entirety of these attacks seem based on the idea that Obama knew this would happen, or should have, and let it happen. The foundation for these attacks are conspiracy theories generated by right wing nuts, and yet there’s John McCain, once again proving what an idiot he is, along with numerous other members of Congress.
Maureen Dowd published an opinion piece on the matter, and the entirety of her complaint seems to be that Rice should have known better than to believe intelligence officials, and gee, do we really need another SOS named Rice who might taint the office? No real substance as to why Rice’s name should be off the list.
Rick Massimo
The mainstream-media use of the term “Former Confederacy” strikes me as a really big deal.
I heartily approve. Get ’em back on their heels.
Wolfdaughter
For some of the Repubs, this is probably all that is involved. For others, I think race is involved as well, tho possibly not on a conscious level.
Anya
@Yutsano: I don’t know. I still think Bridget is darker than Michelle. Look at this picture which is outdoors in a not very bright day and compare it to linked photo here@Steve Crickmore:
Of course this does not matter at all, except for my need to be right.
Anya
@Hal: The most ridiculous argument was made by some reporter named something Newton Small, who argued (on Tweedy’s show) that Rice’s reliance on talking points proved that she’s not an independent heavy weight SoS but instead will be under Obama’s thumb. Yeah, like SoS’s have their own foreign policy independent of the POTUS.
BobS
@TG Chicago:At this point, Obama and the Democrats in general have a lot to gain by him nominating black and Hispanic women to high profile administration positions and the resulting optics of angry old white Republican men assaulting those nominees.
the Conster
@BobS:
Tweety has done a good job of pointing this out to his panelists – yeah, Tweety. He likens it to the Sotomayor nomination, and basically is goading them to keep repeating their errors.
Laura
These people aren’t racist. If they were really racist they would’ve never let Condi near the State Department.
These people are angry that she’s working for a Democrat.
ruemara
Once again, I am always thrilled to see white males come out of the woodwork to explain to others what racism actually is. At some point, you really do have to bow to their superior knowledge on exactly what bigotry is, the specificities on how it manifests and the proper methods to draw any conclusions. Thanks again, white males, without you, nothing gets done.
TG Chicago
@Another Halocene Human: Basically, some folks blame Chu for Solyndra. Which, of course, was worse than 500 Watergates.
@@gorram: Wag: Thanks. Agreed that it’s in broad strokes, but it does seem mighty odd. I mean, the rightwing rank-and-file already loathes Hillary (or at least they did in the 90s), but their media masters have done little to capitalize on it. Instead, they focus their misplaced Benghazi blame on Susan Rice.
@gorram – excellent addition to list #1! Shame on me for leaving her off, as Sherrod was perhaps the most egregious example.
@BobS – increasing much-needed diversity while getting political wins for the left? This middle-aged white dude will get behind that play 100%!!
mandarama
@Yutsano: I am totally not into sports, except through living in a house with 3 males who are. What’s everyone’s hatred of ND about? My husband went there, so I hope they win because it will make him happy…but this whole season I’ve noticed how much people dislike the school. Is it like people disliking the Yankees?
I have to say, my husband gets a beating for liking both ND and NY–but he attended the first, and the second…his elderly dad is from Irish Harlem and grew up going to see Mickey Mantle play at Yankee Stadium. I can’t imagine how he _wouldn’t_ be fans of those teams as a result. But I always see here how much both are disliked. Just curious; no one flame me, please!
Full disclosure: I teach at an SEC school and I am really proud of how hard the athletes in my classes work, so I’m usually happy to see any team with strong academic performance win. But like I said, sports are pretty meaningless to me personally.