Friday, 14 December 2012

The long-drawn-out seppuku of Susan Rice

A seppuku was a clean and quick lethal affair.



But in the case of Dr. Susan Rice, it seems to be a long-drawn-out

messy and botched thing.



In her opinion piece on the Washington Post about the Rice debacle,

Jennifer Rubin assumes that Susan Rice, a "political flunky to the

end," "dutifully limped away, well, after crawling out from under the

bus" where President Barack Obama had allegedly thrown her.



Rubin couldn't have been more wrong--though she rightly assesses that

Rice's "record on Africa was dreadful."



Rice isn't leaving on tiptoe, as it turns out.



In the same issue of the Washington Post that Rubin has her op-ed is

posted, Rice published a long-drawn-out a vitriolically rancorous

opinion piece in which she unpacks what she only outlined in her

letter to President Obama.



I think that deconstructionists would have had a field day parsing the

following glaring aporia in the 3rd paragraph of Rice's self-serving

defense.



In that paragraph, Rice first states that:



"When discussing Benghazi, I relied on fully cleared, unclassified

points provided by the intelligence community, which encapsulated

their best current assessment."



She then establishes that:



"These unclassified points were consistent with the classified

assessments I received as a senior policymaker."



O.K. then.



We get the following equation:



"unclassified points" = "classified assessments"



Without any transition to prepare us for the subsequent leap, Rice

then adds this non-sequitur which I capitalize below:



"It would have been irresponsible for me to substitute any personal

judgment for our government's and WRONG TO REVEAL CLASSIFIED

MATERIAL."



Oh my! The equation was in fact an inequation after all?!



If this "mediocre" (Secretary Hillary Clinton's assessment of Rice,

according to Rubin) who can get bogged down in the quagmire of a

paragraph of her own penning is the person President Obama has in mind

for the position of head of the US National Security Council (or wants

to keep as ambassador at the UN), then we ain't out of the woods yet!



(Jennifer Rubin's op-ed:

m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2012/12/13/susan-rice-withdraws/)



(Susan Rice's op-ed:

m.washingtonpost.com/opinions/susan-rice-my-withdrawal-from-secretary-of-state-consideration-was-right-call/2012/12/13/ad69b3fc-4578-11e2-9648-a2c323a991d6_story.html)





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PHOTO CREDITS: Jim Young/Reuters

Via: guardiannews.com

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