President Barack Obama’s top national security adviser Tom Donilon is resigning and will be replaced by U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, marking a significant shakeup to the White House foreign policy team.
The position does not require Senate confirmation.
What a joke.
Rice, then U.N. Ambassador, went on Sunday talk shows at a time of political peril for Obama’s campaign and told a false story which no one defends anymore, that a spontaneous protest over a video led to the killing of our Libyan ambassador and several other Americans in Benghazi.
Rice did not merely rely on talking points cleansed by the administration of references to al-Qaeda planning the attack, she inserted the video claim either on her own or at someone’s request.
The best case scenario for Rice was that she was a clueless dupe who didn’t bother to ask obvious questions and was completely out of the loop on what the intelligence community and State Department knew, yet obliviously parroted a political story line in service not of the country but of her boss’s political campaign.
That’s the best case scenario, and it has been rewarded in an in-your-face, I don’t care about your damn evidence and investigations move by Obama.
Even the NY Times admits as much:
It is also a defiant gesture to Republicans who harshly criticized Ms. Rice for presenting an erroneous account of the deadly attacks on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya.
Susan Rice becoming the new National Security Advisor shows how seriously he takes Benghazi. It's a slap in the face of the families.
— Lee Stranahan ⏳ (@stranahan) June 5, 2013
Update: To add insult to injury, Obama is nominating Samantha Power to be U.N. Ambassador. She does require Senate approval.
In 2003, Power advocated "instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa" as U.S. foreign policy. http://t.co/1FDsBd8So6
— Keith Urbahn (@keithurbahn) June 5, 2013
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Comments
The country is in the very best hands. Only 3.5 years to go . . .
Sad but true. Unless of course there is a Le-gal In-sur-rec-tion
Good one. OK Susie, all together now. B.E.N.G…no no, not BenGay®..
More troublesome than “instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa” is the fact that Cass Sunstein’s wife Samantha Powers also spoke of invading Israel as a means of bringing peace to the Middle East.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFdt6fjdHQw
Unholy Alliance: the American Left and radical Islam (David Horowitz, 2003)
Pure contempt. It’s why Eric Holder will never be fired. How audacious does it need to get before the GOP understands? Because they still do not.
It can not be more obvious that Obama has nothing but contempt for Republicans (and by extension those of us who vote Republican). This move is the equivalent of giving us his middle finger.
He has never been interested in seeking common ground on anything. It’s his way or no way with this guy. He’s brilliantly persuaded the media to portray all of his bullying as Republican “obstructionism” when Republicans don’t give in to his demands.
He gave Republicans his other middle finger when he announced his plan to stack the Court of Appeals in the DC Circuit by nominating three judges at once. We get to look forward to three and a half more years of this crap. Welcome to the second term.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/350109/kerry-israel-must-enter-multilateral-talks-dimitrios-halikias
Kerry et. al are not going to rest until Israel is reduced.
These people are dangerous.
[…] Much more at Legal Insurrection. […]
Stunning article from Bill Gertz in the WashTimes today:
An al Qaeda terrorist stated in a recent online posting that U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens was killed by lethal injection after plans to kidnap him during the Sept. 11 attacks in Benghazi went bad.
The veracity of the claim by Abdallah Dhu-al-Bajadin, who was identified by U.S. officials as a weapons expert for al Qaeda, could not be determined. However, U.S. officials have not dismissed the terrorist’s assertion.
An FBI spokeswoman indicated that the bureau is aware of the claim but declined to comment because of the ongoing investigation into the Benghazi attacks.
…….
If true… who knows?
Read past this and look at all the recent evidence. First, you have David Axelrod giving advice to the Republicans to not “over-reach” on Benghazi. Then you have Susan Rice and () being recycled into top-echelon national security roles. Watch for David Petraeus to be recycled soon as well.
What does this mean? Is it “In Your Face, I’m President!” politics? No, quite simply it means that there is something quite serious, quite damaging, and quite embarrassing behind the whole Benghazi event that cannot be revealed. Thus, any vacant position that would have access to this data trail must now be filled by retreads that already know. Any future attempts to get this data will be thwarted by executive privilege.
The IRS scandal, while big, was released to divert attention away from Benghazi. Keep on that trail, and find a patriot who doesn’t fear Chicago-on-the-Potomac.
Your quote is worth repeating. Thank you.
“…it means that there is something quite serious, quite damaging, and quite embarrassing behind the whole Benghazi event that cannot be revealed….
“The IRS scandal…was released to divert attention away from Benghazi..
Perhaps it is time to enlist the Professor with regard to a grassroots attempt to negate the results of the last election based on fraud, lies AND incompetence…
What say you?
I have to use the phrase “crazy like a fox” for the second time today.
The brilliant Obama Doctrine strategy is just to exhaust the will of Islamist terrorists by making excuses for them and never, ever giving them credit for their massacres.
They can shout, “We did it! We’re responsible!!” all they want … to no avail.
The Obama admin. just answers with, “No you didn’t. It wasn’t you. It had nothing to do with Islam …”
That would tire anybody out!
Speaking of crazy like a fox. The fox isn’t guarding the henhouse.
We’ve got the hens guarding the fox house.
Rice’s cable news Tour of Shame peddling the evil video alibi revealed she is one of only three possibilities:
1. She knew the real story but is totally comfortable lying to the American people. Huge character flaw/danger sign.
2. She didn’t know the real story but is totally comfortable passing along demonstrable lies to the American people. Huge character flaw/danger sign.
3. She didn’t know but toally believed what she was ordered to repeat, making her too stupid, naiveté, or both, too totally comfortable with her useful idiocy to serve in any government post.
Many an adjective, positive and negative, has been spent on Susan Rice, but stupid or naïve is not among them. This woman is fully on board with the F**k The Laws Brigade currently running the country, the consummate committed leftist political hack.
Just think of all the wonderful databases of information on citizens, groups, organizations, companies, and corporations that would be available to a president’s National Security Advisor. Be a darn shame if some of that data leaked.
If they’d do it with the IRS, what argument certifies they wouldn’t do it with the NSA? Would those who ordered IRS into political battle balk at ordering some other federal agency to do the same? Of course, you’d need a bought ‘n owned thug to run the op for you, someone like Susan Rice as National Security Advisor.
Addendum: I meant to add – I think this administration has shown the required level of willing lawlessness to try the following: now that the anti-conservative game is up at IRS, they drag it out, let the GOP lop a few heads for the peasants, let the whole thing slide into the past, and all the while they are setting up an essentially identical ‘screw conservatives’ program in some other federal agency, the tactics dictated by the particular powers of the particular agency, but a politicized national security team would have access to immense amounts of sensitive data.
I am trying to figure out what Obama thinks Susan Rice brings to the National Security Advisor’s position. The Middle East is on fire, Iran is moving into Argentina, China is making move into the Caribbean and toward Japan. In the face of all this and in the face of the serious foreign policy failures, why would Obama want anyone other than the best?
She was a disaster as assistant secy of state for African affairs during Clinton admin. So bad even the NYTimes gave her a negative review.*
It gets worse. An excerpt:
“Ambassador Rice and her colleagues are deeply partial to Rwanda because of their involvement in the crafting of the Clinton policies toward Rwanda and the Congo. They are blinded by their policy commitments and guilt. In fact, they [benefitted] financially, since Kagame’s Rwanda [was a client of their consulting firm while Rice was in-between gov’t jobs], which is paid by Kagame to defend Rwanda in Washington.”**
*http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/opinion/susan-rice-and-africas-despots.html
**http://foreignpolicyblogs.com/2013/03/20/the-congo-and-why-obama-should-repudiate-clinton-policies/**
Since the Obama administration has no national security policy, and does not want to have a national security policy, it makes sense to appoint someone completely corrupt and incompetent to be the national security advisor.
I assume Susan Rice was rewarded by Obama with the NSC chief position for being a dutiful spear carrier for him after the Benghazi debacle last September. She went on those 5 Sunday talk shows and parroted the party-line cooked up by the White House-State Dept. “team”. Recall that the initial CIA-developed position/talking points on the Benghazi attack presented an accurate picture of what happened. They then morphed thru 12 rewrites into the phony YouTube video-induced mob attacks after “inputs” from State & the White House. I believe that Clinton and Obama jointly cooked up the phony cover story for what happened. (They’re on the same page in that regard.)
A more serious policy difference between Susan Rice & Samantha Powers versus Obama himself is their instinct for humanitarian interventions when “genocides” are in the making. (Powers has been nominated by Obama as the new Ambassador to the UN, replacing Rice.) Rice and Powers lobbied for US intervention in Libya to overthrow Mummar Gaddhafi on the grounds that a mini-genocide was in the making around Benghazi. Obama was very reluctant to get the US involved, though. We ended up “leading from behind” as one of his minions leaked the press. Rice & Powers “won” that debate and we supported France and the UK in Libya. I suspect the Obama may regret that involvement now, although I’m not sure of that assumption – now that I think about it.
We now have a civil war in Syria that is resulting in many, many more deaths than Libya saw by far. Yet, Obama has not breathed one word about the need to intervene on humanitarian grounds like he did in Libya. Will Rice and Powers both resume their policy recommendations for increasing our involvement in Syria to stop the killing?
My answer is, “No” for Rice and “It doesn’t matter” for Power. Rice is a dutiful servant of her immediate superior and will do whatever Obama tells her to do as his new NSC chief. Samantha Powers is ambassador to a totally useless organization with respect to doing anything along humanitarian grounds. She’ll end up lecturing the UN to stop the genocide in Syria; lecturing Russia for being part of the problem and not part of the solution. Well, who knows…it’s hard to guess what these statists will do once they get in office.
I doubt that Powers will have any impact within the Obama White House w.r.t. its foreign policy direction. Admittedly, I have no idea what the backroom advice-interchange is/goes on between Obama and Power. She was a close adviser while he was US Senator and then in his 2008 campaign. She ended up in the White House until she left recently. (Hubby left and went to the JFK School of Government at Harvard. She has very young children.)
I assume Obama and his closest White House aides (Valerie Jarrett, his wife Michelle, his Chicago associates) determine his foreign policy. He seldom has Cabinet meetings or delegates major political decisions to his cabinet officers.