Rice withdraws

I was saddened to learn that Susan Rice has withdrawn her name from consideration as Secretary of State. The proximate cause was, of course, the inane controversy over Benghazi:

Rice, who was considered a top contender for the position, has been embroiled recently in ongoing controversy surrounding her account of the September 11 Libya attacks, which she discussed in a series of talk show appearances on September 16. 

Infuriating. There is no genuine scandal here; the whole pseudo-controversy was ginned up by the Republicans as an election-year gimmick.

I mean, come on -- just what it, exactly, that the Republicans have been trying to say? Do they really think that Obama lied about the attack because he was somehow trying to cover up for his Mooooslim buddies in Al Qaeda? That kind of paranoid nonsense might seem credible to sub-Trumpian birthers and cognate aficionados of quasi-psychotic absurdia, but the idea is laughable to all rational people.

Everything Rice said about Benghazi derived from reports she received from the intelligence community. If those reports got the story wrong, you can't blame her. It's not as though she personally went snooping around Libya looking for the truth, then lied about what she found.

If the CIA offered varying descriptions of what happened on September 11 -- and they did -- we must presume that their analysts received conflicting reports from their human and electronic sources. That kind of dispute happens all the freakin' time in the world of intelligence analysis.

Whenever a violent outbreak occurs, historians often argue about who did what when -- and those arguments have been known to span centuries. We still don't know whether the Russians or the French set the great Moscow fire of 1812. We still don't know precisely how Wat Tyler's rebellion originated. People still argue about the sequence of events surrounding the Boston Massacre.

Turning the Libyan attack into a weapon against the Democrats was always nothing more than a cheap, low GOP ploy. The Republicans thought that spinning absurdities about Benghazi could bring down Obama. When that line of attack failed, they settled on a secondary target. Rice.

Their obvious goal is to push John Kerry into that post, thereby freeing up his seat for Brown.