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)
***
PHOTO CREDITS: Jim Young/Reuters
Via: guardiannews.com
