Susan Rice

Bozell, Hannity Discuss MSNBC's Desperate Attempt to Smear Susan Rice Critics As Racist
By NB Staff | November 30, 2012 | 12:05 PM EST

Attempts by liberal MSNBC pundits like Touré and Richard Wolffe to dismiss conservative criticisms of Amb. Susan Rice as racially-motivated are evidence of the "militant, radical Left flexing its muscles" post-Obama reelection, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told Sean Hannity on the "Media Mash" segment of the Fox News host's November 29 program.

"Where were" liberal journalists when "Clarence Thomas was smeared in his confirmation hearings" or "with Allen West in Florida?" Bozell asked. "When a conservative black man is attacked," the media are mute, failing to consider if perhaps there is racism at play in the criticisms leveled by liberals. What's more, if Rice were white, the media would simply complain Republican critics are "anti-woman," the Media Research Center founder observed [watch the full segment below the page break].

Washington Post's Marcus Claims Rice's False Benghazi Comments Were 'Basically Right'
By Kyle Drennen | November 30, 2012 | 10:41 AM EST

In an attempt to dismiss Republican criticism of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's misleading September 14 Sunday show statements about Benghazi, on Thursday's MSNBC Andrea Mitchell Reports, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus asserted: "I don't think this is really about some comments that were basically right, that she made on Sunday talk shows." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Marcus was prompted to make the declaration after Mitchell tried to paint GOP critics as a combination of sexist and racist: "There have been issues raised as to whether she was being attacked, criticized because she's a woman, because she's African-American....is there a double standard here? Have we had others who've gone on Sunday television talk shows, made mistakes, and not been punished as severely as Susan Rice?"

NYTimes' Shane Laments How 'Four Pallid Sentences' Are Root of GOP Attacks on Rice Handling of Benghazi
By Clay Waters | November 29, 2012 | 2:50 PM EST

A front-page "news analysis" Thursday by New York Times intelligence reporter Scott Shane, "Talking Points Overshadow Bigger Libya Issues," downplayed the seriousness of the controversy and attempted to reduce GOP criticism of UN ambassador Susan Rice, a possible Secretary of State candidate, into just more food for the partisan "meat grinder."

Shane questioned why "four pallid sentences that intelligence analysts cautiously delivered are the unlikely center of a quintessential Washington drama, in which a genuine tragedy has been fed into the meat grinder of election-year politics." The paper wasn't so forgiving about President George W. Bush's famous "16 words" in 2003 about Saddam Hussein looking for nuclear material in Africa.

NBC Touts Obama's 'Strong Message' to Senate GOP: 'Don't Mess With My U.N. Ambassador'
By Kyle Drennen | November 29, 2012 | 1:05 PM EST

Striking a sympathetic tone toward the U.N. ambassador on Wednesday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams lamented: "It was another one of those days for Susan Rice....who again found herself today in the middle of a power struggle between some Republicans on the Hill on one side, and the President..." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

In the report that followed, chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell eagerly described a moment in a recent Obama cabinet meeting: "With Hillary Clinton nodding her approval, the President sent a strong message to Senate Republicans, 'Don't mess with my U.N. Ambassador.'" Mitchell observed: "For Rice, a welcome signal that her nomination is still alive, despite another brutal day on Capitol Hill."

How Amazingly Convenient: Lefties 'Discover' That Susan Rice Has 'Conflict of Interest' Energy Investments
By Tom Blumer | November 28, 2012 | 9:43 PM EST

In what would appear to be a sure sign that the Obama administration's leftist allies, perhaps with the President's go-ahead, are preparing to throw current U.N. ambassador Susan Rice under the bus, Alex Guillen at the Politico reported at 6:14 p.m. on information that has from all appearances been public for at least three months, but which the National Resources Defense Council's On Earth blog noted about an hour earlier.

Rice's offenses? She "holds significant investments in more than a dozen Canadian oil companies and banks that would stand to benefit from expansion of the North American tar sands industry and construction of the proposed $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline." That's indeed troubling, but it was just as troubling when leftists up to and including the editorialists at the Washington Post were accusing anyone objecting to Rice's potential nomination of being presumptively racist. Excerpts from Guillen's report follow the jump (bolds are mine):

NBC's Guthrie to Chris Matthews: Did Susan Rice 'Mislead' the Public?
By Kyle Drennen | November 28, 2012 | 4:25 PM EST

In an exchange with MSNBC Harball host Chris Matthews on Wednesday's NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie pondered the possibility that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice lied about Benghazi: "...should she have been more direct that the information she was providing to the American people was at that point, not just preliminary, but incomplete? I guess the bottom line is, did she mislead?"

Matthews replied by wondering: "...was she a flack...just out there mouthing the words that somebody told you, or is she a thoughtful cabinet minister – to be a potential cabinet minister?" He then laid the blame entirely on the intelligence: "But from what I'm told, she got the facts directly unchanged, unspun by the White House, nobody changed anything. If anybody's at fault here, it's the intelligence community, for giving her incomplete information for their own purposes."

New York Times Columnists Battle Over Susan Rice and Benghazi
By Clay Waters | November 28, 2012 | 4:24 PM EST

Wednesday's New York Times front page featured Susan Rice's failed attempt to assuage concerns of three Senate Republicans on her false statements about the Benghazi massacre in "Rice Concedes Error on Libya: G.O.P. Digs In." Inside was an unflattering photo of a peeved-looking Sen. John McCain. Posing Republican senator and Rice critic McCain as the bad guy, an on-line text box accompanying the article highlighted a reader comment from "Them or Us": "If you think these three Senators walked in with open minds and no agenda, I'd like to sell you a bridge that crosses the East River into Brooklyn. McCain's little kangaroo court is about as transparent as his anger." Meanwhile, on the back pages, two liberal Times columnists disagreed on Benghazi's significance.

In the front-page story, reporters Mark Landler and Jeremy Peters minimized the import of the policy scandal by focusing on the personal, portraying Rice, who may be nominated by President Obama to the post of UN ambassador, as offering an olive branch that "hostile Senate Republicans" rejected.

ABC Continues to Spin for Susan Rice: She Ran Into a GOP 'Buzz Saw' on Tuesday
By Scott Whitlock | November 28, 2012 | 12:21 PM EST

Good Morning America's reporters on Wednesday continued to fret about the fate of Susan Rice, lamenting the GOP "buzz saw" the UN Ambassador ran into on Tuesday. ABC's Martha Raddatz hyped all the pressing issues in the world as a possible reason to just confirm the potential Secretary of State nominee quickly.

Martha Raddatz worried, "You have got Iran that is trying to acquire a nuclear weapon. You have got North Korea. There's satellite photos just out showing that North Korea would like to test another long-range ballistic missile." She then reminded that this is "such a critical time in Afghanistan." GMA co-anchor George Stephanopoulos referenced the fall of David Petraeus and hyped that all of these vacancies are "happening when there's a lot of hot spots in the world bubbling up."

Fat Chance: Van Susteren Demands Apologies for Reckless 'Racism' Charges Hurled at McCain on MSNBC
By Tom Blumer | November 28, 2012 | 11:45 AM EST

Fox News Channel's Greta Van Susteren has reached her boiling point after seeing yet another person at MSNBC hurl a gratuitous, objectively false charge of "racism" at Arizona Senator John McCain for having the gall to believe that Susan Rice would not be a good choice to be the next Secretary of State.

She let it rip in a blog post Monday afternoon:

Here We Go Again; NBC's Wolffe Claims GOP Criticism of Susan Rice Racially Motivated
By Jeffrey Meyer | November 27, 2012 | 4:18 PM EST

It’s one thing for a leftist pundit to appear on MSNBC and smear Republicans as racist and bigoted.  It’s another when the editor of MSNBC.com, a supposedly professional journalist, joins the ranks of liberal pundits slamming the GOP for its criticism of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s comments following the attack on our Embassy in Benghazi. 

Appearing on Tuesday’s NOW with Alex Wagner, Wolffe started off the show by having the audacity to claim, “there has been a witch hunt against every prominent person of color that has served alongside this president.”  [See video below page break.  MP3 audio here.] 

Klein Gobbles Obama's Benghazi Talking Points 'Like Thanksgiving Turkey'
By Mark Finkelstein | November 26, 2012 | 9:00 AM EST

At the end of Joe Klein's stupefying defense of Susan Rice and the Obama admin's misinformation campaign on the Benghazi outrage on today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough asked Time's Klein whether President Obama had invited him to play golf, "because you are just gobbling up the talking points like Thanksgiving turkey." H/t NB reader Carmel.

Here were some of Klein's astounding assertions: There are no unanswered questions about Benghazi.  Ambassador Stevens had all the security he wanted. Rice's talking points were "absolutely accurate"--it was a spontaneous demonstration by extremists. Al qaeda was not involved in the attack. Not clear that reports from Stevens asking for more security exist. View the video after the jump.

Washington Post Suspects Racism In GOP Opposition To Rice Nomination
By Mark Finkelstein | November 23, 2012 | 10:05 AM EST

As I wrote this morning to the NewsBusters editor who alerted me to the Washington Post's editorial, "The GOP’s bizarre attack on Susan Rice," I don't read WaPo much, but somehow assume they're not quite as extreme as the New York Times." Silly me, judging by WaPo's ugly, over-the-top opinion item.

Here's the ugly last paragraph from today's editorial: "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."  More after the jump.