Susan Rice! She’s like a black Hillary! In fact, she is a black Hillary! She’s the black Hillary!
God, it feels good to hate, doesn’t it? To be utterly consumed with righteous rage at that black bitch controversial former national security advisor, utterly loathed by the right for being a black woman1 for having repeated elaborately crafted CIA/State Department/White House talking points regarding the murders of four Americans in Benghazi. And who now can be loathed all over again, supposedly for letting the world know that former national security advisor Michael “Turkish Taffy” Flynn was (and is) a world-class fruitcake.
If you go to the link above, or wade through these real time posts, though I would advise strongly against it, you’ll discover I haven’t been much of a fan of Rice, but in the whole Bengazhi affair, I think she was largely a fall-guy, chosen to present a “story” to the Sunday talk shows because, as UN ambassador (her job at the time), she had no first-hand knowledge of what had transpired in Benghazi. She was chosen, in other words, for her ignorance, and because Hillary didn’t want to get her hands, and skirts, dirty.
Now, thanks to the sleuthing of Eli “This time I’m telling the truth, probably” Lake, and copious leaking from the White House—but good leaking this time around—we know the following:
“White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
…
“The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations – primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.”
Unfortunately for Eli, he has to concede that what Rice had done was “probably legal”, and, though of course he doesn’t mention it, part of her job as national security advisor to discover what other countries are up to, which is why we “intercept” their messages in the first place. When poor Michael Flynn was hoist on his own petard by talking with a Russian official in a telephone conversation that he was surely aware might be monitored, everyone blamed him for being stupid. But now Eli wants to blame Rice for being wicked!
What Eli is really pissed about is his conviction that the Obama Administration, in the course of pushing its Iran deal through Congress, “spied” on Republican opposition via monitoring of foreign officials. Since Israel and Republicans in Congress were openly conspiring together, the shocking fact is that the administration had every right to keep track of what both the Republicans and the Israelis were up to.
But at this point Eli is pretty much a sideshow. The Republicans are doing what they do best, screaming for blood. And when it’s the blood of a black woman, well, that’s pretty much Republican heaven.
Afterwords
Over at Slate, Fred Kaplan presents a more nuanced take on the latest Susan Rice non-outrage.
- Okay, I’m being (slightly) unfair. The right doesn’t hate Rice because she’s a black woman. They hate her because she’s a powerful black woman who’s a Democrat. I firmly believe that if Rice were a white guy, she probably could have gotten a job with the Romney administration. ↩︎
