David Broder most be rolling over in his grave considering the vituperation involved in this Washington Post editorial board opinion piece about 97 House Republicans who sent a letter objecting to the possible nomination of Susan Rice to be the next Secretary of State:
SINCE THE Senate is solely responsible for the confirmation of Cabinet officers, it’s not often that members of the House of Representatives jump into a debate about the nomination of a secretary of state — particularly before there has been a nomination. That’s one of the reasons a letter sent to President Obama this week by 97 House Republicans, challenging his potential choice of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for the State Department job, is remarkable…
…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. You’d think that before launching their broadside, members of Congress would have taken care not to propagate any falsehoods of their own.
When the Washington Post editorial board calls you racist, you know you’ve crossed some kind of invisible line.
If the shoe fits, wear it, Republicans.
Like Bush, they’ll duck it…
Good commentary from Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates this morning, “The notion that you can separate who Republicans target, from how their base tends to evaluate those targets is willfully naive.”
Could it be every one of the jerks who signed the letter voted to cut the state department security budget not just once, but twice?
Lest we forget about that little fact.
that allows them to play the victim of baseless racism charges, whether convincing or not.
The bigger and more damaging point is that they are either clueless and/or dishonest clowns differing not from John McSame, and unworthy of their office as a result. If reading material from the intelligence agencies and content of the kind they authored for the reasons they’ve cited is disqualifying on the basis of some integrity issue, then obviously they are disqualifying themselves in the process, given the lack of intellectual heft and integrity they demonstrate with that action.
And after all, racism is born from the ignorance and mindless animus they proudly display on a host of issues, so if anything, it’s merely a symptom of a much larger problem many on the rightwing share.
Alas, two people very close to me have worked with Susan Rice, and the word is that she is extremely difficult, thin-skinned, an egomaniac, convinced of her own brilliance, and intolerant of differing opinions or dissent.
This, from career professionals and passionate progressives. Ms. Rice will be an unfortunate candidate for President Obama to dig his heels in on.
Of course, these are not the reasons the right-wing is opposed to her.