Each pulled back from the harshest rhetoric they had previously used against her-McCain went as far as to question her intelligence-and now while they still claim to want answers-then why did McCain miss that Benghazi Senate briefing before his own committee? one wonders-they won't even say categorically that they won't confirm her if she's nominated for Secretary of State:
"For the past several weeks, congressional Republicans have presented a united front against UN Ambassador Susan Rice, calling her unfit for the job of Secretary of State and promising to block her should President Obama nominate her for the job."
"But on Sunday, Rice’s most vocal opponents — Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — struck a decisively different tone, declining to state that they would vote against her potential nomination in the Senate. Instead, both indicated, they now want to hear her out.
McCain, who previously promised to block Rice’s nomination, indicated Sunday that he could be convinced to shift away from that hard-line position."
“Sure,” McCain said to a question on whether Rice could do anything to change his mind about her on “Fox News Sunday.” “I’d give everyone the benefit of explaining their position and the actions that they took. I’d be glad to have the opportunity to discuss these issues with her.”
“I think she deserves the ability and the opportunity to explain herself and her position,” McCain said when asked if he might vote to confirm her as secretary of state. “But, she’s not the problem. The problem is the president of the United States, who, on — in a debate with Mitt Romney, said that he had said it was a terrorist attack.”
Well, he said that he called it a terrorist attack-because he had called it a terrorist attack the day after.
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/11/mccain-graham-susan-rice-benghazi.php?ref=fpa
"Graham repeated his belief that the administration’s refusal to immediately call the September 11 attacks in Benghazi a terrorist attack was a political cover-up, during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday. But when asked whether he would vote against Rice because of her appearances on the Sunday talk show circuit five days after the attacks, Graham too declined to repeat his previous hard-line opposition to Rice."
“When she comes over, if she does, there will be a lot of questions asked of her about this event and others,” Graham said when asked if he still opposed Rice’s elevation to Secretary of State.
They had sounded quite different previously, taking a hard line that indicated they would oppose her nomination to the hilt:
"Republicans’ opposition to Rice centers on her appearance on five Sunday talk shows on Sept. 16 in which she said that the attacks that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, were the result of a spontaneous protest over an offensive video. Following vocal opposition from McCain and Graham, 97 Republican House members penned a letter to Obama indicating that they opposed her nomination and that she “either willfully or incompetently misled the American public.”
However, the Dems have pushed back hard on their attacks and many have suggested there are racial and sexual overtones to these attacks. Then there's the fact that she said what the CIA had asked her to.
"But the softer tone from McCain and Graham Sunday comes after strong Democratic push-back to their criticism of Rice. Their comments also follow reports this week that the office of the Director of National Intelligence, rather than political officials, struck any mention of terrorism and al Qaeda from the intelligence briefing Rice used on the Sunday shows five days after the attack."
Interestingly, this morning GOP Rep. Peter King suggested that she was wrong to just read the CIA's talking points that she somehow should have gone over their head in crafting her statement. Is this normal to expect a political official to do an end run around what the intelligence agencies have laid out for them to say? Wouldn't the criticism go through the roof if Rice went out and decided to ad lib?
Whatever issues there are to deal with Benghazi they won't be dealt with properly in this silly game of political gotcha the GOP has engaged in since Romney made his absurd statements the night of the attacks before we even knew the details of the attacks-claiming the President sympathized with the terrorists who killed Ambassador Stevens and the other Americans who served their country with such distinction.
The more legitimate questions are about whether there was appropriate and adequate security prior to the attacks rather than quibbling about who did or didn't use the words "terrorists" "anti Muslim film", "spontaneous" and "planned" after the attacks.
Of course the answers to this question don't have any payoff to the GOP, is more complicated and is about more than simply finding political scapegoats. If anything,, one problem was that requests for more state security was blocked-by GOP Congressman. There had in recent years been an over-reliance on private contractors.
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2012/11/again-obama-administration-didnt-give.html
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