Rice´s withdrawal: the right call for the wrong reason.
An extract from Susan Rice´s public letter withdrawing herself from consideration as Secretary of State - my emphasis:
It is far more important that we devote precious legislative hours and energy to enacting your core goals, including comprehensive immigration reform, balanced deficit reduction, job creation, and maintaining a robust national defense and effective U.S. global leadership. Therefore, I respectfully request that you no longer consider my candidacy at this time.
Three domestic priorities and two foreign. Climate breakdown and the energy transition don´t rate a mention in either context. (¨At this time¨ is nice.)
The right call, for the wrong reason.
Author: James Wimberley
James Wimberley (b. 1946, an Englishman raised in the Channel Islands. three adult children) is a former career international bureaucrat with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. His main achievements there were the Lisbon Convention on recognition of qualifications and the Kosovo law on school education. He retired in 2006 to a little white house in Andalucia, His first wife Patricia Morris died in 2009 after a long illness. He remarried in 2011. to the former Brazilian TV actress Lu Mendonça. The cat overlords are now three.
I suppose I've been invited to join real scholars on the list because my skills, acquired in a decade of technical assistance work in eastern Europe, include being able to ask faux-naïf questions like the exotic Persians and Chinese of eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. So I'm quite comfortable in the role of country-cousin blogger with a European perspective. The other specialised skill I learnt was making toasts with a moral in the course of drunken Caucasian banquets. I'm open to expenses-paid offers to retell Noah the great Armenian and Columbus, the orange, and university reform in Georgia.
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Mr. Wimberley, although I can’t help but suspect that you are trolling for this, why would Susan Rice, who is so heavily invested in oil say anything about “climate breakdown and energy transition”?
Oh no! Didn’t follow all the links.
If she had been a Democratic member of the Senate with the same qualifications, and if her seat had been vacated with her confirmation, preparing the way for a special election to replace her, does anyone think that McCain company would have had the least objection to her taking the job of Sec of State? On the contrary, they would have cleared her in a heartbeat.
or if she’d been an old white guy
Senator Hillary Clinton passes her Senate confirmation hearing, 94 to 2 without any difficulty ,in spite of or because as Carl Bernstein her biographer writes, “Since her Arkansas years, Hillary Rodham Clinton has always had a difficult relationship with the truth… Judged against the facts, she has often chosen to obfuscate, omit, and avoid..Her record as a public person is replete with “misstatements†and elisions and retracted and redacted and revoked assertions” while Susan Rice, a more candid and forthright person, and even more knowledgeable and articulate about foreign affairs,(but less formidable and her husband is not an ex-President) is simply not in the club!
well, (a) Ms Clinton had just served several years in the Senate, and had shown some talent for getting along there across partisan lines, so they were dealing with one of their own and (b) Bernstein may not have been accurate. That takes nothing away from Ms Rice or the rubbish she’s been having to face from disgraceful people like McCain and Graham.
Susan Rice: The position of secretary of state should never be politicized.
Oh hush. A substantial part of her life has been politics. And so she decides to empower politicization by removing her name because of the politics? That’s just weak tea. Worse she sacrificed herself too soon. A true trooper would have hung in there realizing the potential gamesmanship involved: That to be torn up by republican senators in committee would have been a higher form of service. If she survived, Mr. Obama would have his choice. If she didn’t, the red team would have exposed themselves as bullies again. A costly win for them indeed…
To paraphrase Truman: If you can’t take the heat, at least know the correct time to get out of the kitchen. But as James suggest, with her portfolio she obviously cares little about global warming. So why should she care about gaining hard yardage for the blue team? I could be wrong, but I don’t think she was in the game for something greater than herself. Then again, few of the DC creatures are. What a swamp…
Politicized seems to be the right word.
So now how does the White House make the Republicans pay for what they have done? How do they turn the McCain-Graham behind-the-scenes gloating into utter consternation?
This was nothing more than the GOP attempting to demonstrate that they still have power-they can still massively troll the president at will-even despite the last “referendum” election.
Having said that, I actually think Rice was the wrong person for the job. Too conflicted financially, too unknown.
Also she was very supportive of authoritarian African leaders with very dubious records of support for human rights. I think the Democrats dodged a bullet on this one.
Agreed.
Judging by all the flowering phrases and adjectives that Rice employed praising Obama and his policies. Really she layed in all pretty thick with a trowel, no wonder Obama thinks he can do no wrong. Making her his chief speech writer would be good payback for the Republicans.
How about making her McCain’s chief speech writer for payback?