She is "The Obama Administration’s Zelig"

Posted on: April 12, 2017 at 10:31:28 CT

The Benghazi deceptions, the selling of the Iran deal, the Bergdahl trade – one ‘expert’ kept turning up to peddle falsehoods.

Susan Rice is the real version of Woody Allen’s cinematic character Zelig, who in the movie of the same name popped up almost anywhere as an expert on anything.

As U.N. ambassador from 2009 to 2013, and later as National Security Adviser from 2013 to 2017, Rice seemed to have turned up everywhere there was an Obama-administration implosion. She was always eager to offer a supposedly expert assessment — one that also always proved wrong or untrue or both.

Rice, along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, had a major role in the disastrous Libyan bombing decision and its wasteland aftermath.

As U.N. ambassador, she helped the U.N. draft resolutions establishing no-fly-zones and humanitarian aid to curb the violence against Arab Spring protestors. But such U.N. policies were immediately contorted into an active military role when the U.S. and allies supplied direct air support to anti-Qaddafi ground forces. The allied bombing to overthrow Qaddafi gave some credence to Russian complaints that Rice had deceived them about the true intent of the resolutions, which were really used by the Obama administration to facilitate French, British, and American efforts to achieve regime change in Libya.

The later Benghazi disaster and the subsequent false narrative of a video-inspired spontaneous riot — aimed at advancing the “al-Qaeda on the run” talking point central to Obama’s reelection campaign —were her most infamous moments of deceit. That fake-news effort eventually led to the unjustifiable imprisonment of the scapegoat (and otherwise shady character) Nakoula Basseley Nakoula on suddenly trumped-up enforcement of his parole violation. Rice’s well-publicized untruth, while helpful to Obama’s reelection effort, was not benign: It obscured the disturbing circumstances in which four brave Americans died.

Yet, to be fair, it is difficult to know whether Rice was a seasoned architect of that duplicity. Given her reputation as a useful naïf and loyal fall person, perhaps she was easily manipulated into going on five Sunday shows to mislead and distort. Her subordinate Ben Rhodes needed a vessel to assure the nation that the Benghazi attacks were not due to administration policy failures, and Rice was deemed the ideal vehicle to spread that myth.

And the fable of the supposedly honorable Bowe Bergdahl (currently facing Pentagon charges of desertion)?

Rice was there, too. To prop up an unhinged trade of five terrorists at Guantanamo for an AWOL soldier, Rice falsely claimed that Bergdahl had “served with honor and distinction.” Then she trumped that with a quite unnecessary fillip: “Sergeant Bergdahl wasn’t simply a hostage; he was an American prisoner of war captured on the battlefield.” Left unsaid was that a number of American soldiers were killed as a result of efforts to find his walkabout whereabouts.

Again, note always the weird but characteristic Rice emphatics: Just as she did not go on one show but five to disseminate Benghazi falsehoods, so too it was not enough just to leave Bergdahl’s story at “honor and distinction” without the added “captured on the battlefield” nonsense. Unfortunately, she can be counted on to give a tough, no-holds-barred confirmation of something false — on the logic that bogusness gains credibility the louder and stronger it is expressed.

The Iran deal?

Rice was there, too. Just a few months before American hostages in Iran were released upon receipt of a hushed nocturnal shipment of $400 million in international currencies (a fact hidden from the public for months, given that it seemed to have coincided with the real and final full implementation of the Iran deal), Rice had assured the country that just the opposite would occur:

And we were very specific about the need not to link their fate to that of the negotiations, because we had no idea for certain whether negotiations would succeed or fail. We didn’t want to give the Iranians a bargaining chip to use against us in the negotiations.

“Bargaining chip” was Rice’s phrase, not that of the opponents of the deal. But notably, on prior occasions, skeptics had feared that Iran would indeed use the hostages as a “bargaining chip” traded for concessions, only to later release them secretly under false premises of not being linked to the deal. All of which happened.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446622/susan-rice-obama-administration-zelig-appearing-many-scandals