By the new "Susan Rice standard," no Republican should ever be confirmable again for any post that doesn't lead to a lethal injection

The not-future and the incumbent secretary of state

by Ken

Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to see the world through Village eyes. Like today we have the Washington Post's Dana Milbank weeping uncontrollably over "Joe Lieberman's sad send-off" -- not, as one might assume, because the world's largest pile of pus finally dragged his loathsome carcass out of a Senate chamber to which, even in its current degraded state, he became a disgrace.

No, Dana weeps because Holy Joe, self-made hypocrite and crook, "was drummed out of his party because of his willingness to embrace Republicans (he received a kiss from George W. Bush after a State of the Union address)." Makes you wonder where our Dana has been all the time His Holiness was soiling himself in the Senate. (Oh wait, he was in the Post newsroom covering it all. Hmm.)

So let's take a peek at the humiliating but clearly necessary withdrawal of Susan Rice from consideration to be secretary of state -- because of implacable opposition from a band of GOP poopyheads whose cumulative reasoning power is roughly zero -- as seen through the eyes of Village stooge Chris Cillizza ("What Susan Rice's withdrawal means"):

[T]he writing had been on the wall regarding the difficulty of a Rice nomination for weeks. Fair or not, Republicans had seized on Rice as the face of the September attacks in Benghazi that left four diplomats including the U.S. Ambassador to Libya dead.

That opposition included some of the usual suspects -- Arizona Sen. John McCain, for example -- but also people like Maine Sen. Susan Collins and Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker. Combine that broad spectrum of Republican opposition to her nomination with the fact that there were a number of Senate Democrats -- many of whom are up for reelection in 2014 in swing and Republican-leaning states -- that didn't want to have to vote on someone as controversial as Rice and it had become clear that her nomination would be dead on arrival.

Did you get that? "People like Maine Sen. Susan Collins and Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker"? Aren't people like that generally to be found in cages in science laboratories along with the other primate test subjects? Suzie Q is one of the gutless wimps who made the reign of terror of the last GOP-controlled Congress possible, and Bullet-Brain Bob, well, I have to assume that the people of Tennessee got together and decided that what they really needed to represent them in the U.S. Senate was a barrelful of doggie poop, but when constitutional-eligibility issues were raised (could they show that the doggie poop in question was at least 30 years old?), they decided that the Bullet Brainer was as close as they could get to doggie poopitude in constitutionally acceptable form.

Just as a reminder, there is no substance to the Republican complaints about Ambassador Rice. It really doesn't even have anything to do with Libya, about which "people like that" don't give a stinking fart. It's just a matter of their psychotic savagery and imbecility, a lashing out at people their crabbed self-loathing selves recognize as their superiors. (Which isn't saying much. If they were in that primate lab, they would have reason to feel just as inferior mentally to their cagemates.)

When last we left the subject of the bruited Rice nomination last week, WaPo right-wing columnist Kathleen Parker was puncturing the notion that there was reasoned opposition to it:

[T]he opposition's arguments are weak, chief among them that Rice isn't qualified. This from [Sen. John] McCain, whose vetting history includes about 80 minutes of conversation with Sarah Palin before selecting her as his running mate in 2008. . . .

[T]houghtful Republicans might reconsider the image of white men ganging up on a highly qualified black woman as they ponder the reasons for their collapsing tent. The road to redemption ain't thataway.

Now the business about Rice's alleged closeness to the Rwandan thug is something I might want to know more about, but can anyone take seriously the notion that Chris C's "people like that" could possibly give a damn? These are people who couldn't find Rwanda on a map if their lives depended on it. People who have almost certainly never given Rwanda a thought in their useless lives.

And when it comes to buddying up to thugs, is their any trait more deeply imprinted on slug-worshipping Republican souls than making nicey-nice with the rich and powerful? Their lives are veritable wet dreams of power-fucking.

When it comes to foreign-policy fibbing, in what universe do "people like that" dare open their corrupt maws? I mean, the very people who sat cheering during the eight-year criminal rampage of the Bush regime, whose every word on foreign policy was an egregious, blatant whopper. Again, people who couldn't tell the truth if their lives depended on it. And those lose had incalculable world-serious consequences.

I can't resist requoting something I quoted just the other day, from HuffPost's Dan Froomkin's chinwag with conservative Republican strategists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein.

[A]ccording to longtime political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, campaign coverage in 2012 was a particularly calamitous failure, almost entirely missing the single biggest story of the race: Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth.

Mann and Ornstein are two longtime centrist Washington fixtures who earlier this year dramatically rejected the strictures of false equivalency that bind so much of the capital's media elite and publicly concluded that GOP leaders have become "ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

The 2012 campaign further proved their point, they both said in recent interviews. It also exposed how fabulists and liars can exploit the elite media's fear of being seen as taking sides.

"The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties' agendas and connections to facts and truth," said Mann, who has spent nearly three decades as a congressional scholar at the centrist Brookings Institution.

"I saw some journalists struggling to avoid the trap of balance and I knew they were struggling with it -- and with their editors," said Mann. "But in general, I think overall it was a pretty disappointing performance."

"I can't recall a campaign where I've seen more lying going on -- and it wasn't symmetric," said Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who's been tracking Congress with Mann since 1978. Democrats were hardly innocent, he said, "but it seemed pretty clear to me that the Republican campaign was just far more over the top." . . .

[The "publicly concluded" link, by the way, is to an op-ed piece that Mann and Ornstein penned for the Washington Post last April, "Let's just say it: The Republicans are the problem."

There was one more thing I meant to mention from Dan Froomkin's piece. Mann and Ornstein have become virtual pariahs among their former Village cronies.

It's hard to exaggerate just how popular Mann and Ornstein were with the press before their apostasy. They were quite possibly the two most quotable men in Washington. They were the media cocktail party circuit's most reliable walking talking points.

And now they are virtual pariahs.

"It's awkward. I can no longer be a source in a news story in the Wall Street Journal or the Times or the Post because people now think I've made the case for the Democrats and therefore I'll have to be balanced with a Republican," Mann said.

Neither Mann nor Ornstein have been guests on any of the main Sunday public affairs shows since their book came out. Nor has anyone else on those shows talked about the concerns they raised.

Ornstein is particularly infuriated that none of the supposed reader advocates at major newspapers have raised the issues they brought up. "What the fuck is an ombudsman doing if he's not writing about this?" he asked.

Since Mann and Ornstein are both singularly articulate gentlemen, they had more to say, but I think you get the general idea. The kinds of things they've been caught saying in public can't be said by proper Republicans of either party.

It takes a Village to cover its own butts.

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