Just when you think the farce that goes by the name of the Obama White House couldn’t descend any lower, along comes this: In a move sure to provoke congressional Republicans, President Obama is nominating embattled U.N. Ambassador Susan E. Rice Wednesday to serve as his national security adviser. The White House also confirmed that Mr. Obama is nominating former aide Samantha Power, who once referred to Hillary Rodham Clinton as a “monster” in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, to succeed Ms. Rice as U.N. ambassador. For those of you scoring at home, that’s not one, not two, but three flips of the Obama bird to Congress, the American people, and his erstwhile secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. Let’s start at the top. Susan Rice is no more qualified to opine on matters of national security than a character from The Wizard of Oz. Like Obama himself, she is a highly politicized, over-credentialed Scarecrow, with certificates from Stanford, Oxford, and the Brookings Institution in place of a brain. Among her intellectual “achievements”: In college, she pushed herself to excel. She not only earned Departmental Honors and University Distinction, but also became a Harry S. Truman scholar, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and earned a Rhodes scholarship. She turned the heads of top administrators when she created a fund that withheld alumni donations until the university either stopped their investments in companies doing business in South Africa, or the country ended apartheid. After she received her bachelor’s degree in history in 1986, she went on to attend University of Oxford in Oxfordshire, England. Here she earned her M.Phil and D.Phil in international relations, and wrote a dissertation that examined Rhodesia’s transition from white rule. A protege of Madeleine Albright, Rice joined the National Security Council during the Clinton administration in 1993: [Albright] recommended Rice for the post of assistant secretary for African affairs in 1997. With her appointment, she became one of the youngest assistant secretaries of state ever. Many elder politicians disagreed with placing a young woman in the position, arguing that she would be unable to deal with older, male leaders. But Rice developed a reputation for her direct, plainspoken opinions, and an ability to bring people to her side of the table. “They have no choice but to deal with me on professional terms. I represent the United States of America,” she says. “Yeah, they may do a double take, but then they have to listen to what you say, how you say it and what you do about what you say.” In other words, she’s a grievance-monger with a feminist chip on her shoulder, twin virtues which will henceforth inform her foreign-policy perspective as Obama continues his mission to “fundamentally transform” American society by wreaking revenge on his “enemies.” But wait, it gets worse.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Jun 2013 19:25:00 +0000
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