Ambassador Susan Rice sat down with Senators John McBitter, Lindsey Graham, and Kelly Ayotte today to assuage their concerns, but apparently this gesture, which she was not obligated to make, has been spit back in her face.
After originally accusing Susan Rice and the Obama administration of intentionally misleading the American people, their new charge is that they shouldn't have conveyed the intelligence that was given to them at all. Because they should have known it wasn't accurate. Or something. Of course we know now that it wasn't entirely inaccurate.
Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) sat down with U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice in a closed-door meeting on Tuesday to discuss the administration's response to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya earlier this year. Rice did not appear to soothe their concerns.
"I'm more disturbed now than I was before," Graham told reporters following the meeting. "I think it does not do justice to the reality at the time and in hindsight clearly was completely wrong. But here's the key, in realtime, it was a statement disconnected from reality." [...]
"If you don't know what happened, just say you don't know what happened," Graham said. "People can push you to give explanations and you can say I don't want to give bad information. Here's what I can tell you -- the American people got bad information on the 16th of September, they got bad information from President Obama days after, and the question is, should they have been giving the information at all? If you can do nothing but give bad information, isn't it better to give no information at all?"
The gross hypocrisy of John McCain and Lindsey Graham is beyond description.
They never demanded that the Bush administration answer for one of the biggest lies told to the American people in recent history, which is that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Hundreds of thousands died in Iraq, many more were wounded, and we pissed away $3 trillion in blood and treasure.
And here they are having a chicken-or-the-egg argument over the disclosure of intelligence following the deaths of four Americans in Libya. Four deaths which, as far as I can tell, are no longer even part of the conversation. McCain and Graham have stopped asking why they were killed and are now just chasing shadows.