New York Times Columnists Battle Over Susan Rice and Benghazi

Wednesday's New York Times front page featured Susan Rice's failed attempt to assuage concerns of three Senate Republicans on her false statements about the Benghazi massacre in "Rice Concedes Error on Libya: G.O.P. Digs In." Inside was an unflattering photo of a peeved-looking Sen. John McCain. Posing Republican senator and Rice critic McCain as the bad guy, an on-line text box accompanying the article highlighted a reader comment from "Them or Us": "If you think these three Senators walked in with open minds and no agenda, I'd like to sell you a bridge that crosses the East River into Brooklyn. McCain's little kangaroo court is about as transparent as his anger." Meanwhile, on the back pages, two liberal Times columnists disagreed on Benghazi's significance.

In the front-page story, reporters Mark Landler and Jeremy Peters minimized the import of the policy scandal by focusing on the personal, portraying Rice, who may be nominated by President Obama to the post of UN ambassador, as offering an olive branch that "hostile Senate Republicans" rejected.







Interestingly, Times columnists Tom Friedman vs. Maureen Dowd weighed in on opposite sides of the Susan Rice affair in their Wednesday columns, with Friedman as usual dismissing the controversy as a "contrived flap" and Dowd taking Republican concerns pretty seriously -- at least those of moderate Republican Susan Collins.



Dowd by contrast posed a series of questions courtesy of moderate Republican Susan Collins, who presumably can't be accused of racism or sexism in her criticism of Rice:





Dowd summarized Collins's questions for Rice, including:


Why did Rice say on ABC News’s “This Week,” that “two of the four Americans who were killed were there providing security”? Rice was referring to the two ex-Navy SEAL team members who were C.I.A. security officers working on a base about a mile away. “They weren’t there to protect Ambassador Stevens,” Collins said. “That wasn’t their job.”


Collins said that before she would support Rice for secretary of state, she needs to ascertain what was really going on. “Did they think admitting that it was an Al Qaeda attack would destroy the narrative of Libya being a big success story?” Collins asked. As one of the administration champions of intervening in Libya, Rice was surely rooting for that success story herself.

Clay Waters