Susan Rice Stonewalls Host David Gregory on Today's "Meet the Press"

If academic credentials and a lucky accident of birth were the sole criteria of leadership success, the woman appointed by Barack Obama to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations would be a stand-out foreign policy advisor. With a father a renowned economics professor at Cornell and a mother who distinguished herself at the Brookings Institute, Susan Rice came from a privileged academic and family background. Even so, Susan Rice is hardly the bedrock of Democratic party politics. The current U.N. Ambassador was considered an elitist even by the Congressional Black Caucus when she was appointed Bill Clinton's Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs.

The Wikipedia bio for Susan Rice quoted Congressional Black Caucus members as saying that Rice was a member of "Washington's assimilationist black elite." You could read that to mean Susan Rice wasn't "black enough," in other words. I suppose that appellation would be a description in favor of a "post-racial" President who has promised to be the president of all the people. The overall point, though, is that Susan Rice's background is that of a highly educated liberal progressive Democrat with political views that reflect and influence those of our philosophically internationalist president, Barack Obama.

Critics are currently wondering if the word "progressive" is a synonym for "politics-above-everything." Ironically, it was a member of Obama's own campaign team, Susan Powers, who criticized Susan Rice of precisely that in a 2001 Atlantic Monthly article which has Rice of fretting to other participants in an NSA teleconference about the potential negative impact upon Democrats of using the word "genocide" in upcoming congressional elections. I wonder how Powers, the Obama campaign aide forced to resign after calling Hilary Clinton a "monster", feels about "overseas contingency operation."

It is the intensely political self-consciousness of Susan Rice which has grabbed headlines today, mainly stemming from an interview with David Gregory on Meet the Press. All those years of education and left-liberal mentoring have well-equipped Susan Rice to side-step any issue, and the YouTube video of Rice's appearance with Gregory on "Meet the Press" is ample evidence of that.

Gregory asked Rice about President Obama's latest seeming about face on the war in Afghanistan, asking Rice if Obama would grant General McChyrstal's request for additional troops. Rice may well have been guarding the Hope Diamond as she stonewalled, repeating the usual administration cant about "keeping America safe" while refusing to answer David Gregory's question. Gregory pointedly noted several times the president's frequent characterization of Afghanistan as the "war of necessity" unlike Iraq, which the President called "a war of choice."

Fortress Rice did not limit stonewalling to General McChrystal's troop requests; U.N ambassador Rice also refused to comment on a New York Times report that Iran already has the technology and material to make a nuclear bomb right now. Certainly, such an admission would undermine another Obama team political initiative designed to convince critics that progress is being made in talks with the Iranians.

However, it has long been the view among the French, the British, and the Israelis that the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate was incorrect in reporting that Iran had discontinued its nuclear weapons program. Certainly, the secret Iranian nuclear enrichment facility at Qum wouldn't have come to light without the efforts of foreign intelligence agencies. Susan Rice was most likely close to the truth when she said on "Meet the Press" that "we are in a period of tense negotiation." Tense for America, that is, less so for Iran's Ahmadinajad who scored a major coup in quieting U.S. criticism of its recent brutal political oppression and getting to appear on the world stage as a co-equal holocaust denying militant Islamist giant-killer.

If U.N ambassador Susan Rice's past is prologue, the future for the war on terror may be bleak.
Many sources, including a 2002 Washington Post story, implicate Susan Rice in thwarting the Sudanese government's overtures in offering to hand over Osama Bin Laden when the terrorist leader had established a base of operations there during the Clinton administration. According to Newsmax, the op-ed piece was co-written by Clinton diplomatic advisor Mansour Ijaz and former U.S Ambassador to Sudan, Tim Carney.

Sources: Wikipedia bio at : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Rice: Newsmax: http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/7/29/132456.shtml