The real reason Obama tapped Susan Rice for national security adviser
K.T. McFarland, FoxNews.com
President Obama will tap UN Ambassador Susan Rice Tuesday to serve as our nation's next National Security Adviser.
Tuesday morning my reaction was Susan Rice as National Security Adviser? She will be a DISASTER.
Here's why: I spent seven years working for the most successful NSC Adviser in history, Henry Kissinger.
I watched him conceive new policies, negotiate with foreign leaders, ride herd over the bureaucracy, massage the press and foreign policy intelligentsia, work behind the scenes with congressional leaders.
President Obama is rewarding Susan Rice for being a loyal (if incompetent) soldier.
Susan Rice can’t do any of those things.
She has zero credibility with the media, on Capitol Hill, with the foreign policy community and foreign leaders, and is so badly tarnished by the Benghazi scandal that she walks into the job on Day One weak and wounded.
The most obvious problem is her disastrous performance on the Sunday talk shows peddling the administration’s fairy tale on Benghazi; when she was either complicit in the cover-up or incompetent.
Either she knew what really happened and deliberately lied to the American people or she was a mere actress who read the script she was given and didn’t know enough to question whether they were right.
Susan Rice might have been able to overcome the Benghazi debacle if she had other strong credentials, for example being a senior military officer like Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft, or a respected academic like Kissinger and Brzezinski. But she is none of these.
When the spotlight was on her in her biggest job she was being an ineffective U.N. ambassador who couldn't get Russia or China on board to deal with Syria or impose strict sanctions against Iran -- and was stunned when they refused to do what she wanted them to.
Not only did she fail to persuade them, she didn't know she had failed to do so until the vote was taken!
Benghazi was supposed to be her audition for Secretary of State job -- go on all the Sunday talk shows and be the Obama administration’s spokesman.
She was so eager to for the try out that she didn't stop and ask why they wanted her. The decision to send someone out from the administration to all five talk shows is a decision made at the highest levels of the White House.
It should have been the Secretary of State, or maybe Secretary of Defense, or CIA chief, or NSC Adviser or White House Chief of Staff – they were part of the decision process.
Susan Rice was the one senior administration official who knew nothing about events leading up to Benghazi and the Benghazi attack, yet the White House asked her to go on those shows?
Alarm bells should have gone off in her head!
I checked their schedules and most of the other senior officials were in Washington and available that morning. It’s just that they were smarter than Rice and realized it was a poisoned chalice.
So what is President Obama thinking with the Rice appointment? He’s doubling down and circling the wagons. He's rewarding Rice for being a loyal (if incompetent) soldier.
Hang tough on scandals and deny he knew anything about any of them until he read it in the papers.
Or, maybe Obama is smarter than it looks on the surface.By appointing Rice to NSA job means she can invoke executive privilege and doesn’t have to testify on Capitol Hill. And she will certainly be a loyal soldier if she is now sitting 40 yards from the Oval Office.
Hmmm….is Obama now taking Rice out of the running to be a key witness in the inevitable Benghazi hearings? Once she's on the White House staff, she can hide behind the veil of executive privilege.
Stay tuned. This story is far from over.
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