Lindsey Graham and John McCain finally came face-to-face with their prey this week.
The two angry Republican senators have been plotting for weeks to stop Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, from rising any further in the Washington firmament. On Nov. 27, their task got more complicated.
Graham, of South Carolina, and McCain, of Arizona - joined occasionally by Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, if only to make it not seem like two men beating up on a woman - are all aboil about the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans. Well, not exactly: They are upset about what Rice said about the attack on several Sunday-morning talk shows five days later.
Why are they upset at Rice and not, say, officials in charge of security at the mission? Or, if they want to go big, why not Secretary of State Hillary Clinton?
Probably because they wanted to go after a lesser official whom President Barack Obama would like to be secretary of state. Or because they don't want to talk about how Republicans have consistently denied funds to protect diplomatic posts in dangerous places. Or because they don't want to discuss how supportive they were last decade when then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell gave testimony that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Powell and Rice then, like Susan Rice now, were relying on information provided by the intelligence community. There is, however, a major difference: Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were testifying before official government bodies to justify going to war. Susan Rice was filling airtime between ads for erectile-dysfunction drugs.
Of course, all of this is just more evidence of Washington being full of itself. Only in Washington do people take seriously something said to a tiny audience of insiders half- watching their televisions on a Sunday morning. So seriously that a few senators want to embark on a special investigation beyond those already under way (hearings by congressional committees and a State Department inquiry, headed by former Ambassador Thomas Pickering and ordered by Clinton).
It doesn't make sense unless you're just looking for conflict or are up for re-election. As it happens, McCain, the grumpy old man of the Senate, is often spoiling for a fight, and the ally of the man who defeated him four years ago is a satisfying target. And Graham, who must face voters in the red state of South Carolina in two years, already features his dispute with Rice in campaign ads.
