Filibuster reform?

[karynnj]

17. Do you yourself find Randi Rhodes credible?

I found her near unlistenable - and I agreed with most of her positions. Not to mention, there were a few incidents where she has gone off into conspiracy land.

The fact is that as many articles have said, Kerry is quietly (or not so quietly on the treaty he is leading ratification efforts on) doing his job as Senator.

the issue on Rice is very likely an attempt to tarnish the entire Obama national security team - and it is not limited to Susan Rice. The ONLY reason it has any traction is because of the timing.

To try to explain the (il)logic, remember that Rice and others were speaking just before the election. One unusual strong point of Obama is that he polled higher on national security than Mitt Romney. Romney himself led the effort (very clumsily) to use Benghazi to question the Obama reputation on how much they have defeated AQ. Romney's first action backfired badly and with the 47 % tape nearly doomed his campaign. McCain and others continued to push that this showed that AQ was in fact stronger. This actually gained some traction - until President Obama in a masterful move in the debate absolutely killed Romney on this - pointing out he personally spoke of terrorism the day after the attack.

Now, either turn this around and make a parallel case for 2004 or simply try to understand why McCain thinks this a big deal. In either case, the PARTISAN view (not reality) is:

- Something bad happened that directly challenged the opponent's accomplishment claims
- The administration "stonewalled" and said they needed more time (until after the election) to get to what happened.
- Top level administration people said things that minimized (from partisan POV) what happened and those things contradicted what was already being reported and were later found to be inaccurate.
- Now remember that several swing states were said to have been very close at the point before the second debate. Imagine that instead of Romney getting owned on Libya, that Romney successfully had called him both on that part of the world being more unstable than ever AND argued that Obama was stonewalling and not being honest or transparent.

Now, think of how angry we were about Bush lies in 2002 and 2004 that helped the Republicans to win. McCain likely thinks that what he calls lies are what cost Romney and the Republicans an important election.

If you remember, Kerry was pretty silent on Benghazi, other than leading the effort to get a set of questions that the SFRC wanted answered from the state department. Here, he made the point that the questions would become part of the investigation Clinton already authorized. His other comments were the expected comments on the death of people, some well known to the committee. Note that while these were very supportive of the President, they also could not be criticized as stonewalling or covering up. The only other thing he did was to blast the attacks on Rice and praise her effusively.

The fact is that you, others on DU and the media are making this to be Kerry vs Rice. In fact, neither are fighting the other. This is not something where getting the most people behind you wins points. The ONLY person who will make the decision is President Obama.

In fact, the ONLY people I have any problem with are the people, either on Obama's team or close to it, that are feeding this. In the first place, there was no need to leak names, or confirm any speculation on the names.