Susan Rice And The Student Protesters
By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
By now, the dust has settled sufficiently to make a dispassionate assessment of Susan Rice’s contradictory statements about the Obama administration’s surveillance of Donald Trump and his staff. Here’s my dispassionate assessment: She lies easily. The Washington Post agrees: It awarded her statements “four Pinocchios.” (A “Pinocchio” is the term the Post uses for a false or misleading statement made by a public person. Four Pinocchios is the designation for the highest and most deliberate level of deceptions, what the Post calls a “whopper.”)
The Pinocchios were awarded for Rice’s insistence, during a television interview with Andrea Mitchell, that she “knew nothing” about the surveillance of the Trump team during the run-up to the presidential election, when just days later she was forced to concede that “it was necessary at times” for her “to make requests” for the “unmasking” of the identity of American citizens found in conversations with foreign operatives under surveillance, and that members of the Trump team were among those unmasked.
The Post also pointed to her statement to the press, while President Obama’s national security adviser, that the Obama administration was “able to find a solution that didn’t necessitate the use of force that actually removed the chemical weapons that were known from Syria, in a way that the use of force would never have accomplished….We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile.”
The Post fact-checker found this statement “problematic,” considering the ongoing attacks with chemical weapons by the Syrian government against its own citizens.
We could also point to Rice’s willingness to go on the Sunday morning news shows back in 2012 and blame the attack upon our embassy in Benghazi on an anti-Muslim videotape; and to her insistence that it made sense to trade Islamic terrorists imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl because Bergdahl had “served with honor and distinction.”
Case closed. She lies.
But that leaves open the question of why she lies.
I looked up the term “congenital liar” in preparation for this column. The definition I got is someone who “just cannot tell the truth.” There are those who use the term figuratively, to mean someone who feels no guilt when he lies. Others use it literally, to indicate not a moral failure, but an actual genetic defect that causes someone to lie habitually.
I don’t think either definition fits Rice’s willingness to lie. I would bet that she does not lie routinely and without remorse to her husband and family. I doubt that she would lie nonchalantly to Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett, and Hillary Clinton, or to Bill Clinton.
Rice’s lies are in a different category. They are lies that Rice thinks warrant no remorse. She was lying calculatedly, in a Machiavellian manner, taking a bullet for the Obama administration, for the cause. She was denying the truth to people she thought did not deserve the truth. That is why her political allies do not see her lying as a character flaw; why they admire her for it.
It did not matter to her that her lying would be uncovered. She was convinced that her duty was to get the Obama team through a news cycle; that when her lies were eventually revealed it would be matter of little consequence, except as an issue for some conservative journalists and talking heads to bat around, and that no damage would be done to her and her liberal allies.
Rice is aware of many lies like that. Has Bill Clinton suffered politically for lying about Monica Lewinsky? All the polls that tell us he is one of the most admired men in the world can’t be wrong. Did Hillary Clinton lose support among her Democratic base for telling us she made a $100,000 profit on a $1,000 investment in highly speculative cattle-futures contract by “reading The Wall Street Journal”? Or that she had no idea how the missing Whitewater billing records, which she said had “just vanished,” mysteriously appeared on a White House desk?
But where do the student protesters who shout down conservative speakers such as Charley Murray and Heather Mac Donald fit into this equation? Like Rice, they are convinced that they are dealing with people who do not deserve the courtesy of an honest dialogue. They see no reason to be civil and tolerant with their ideological opponents, whom they think deserve to be shouted down. The student protesters do not think conservatives have the right to be heard; Susan Rice does not think they are entitled to the truth.
Is that a fair thing to say about Rice? Think back to the day when President Obama delivered his speech congratulating Donald Trump for his victory in the presidential election. The White House staff gathered in the Rose Garden for the speech. The photo of the Obama team, including Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett, was startling, a textbook example of what people mean when they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Take a look at it. You can access it by doing a search under “photo White House staff angry at Trump victory.”
Their faces are sullen, despondent, angry, reminiscent of the famous photos of the French men and women lining the streets as Hitler and his generals strode arrogantly down the Champs-Élysées after the defeat of France in 1940. The Obama team was not pondering the succession to power of the “loyal opposition.” They were reacting to the new administration as if it were an enemy occupying force that deserved to be opposed by any means necessary.
My hunch is that a photo of the student protesters waiting for Charles Murray to appear at Middlebury College would have shown similar expressions.
