Well, the one thing you have to give the spotlight-humpers currently trying to make a meal out of the career of Susan Rice is they're nothing if not predictable.

Rice, and acting CIA director Michael Morell, took time out of their busy schedules to go up to Capitol Hill and soothe the wounded fee-fees of John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and the inexplicable Kelly Ayotte, who has decided that the foreign-policy credentials she burnished keeping New Hampshire safe from General Burgoyne have made her a serious player, and who apparently has been adopted by Grumpypants and Huckleberry Closetcase because they can convince her that Susan Rice went to prom with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. So Rice and Morell give them the courtesy of a meeting that these three had no real right to demand, and this is what we get from Huckleberry when the meeting is over.

The concerns I have are greater today than they were before, and we're not even close to getting the basic answers," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), joined by McCain and Sen. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), told reporters after the closed-door meeting. "I would place a hold on anybody who wanted to be promoted for any job who had a role in the Benghazi situation."

This whole long con has passed now into the realm of pure McCarthyism.

"We are significantly troubled by many of the answers that we got and some that we didn't get," said McCain, an Arizona Republican. "It is clear the information that [Rice] gave the American people was incorrect when she said it was a spontaneous demonstration triggered by a hateful video. It was not, and there was compelling evidence at the time that that was certainly not the case."

No details. Nothing specific. Just John McCain, being troubled, as he has been since the country declined to make him its president. What happened with Rice and the talking-points, and why it happened, has been explained at length by everyone closely involved in the episode, including David Petraeus, whose word once was gospel, before the episode of The General, His Wife, The Other Woman, The Other General, The Other Other Woman and The Lovesick Shirtless FBI guy erupted.

What more can Rice do? She has explained herself. Petraeus has explained what happened and why. The entire apparatus of government seems satisfied with their explanation of the tragedy in Benghazi and has moved on. Rice can't help it if Fox News is a monomaniacal propaganda mill, or that McCain is little more than a steaming lump of frustrated ambition at this point. The Foreign Relations committee will have at her, if the president follows through and nominates her, which he almost has to do now. The "American people," on whose behalf McCain and Graham (and Ayotte, the permanent parenthetical in this lash-up) allegedly are acting, have accepted the explanation, where they are paying attention at all. This must baffle McCain, who believes that there is no country outside of a green room any more.

McCain and Graham — and the hapless Ayotte, who is clearly, and pathetically, looking past Rice all the way to the 2016 Iowa caucuses — have nothing. They want to beat up on Rice simply because they can't beat up on the president, although McCain made a run at that over the weekend. And they came out of the meeting and ran their mouths about what went on because they knew Rice wasn't going to go into details of that meeting in public. They are a pair of cowards, with a feckless rookie in train, and they are playing dangerous games with the country's security. They hereafter should be ignored and, if Graham goes through with his threat of putting a hold on Rice's nomination, Harry Reid should move his desk out onto Constitution Avenue, and no Democrat should cooperate with this clown ever again.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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