



Update, 12/13/12: NBC News is reporting the Susan Rice has withdrawn her name from consideration for Secretary of State, citing the possibility of a “lengthy, disruptive and costly” nomination fight. Was she the victim of Republican hypocrisy? Here’s what we wrote earlier in December:

UN Ambassador Susan Rice has been a lightning rod for congressional Republicans, who have clamored to portray her television appearances in the wake of the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, as evidence that the Obama administration deliberately misled Americans about the nature of the incident. Rice has been floated as a top candidate to replace Hillary Clinton, who is planning to leave the State Department, and Senate Republicans have threatened to block Rice’s hypothetical nomination as secretary of state because of the Benghazi attack.

The outrage expressed by Republican lawmakers—spurred by the ambassador reciting intelligence-community-generated talking points that turned out to be partially inaccurate—is very different from their response to another administration official named Rice who was accused of misleading the American public on a matter of national security. That, of course, is Condoleezza Rice. When George W. Bush nominated Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, some of the same Senate Republicans who are currently attacking Susan Rice supported Condi wholeheartedly, despite her role in helping to make the case for war in Iraq based on bogus intelligence. Back then, Republicans were much more willing to chalk up Condoleezza Rice’s parroting of flawed intel to well-intentioned mistakes as opposed to outright deception, even when the evidence said otherwise. Here’s how some of Susan Rice’s most vocal critics responded to the Bush administration’s disastrous handling of pre-war Iraq intelligence and the nomination of Condoleezza Rice.

Sources: Mediaite, ThinkProgress, CBS News, BuzzFeed, NewsOK, Inhofe.senate.gov, The Hill, PBS News, ThinkProgress, Collins.senate.gov