Republicans seem to have finally scored one victory this fall – taking Susan Rice out of the running for secretary of state.

In doing so, they’ve applied standards to Rice, the current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, that they would never apply to a Republican administration official, and never have. (Where was their outrage when Secretary of State Colin Powell sold the United Nations a barrel of snake oil to justify the invasion of Iraq?)

They have also obscured the real issues surrounding the attack on the American mission in Benghazi on Sept. 11 — during which Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others were killed — in favor of an endless discussion of what Ms. Rice said on a Sunday morning gab show five days later.



And to fuel their assault, Republicans have invented a strange political theory for why Ms. Rice said on Sept. 16 that the Benghazi attack sprang from a protest inspired by an inane anti-Muslim YouTube video (more on that in a bit).

Senator Susan Collins of Maine, one of the only supposed Republican moderates left in Washington, essentially killed Ms. Rice’s prospects of becoming Secretary of State today. Ms. Collins said that Ms. Rice had played to presidential politics in her description of the Benghazi assault, which she said “began spontaneously” and were spurred by the YouTube video.

The running Republican theory behind Rice’s use of that description? President Obama did not want a story about an al Qaeda attack on the embassy in the news during his re-election campaign, as that would taint an effort to portray the overthrow of Muammar el-Qaddafi as a “success story.”

The theory baffles me — who thought Libya was a big success in the first place? The country is struggling in its post-Qaddafi existence. There have been unceasing reports about security issues, assassinations and other kinds of violence. Who could be surprised by the existence of an al Qaeda faction there?

It’s also still not clear who was responsible for the attack on the embassy. An article published in the Times today said: “On-the-ground accounts indicate that Ms. Rice’s description of the attack, though wrong in some respects, was accurate in others. Witnesses to the assault said it was carried out by members of the Ansar al-Shariah militant group, without any warning or protest, in retaliation for an American-made video mocking the Prophet Muhammad.”

On MSNBC this evening, David Corn of Mother Jones noted that the fight over Ms. Rice is a distraction. “The big thing,” he said, “is not what she said on a talk show. It’s what actually happened and what should be done afterward.”

It seems more and more likely that Mr. Obama will sacrifice Ms. Rice as a possible secretary of state to put out this fire, and perhaps pick the safe, but not inspiring, Senator John Kerry. (Senators love to confirm one of their own for big jobs.)

Maybe then Republicans can stop sputtering with outrage on Fox News and help figure out if there is a need to beef up intelligence and security around American diplomatic missions in dangerous places.