Rice Rocket

            We should be spending our political energy debunking austerity, creating jobs and restoring our country’s economy, but conspiracy fantasists are too busy worrying about Susan Rice.  Their “no there there” conspiracy accusations about Benghazi dominate their headwaters like an addiction.  Despite being one of those wastebasket-of-history ideas, it does resonate with the uninformed.  Like the fake moon landing, the Loch Ness monster, and Piltdown man. 

           A good many people want to believe the government is lying—hiding a horrible truth.  They were there for Clinton, Bush, now Obama, and surely most of their predecessors.  But Obama’s horrible truth isn’t about Libya.  History will more likely judge it to be his drone attack death toll of innocent foreign civilians.  And, his political adversaries’ horrible truth will probably turn out to be that Affordable Health Care worked and saved lives, and they can’t stand that. 

            Another horrible truth, often disdainfully dismissed by the manifestly misguided, is that government is frequently the most efficient provider of public services.  All those familiar jokes to the contrary are slanderous distortions, with rare, notable exceptions.

           Susan Rice draws only second-tier emotional opprobrium—the clear winners there are Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin.  But around here, their time hasn’t arrived.  So it’s Susan Rice who gets the talk radio razzing.  She obviously has something to offer our country that some believe to be valuable.  While her opponents go pale and get sick to their tummies, she has rocketed past them, and will get a chance to contribute that something.