In case he didn’t know it already, Barack Obama has now formally been told that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice is unfit to be Secretary of State by 97 Members of Congress

Latest GOP effort to focus on U.N. Ambassador Rice for being an Obama Administration mouthpiece for its lies in the aftermath of the September 11th attack in Benghazi is being countered by only a small minority of Democrats

A group of ninety-seven House Republicans sent a letter to President Barack Obama on Monday, saying that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice misled the nation about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya, making her unfit to be a candidate to succeed Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The Republican House Members’ letter specifically stated that Rice’s “misleading statements” about the attack that led to the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans “caused irreparable damage to her credibility both at home and around the world.”

Obama’s  U.N. Ambassador became a target when she went on five Sunday talk shows five days after the attack on the Benghazi diplomatic mission on Sept. 11 and said that, from the best information she had at the time, the attack was a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim video and not a premeditated attack. That "best information" later proved to be incorrect. Interestingly, after the arrival of the four dead bodies from Benghazi, the current Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has put a lot of geographic and institutional distance between herself and the rest of the Obama Administration over the shifting Benghazi narratives and the equally shifting intra-agency time-lines related to Benghazi.

The House Republicans said in their letter to the President that Susan Rice, “is widely viewed as having either willfully or incompetently misled the American public in the Benghazi matter.” As a result, they said, “we believe that making her the face of U.S. foreign policy in your second term would greatly undermine your desire to improve U.S. relations with the world and continue to build trust with the American people.”  Or as Clint Eastwood might say to President “Empty Chair” if he were in the same position, “Are you feeling lucky....”

So far only a handful of Congressional Democrats have come forward to particularly defend Ms. Rice;  and right at the start that defense has become bifurcated.  Members of the Intelligence and other committees actually dealing with the issues of Benghazi have countered the Republican arguments with their view of the facts and the record. On the other hand, some others in Congress have decided to push the routine hot buttons. Certain Members of Congress who are black, like James Clyburn and incoming Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Marcia Fudge are speaking out, because they say they are hearing “dog whistles” and seeing “racial code words”; about a dozen others (actually many of them the same people, being “twofers” using the same racial arguments) attacked the Republicans and their charges against Ambassador Rice as a continuation of the so called “War Against Women”.  Since these kinds of arguments seemed to work so well in the recently ended campaign, the Obama Administration and this lead group of Democrats are presuming that Democrats across the board and the rest of the citizenry will be content with their use of race and gender in their defense of this perfidious and incompetent administration on many Benghazi-related matters.

The current Susan Rice fracas looks like it is just the beginning of a very long , very ugly and very polarizing battle over lots more than a black man exploiting some black woman while trying to get by on a Sergeant Schultz-style Nuremberg defense, “I knew nothing and I was just obeying orders....” Ah, the perfect mix of perfidy and incompetence. Only when the buck stops, it was the black man who was probably giving the orders.