The Difficult Secret.

Islam and the 9/11/12 attacks on America were on the minds of Republicans making the rounds on the news shows this weekend. Speaking of the Benghazi murders Senator John McCain (much admired here) said on CNN:

"It was either willful ignorance or dismal intelligence to think that people come to spontaneous demonstrations with heavy weapons, mortars, and the attack goes on for hours...It interferes with the depiction that the administration is trying to convey that Al Qaeda is on the wane [and] that everything's fine in the Middle East...To blame it on the video … shows the absolute ineptitude and ignorance of the realities. It's not the videos, it's the radical Islamists [who] are pushing the videos."

In that last Sen. McCain was referring to Muslims who translated Innocence of Muslims into Arabic and then pushed it, notably in Egypt, on the population. Before that Innocence was as unknown within Islam as it was without. In the former he of course was referring to Ambassador Susan Rice, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama. Rice made the rounds on the Sunday news shows right after the attacks and blamed the Bengahzi attacks on "extremists" who had "hijacked" what was an otherwise peaceful protest in Benghazi. That was, as McCain said, utterly wrong one of two ways, the Obamas spy chief acknowledging this week that the Benghazi murders were an al Qaeda-led “deliberate and organized terrorist attack.” 

Congressman Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, agreed saying, also on CNN, that Rice should resign:

“I believe that this was such a failure of foreign policy message and leadership, such a misstatement of facts as were known at the time and for her to go on all of those shows and to in effect be our spokesman for the world and be misinforming the American people and our allies and countries around the world, to me somebody has to pay the price for this….I can see why if they wanted to say it's too early to say it's definitively terrorism but to rule out terrorism, to say it was not terrorism at that time was a - to me a terrible mistake to make whether it was done intentionally or unintentionally and to show the significance of that, I believe she should resign, yes.”

For his part, Sen. McCain said, Nah, she shouldn't resign, Obama just sent her out there to speak for him so she would look like the idiot, not him. Yes, but she said it. Congressman King is right, Susan Rice should resign. Both King and McCain are right about the rest.

Image: "The Difficult Secret," sculpture by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1770).