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Ricochet Editor-in-Chief Jon Gabriel and Heatstreet’s Stephen Miller chat about Susan “A Video Caused Benghazi” Rice lecturing Trump on honesty, Samantha “Red Line” Power lecturing Trump on Middle East peace, and why Ivanka’s White House role should disturb conservatives.
Our intro and outro music is “Ready to Go” by Guards. Stephen’s song of the week is “First Caress” by Spoon, and Jon’s is “Short Elevated Period” by Wire. To listen to all the music featured on The Conservatarians, subscribe to our Spotify playlist. You also should subscribe to this podcast and give it five-star, glowing reviews on iTunes!
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That was one of the best rants I’ve ever heard. Well done gentleman.
Forgive me for piling on to Stephen’s already epic rant, but I think its worth taking the time to parse out just why Susan Rice’s lie and subsequent statements about the Presidency and truth are so egregious.
Not only did Rice willfully do the rounds on the Sunday shows and repeatedly, knowingly, and brazenly lie about the cause of the Benghazi attack, but the manner in which she did it demonstrates so much of what is wrong with our political leadership over the past two decades.
The lie about the video and subsequent arrest of the director of the video in the middle of the night was an act that betrayed Western virtues like open speech and criticism of religion, as well as civil liberties and due process. It betrayed those values to defend an insular and feckless White House that was out of its depth in a deeply complicated foreign entanglement. It betrayed those values in a way in which it made it seem as though outrageous anti-Muslim statements were the cause of this violence–as though the riots that led to the deaths of Americans there might have some legitimate grievance about prejudice or discrimination behind them, rather than being motivated by a corrupt and desperate interpretation of Islam which makes it a murderous millenarian political theology and justifies every manner of barbarism.
But not only that! The context of those deaths occurred in a conflict in which the United States “led from behind” (continued)
(continued)
which was a preposterous euphemism for the fact that the United States wanted to appear “on the right side of history” by supporting popular uprisings against dictatorships in the Middle East, but didn’t want to expend the blood or treasure necessary to actually deal with the consequences of this set of policy choices in places, like Libya, that were guaranteed to become ungoverned spaces without massive international engagement (which the Europeans were incapable of offering) because they’d been ruled as despotic tyrannies for so many years. And so the Obama administration pursued “regime change” on the cheap, and it sowed chaos and terrorism and failed states throughout Northern Africa.
So, Rice vacillated between ostriching and throwing up a smokescreen which by turns betrayed our values, failed to defend our national interests, and was utterly incapable of winning a conflict or following through on its own implied rationale to ensure the political objectives of a military action actually came to pass.
With “expertise” like this, is it at all surprising to any intelligent observer that an American people that was exhausted of hearing euphemisms and cutting through verbal thickets turned to a man presented himself as “no BS” and whose entire campaign said, in effect, “to hell with all of these people in power!”
Rice and Powers’ legacy is not merely the failures of Obama’s foreign policy. They helped create the environment in which a Trump election was thinkable–and seemed preferable to returning them to power!
I shared in Stephen’s palpable desire to HulkSmash the crap out of those preening idiots who populated the Barry administration ™, and who so very clearly lack the essential, human fundamentals, one of them being self-awareness.
I can see why people want those White House gigs. You are truly accountable for zero as long as no bad news splashes onto the lower part of the president’s precisely-creased pants. Being responsible for nothing means you don’t have to apologize for anything, and has the side effect of making you bombastically stupid later on, evidenced by the borderline insane tweets coming out of your guilty pieholes just two months after power transitions.
Great pod.
At this point, I’m convinced that none of these bands really exist and you’re just gas-lighting me…