Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is vowing to block U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice from becoming the next secretary of state because he says that her early assessment of attacks in Benghazi, Libya make her "not qualified" for the job.
"Susan Rice should have known better and if she didn't know better, she's not qualified," McCain told Fox News on Wednesday. "I will do everything in my power to block her from being the United States secretary of state."
"She has proven that she either doesn't understand or is not willing to accept evidence on its face," he added.
"I was on Face the Nation that Sunday," McCain insisted. "Right after her came the president of the Libyan National Assembly who said this was al Qaeda. And everybody knew that. And so, she went out and told the American people something that was patently false and defied common sense."
Rice has been a target of conservatives ever since her Sept. 15 appearance on several Sunday morning shows when she repeated a CIA judgement that the Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans had been a reaction to an anti-Muslim video.
"The Republican freakout over Benghazi has been shameful, and their insane scapegoating of Rice's appearances on the Sunday chat shows a week after the attacks has been doubly so," Mother Jones' Kevin Drum wrote on Tuesday. "Republicans—aided and abetted at times by reports in the mainstream media—decided to pretend that Rice had blamed the Benghazi attack entirely on a YouTube video, which they took as dark evidence of a coverup designed to protect Obama. But the truth is that Rice flatly did nothing wrong, a point that bears repeating. She did nothing wrong."
"Graham and the rest of the Republican caucus appear to still be in election season attack dog mode, and it's time for this to stop."
