{"id":9760,"date":"2012-12-04T07:05:13","date_gmt":"2012-12-04T15:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bradblog.com\/?p=9760"},"modified":"2012-12-03T22:20:13","modified_gmt":"2012-12-04T06:20:13","slug":"republican-congressman-on-susan-rice-witch-hunt-maybe-we-should-investigate-bush-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/?p=9760","title":{"rendered":"Republican Congressman on Susan Rice Witch Hunt: ‘Maybe We Should Investigate Bush Too’"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Henry Decker at The National Memo<\/a> (where, by way of full disclosure, I’m also a fairly regular contributor<\/a>)…<\/p>\n

For the second time in a week, conservative Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) is breaking with his party on a hot button issue.<\/p>\n

Last Tuesday, Cole made headlines for disagreeing with House Speaker John Boehner and advising<\/a> his fellow Republicans to accept President Barack Obama’s offer to immediately extend tax cuts on incomes under $250,000, while negotiating a broader deal involving tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.<\/p>\n

During a Sunday morning appearance on ABC’s This Week<\/em>, Cole offered his advice on the other issue that has animated Republicans in the weeks since the election: U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s response to the September 11th attacks in Benghazi, and her potential nomination as Secretary of State.<\/p>\n

When Dan Senor “\u201d the former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority during the Iraq War, and the chief foreign policy advisor to Mitt Romney “\u201d suggested investigating “whether or not Susan Rice should be blamed”\u009d for the Obama administration’s response to the Benghazi attacks, Cole reminded Senor of the Bush administration’s false claims that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.<\/p>\n

“We saw President Bush out front defending something wasn’t true too,”\u009d Cole noted. “Maybe we should ask those guys some questions too.”\u009d<\/b>
\n…
\nIn both cases, Cole is not adopting the Democratic position; he opposes raising tax rates for the wealthy, and he does not appear to support Rice (although he did not say whether or not he would vote to confirm her if he were in the Senate.) Instead, Cole seems to be trying to divert his party from embracing hopeless political positions. Just as Cole correctly identified that the White House has all of the leverage in the tax cut debate, so too does he seem to realize that a public battle over Rice could lead to some very uncomfortable questions about the Bush administration’s record “\u201d a history that the Republican Party would rather stay buried.<\/div>\n

Video of the ABC <\/em>This Week moment mentioned above, from 12\/2\/2012, follows below…<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Henry Decker at The National Memo (where, by way of full disclosure, I’m also a fairly regular contributor)… For the second time in a week, conservative Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) is breaking with his party on a hot button issue. Last Tuesday, Cole made headlines for disagreeing with House Speaker John Boehner and advising […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[326,192,405,24,474,300,586,587],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-9760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abc","category-accountability","category-bush-legacy","category-iraq-war","category-libya","category-republicans","category-susan-rice","category-tom-cole","bb-type-bradblog"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9760\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9760"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=9760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}