Susan Rice

Note to GOP re Benghazi: Stop calling it Watergate, Iran-contra, bigger than both, etc. First, it might well be, but we don't know. History will judge. Second, overhyping will only diminish the importance of the scandal if it doesn't meet presidency-breaking standards. Third, focusing on the political effects simply plays into the hands of Democrats desperately claiming that this is nothing but partisan politics. Let the facts speak for themselves. They are damning enough. Let Gregory Hicks , the honorable, apolitical...

Note to GOP re Benghazi: Stop calling it Watergate, Iran-contra, bigger than both, etc. First, it might well be, but we don't know. History will judge. Second, overhyping will only diminish the importance of the scandal if it doesn't meet presidency-breaking standards. Third, focusing on the political effects simply plays into the hands of Democrats desperately claiming that this is nothing but partisan politics. Let the facts speak for themselves. They are damning enough. Let Gregory Hicks , the honorable, apolitical...

UNITED NATIONS — Susan E. Rice , the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who lost out in a bruising bid for the job of secretary of state, may have the last laugh. Rice has emerged as far and away the front-runner to succeed Thomas E. Donilon as President Obama's national security adviser later this year, according to an administration official familiar with the president's thinking. The job would place her at the nexus of foreign-policy decision making and allow her to rival the...

BEIJING — Responding to regional worries over North Korea's bellicose threats , China on Sunday expressed concern and what appeared to be veiled criticism of its longtime ally. "No one should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world into chaos for selfish gains," Chinese President Xi Jinping said at an economic forum in Hainan province. Avoiding mentioning North Korea by name, Xi said, "While pursuing its own interests, a country should accommodate the legitimate interests of others.

SEN. JOHN KERRY (D-MASS.): Thank you very much, Senator Dodd. It's my pleasure, on behalf of the entire committee and the Senate, to welcome you here, Dr. Rice. We're really pleased to have you here today. And obviously, I can see that some members of your family are here, ranging up and down the generations I see. We'd love to have you introduce them, if you would. Can you just share with us quickly who they are? And then I'd like to say a few words and I know Senator Lugar would too. SUSAN RICE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

President Obama had a rare "bring-it-on" moment when ABC News's Jonathan Karl asked him about threats by Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham to block the confirmation of Susan Rice, should he nominate her for secretary of state. "If Senator McCain and Senator Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me ," Obama said Wednesday at his East Room news conference, defending his U.N. ambassador from charges that she misled the public about attacks on Americans in Libya.

In his Nov. 18 Sunday Opinion column, " The wrong person to fight for ," Dana Milbank joined the chorus of those calling U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice unqualified to be secretary of state. I was privileged to teach Ms. Rice in two high school history courses at the National Cathedral School in Washington. She excelled in both courses. As a ninth-grader, Ms. Rice was already a writer of superb essays. I taught her again in a difficult AP course when she was a junior. Her performance was again excellent.

Does gender — or the supercharged combination of gender and race — play a role in the preemptive strikes on not-yet-secretary of state nominee Susan Rice ? For perspective on this complex question, it helps to return to 1974 and the nomination of another woman, Alice Rivlin, to head the Congressional Budget Office. As Rivlin tells the story, the office had just been created, she was selected by a search committee — and the House Budget Committee chairman made clear his adamant, gender-based opposition.

White House observers note an interesting game of musical chairs underway — or maybe dominoes is more appropriate — with U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice at the center. Here's what we're hearing is the state of play amongst some very interested parties. While it's well known that Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett is (after President Obama himself) Rice's biggest supporter to be nominated as secretary of state, self-interest has created a coalition of strange bedfellows who are also backing her, despite the...

Replacing Hillary Clinton was always going to be hard. Even before the attacks in Benghazi became a political controversy, the job of filling Clinton's globe-trotting heels as secretary of state was a monumental one for President Obama. With high approval ratings, a record of success that " relies on development and civilian power as much as military might " and a status as the easy favorite for a 2016 Democratic presidential nod, Clinton was always going to be a tough act to follow.

That delegation of lawmakers who went to the Vatican to welcome the new pope may not have traveled in the style to which members of Congress are accustomed — but at least they didn't have to shell out for their own tickets. Under post-sequester rules announced by Speaker John Boehner , House members must fly commercial instead of taking military aircraft for overseas trips — and they have to pay for the privilege of having no legroom and eating gummy in-flight food out of their own office budgets or out of their committee's purse.

UNITED NATIONS — Susan E. Rice , the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who lost out in a bruising bid for the job of secretary of state, may have the last laugh. Rice has emerged as far and away the front-runner to succeed Thomas E. Donilon as President Obama's national security adviser later this year, according to an administration official familiar with the president's thinking. The job would place her at the nexus of foreign-policy decision making and allow her to...

There are signs that Secretary of State John Kerry 's presence may mean somewhat longer meetings for President Obama 's Cabinet and his national security team. Kerry's emotional and long farewell address to the Senate on Wednesday came in at around 7,700 words. In contrast, Sen. Daniel Webster 's famous 1830 speech against state nullification of federal laws — widely seen as the greatest ever delivered in the Senate, was about 4,500 words. Kerry will be joined in many meetings by a former Senate colleague,...

Before they were girls, they were women. Before that, they were girls. I am not talking here of the chronology of females but of acceptable usage. Back in the 1970s, for instance, the use of "girl" could trigger a stinging rebuke and the damning charge of male-chauvinist piggism — or why else would a man call a woman a girl? This was the Golden Age of political correctness, which now, it seems, has its last redoubt on, of all places, the opinion pages of the robustly anti-PC Wall Street Journal.

Want to take a guess about the two most popular politicians in the final NBC-Wall Street Journal poll of 2012? Hint: They have the same last name. Yes, the answer is Bill and Hillary Clinton — two figures who have been on the national political scene so long that it's hard to remember a time when we didn't have them in our lives. In politics, ubiquity usually breeds fatigue from the public, not more excitement. (See Gingrich, Newton Leroy .) And yet Americans seem to grow ever more fond of the...

If only Hillary Rodham Clinton had not been worn down after a week of flights and high-stakes diplomacy, U.N. Ambassador Susan E. Rice might now be well on her way to being the next secretary of state. In the immediate aftermath of the September attack that left four Americans — including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens — dead in Benghazi, Libya, it was Clinton who was supposed to go on the Sunday talk shows to explain what had happened and why. Instead, that duty fell to...

In 1953, an Army officer by the name of Irving Peress was promoted from captain to major. Peress was a leftist, possibly a communist, and word of his advancement in rank reached Sen. Joseph McCarthy in Washington. He asserted that the promotion proved the Army was "soft on communism," and he launched an investigation that transfixed the nation. Peress, by the way, was a mere dentist. He was the Susan Rice of his day. Rice, of course, is a much more substantial figure. She is the U.N. ambassador, a friend of Barack Obama's and a member of...

Regarding the Nov. 15 news article " President, GOP spar over Benghazi ": The complaint of Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) against U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice seems to boil down to this: There is no such thing as the legendary "fog of war," so those who would offer tentative evaluations of catastrophic events should be omniscient and infallible. Ms. Rice was careful to say, in preface to her remarks in the days after the Benghazi incident, that her information was such as was known at the time.

The decision by United Nations ambassador Susan Rice to withdraw her name from consideration as President Obama's next Secretary of State sent shockwaves through Washington Thursday evening. Rice, as anyone watching the political battle over her potential nomination knows by now, had come under fire from Senate Republicans for comments she made earlier this fall on Sunday morning talk shows about the attacks in Benghazi, Libya. Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte seized on the issue and promised a difficult...

It is a strange world in which a person is compelled to announce her withdrawal from consideration for a position for which she has not been nominated. Strange and, more to the point, ugly. I know Susan Rice only a bit. I have no strong view about whether she would have been a good secretary of state. But I do believe that the lengthy public twisting-in-the-wind process of her non-nomination reflects badly on nearly everyone involved — on Republicans, most obviously, but also on the president.