Victoria Nuland is worth more than Rice!

TUESDAY, MAY 14, 2013

Quite correctly, David Brooks defends the latest scapegoat: Last Friday night, viewers of Fox were treated to an obscenity from a fallen figure.

Tucker Carlson killed the pig while speaking on Hannity. For various reasons, the highlighted portrait is obscene, ugly, false, vile:

CARLSON (5/10/13): Let me just jump with a couple of facts there. So, we know actually some of what happened. The CIA offered up its analysis to the administration, to the State Department. And Victoria Nuland—who is a Hillary loyalist and a well-known mediocrity and hack, by the way—in Washington saw this and apparently said, “this could be used by the Republicans to attack us,” and thus began the process of changing the CIA reports into what became the talking points you saw on these shows.

That was the downward-spiraling Tucker Carlson, misleading Hannity’s viewers. The next morning, we had the misfortune to see Carlson offer the same assessment on the appalling show, Fox and Friends Weekend.

Carlson was feeding an emerging tale to Fox viewers. All over Fox, Victoria Nuland is being portrayed as the latest hackish slave to the she-devil, Hillary Clinton.

Because Nuland is a hack and a slave, she got those accurate talking points changed! Or so Fox viewers are told.

Carlson went farther than most in his obscene declamation. But he has become a deeply degraded figure as he tries to hang onto the tail of his gruesome career.

Here’s the good news: By now, many people have reported the fact that Nuland pretty much isn’t a hackish slave to Hillary Clinton. In fact, Nuland is a highly accomplished foreign policy person with major ties on the right.

For Salon’s portrait of Nuland, click this. “Victoria Nuland is a former Cheney aide married to a Romney adviser,” the accurate headline proclaims.

Nuland’s personal politics aren’t clear. As a career foreign service professional, she isn’t supposed to be a political player.

But by marriage and by friendship relations, Nuland comes from the rightish side of the aisle. For that reason, she is now being defended from some very high platforms.

This morning, David Brooks offers a highly informative column in which he defends the conduct of Nuland, who he describes as his friend.

Below, you see the way Brooks begins his highly informative column. We strongly recommend the whole piece, which is aptly called “The Next Scapegoat:”

BROOKS (5/14/13): Twenty years ago, when she was a young Foreign Service officer in Moscow, Victoria Nuland gave me a dazzling briefing on the diverse factions inside the Russian parliament. Now she is a friend I typically see a couple times a year, at various functions, and I have watched her rise, working with everybody from Dick Cheney to Hillary Clinton, serving as ambassador to NATO, and now as a spokeswoman at the State Department.

Over the past few weeks, the spotlight has turned on Nuland. The charge is that intelligence officers prepared accurate talking points after the attack in Benghazi, Libya, and that Nuland, serving her political masters, watered them down.

The charges come from two quarters, from Republicans critical of the Obama administration’s handling of Benghazi and intelligence officials shifting blame for Benghazi onto the State Department.

It’s always odd watching someone you know get turned into a political cartoon on the cable talk shows. But this case is particularly disturbing because Nuland did nothing wrong.

Brooks blames two groups for the attacks on Nuland. Skillfully, he omits Fox.

But as far as we know, that last highlighted claim is true: Nuland has done nothing wrong with regard to the famed talking points. We suggest you read Brooks' whole column to help flesh out this claim and to gain a new perspective on the Benghazi disaster.

You may also gain a new perspective on the way our political tribes tend to function. Here’s where the problem comes in:

The previous scapegoat, Susan Rice, also did nothing wrong! But all last fall, Rice was simply thrown away, left for dead by the side of the road by your liberal heroes.

In fact, the discarding of Rice has continued this week, a point we’ll discuss on Thursday. If you watched Chris Matthews last night, we hope you enjoyed a good retch.

In the divergent reaction to these two scapegoats, we see one of the basic power structures of modern American politics. Conservatives will defend their own. Career pseudo-liberals will not.

We’ll go into this problem in more detail by the end of the week. But Rice is hardly the first liberal or Democrat who was simply left for dead when attacked by bogus tales.

Perhaps you can think of other such figures. We can think of several figures who ranked much higher than Rice.

Quite plainly, Victoria Nuland is worth more than Rice! On Thursday, we’ll help you see the way the liberal world has continued to prove this sad point.

Meanwhile, David Brooks has correctly defended the latest scapegoat. At some point, he should have written a similar column about Susan Rice, of course. But if our own tribe was too craven to do so, can we really beat up on poor Brooks?

This morning, the right is defending one of its own. Our “leaders” refuse to do such things!

Whose side are they actually on?