Susan Rice withdraws her name from Secretary of State:

We know John McCain will be on Sunday shows as an important voice on foreign policy, even though he is mostly wrong all the time. Susan Rice, although she was simply representing intelligence information provided to her by Petraeus for release, is now a no go for Secretary of State and has withdrawn her name. (Note: Petraeus gave her a bunch of garbage to lay out all Sunday because it really didn’t help us understand Benghazi nor did it allow the Department of State to get ahead of the information coming out of that incident)

It’s important to remember why Libya:

Power’s piece is a fascinating study in how and why the U.S. is slow to react to atrocities abroad. It also includes one passage that casts Susan Rice in a damning light:

At an interagency teleconference in late April, Susan Rice, a rising star on the NSC who worked under Richard Clarke, stunned a few of the officials present when she asked, “If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?” Lieutenant Colonel Tony Marley remembers the incredulity of his colleagues at the State Department. “We could believe that people would wonder that,” he says, “but not that they would actually voice it.” Rice does not recall the incident but concedes, “If I said it, it was completely inappropriate, as well as irrelevant.”

I suspect the passage didn’t endear Power to Rice. But as Massimo notes in his piece, Rice also told Power that, “I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required.”In Libya, Rice made good on her words–a position that put her in alliance with Power, with whom she is now said to have a strong relationship. Whether she might go “down in flames” as a result remains to be seen.

Remember, convincing Secretary of State Clinton to push the President to pursue action in Libya came from Rice and Power contra the Pentagon led by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the Intelligence heads. In addition, Clinton and Rice actually moved a lot of political actors to get Libya done:

Though Defense Secretary Robert Gates was joined by the national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon and the counter-terrorism chief John O. Brennan in arguing against American military action, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton overrode their objections. Samantha Power of the National Security Council (left) and U.N. ambassador Susan Rice (right) had been arguing for the deployment of military force. According to Brian Katulis, a national security expert, “Hillary and Susan Rice were key parts of this story because Hillary got the Arab buy-in and Susan worked the U.N. to get a 10-to-5 vote, which is no easy thing.”

This is the type of capacity Rice has already served so far: a competent diplomatic representative of the state. John McCain says something and the beltway journalists jump, so there’s that. People forget, in touting the new found democracy in Libya, McCain, Graham and Ayotte deign to acknowledge her key role in brokering the coalition for intervention into Libya. An intervention that cost us 4 American lives total vs. Iraq and Afghanistan which McCain supported at all times in all phases. No one asks McCain about his pow wow in favor of arming Libya’s despot Gaddafi. She’s qualified and she has served at a high level. John McCain argues for intervention on behalf of people rebelling , but Susan Rice helped actually devise a successful limited engagement that resulted in a democracy. This all the while senators continued to not do their duty in holding the office of the president to the war powers act’s limits. So McCain is actually knee capping a diplomat responsible for the muscular, successful foreign policy he advocates but he himself never divine.

I think John Kerry will be a good nominee if nominated, but also remember, McCain and Kerry were supposedly friends before 2008, but then swift boats part II happened, and John Kerry was very surprised. So even though you hear a lot of “we would tots be cool with John Kerry” now, in reality, sh*t may not be so sweet when his name is actually put forward for Secretary of State. I don’t trust them, and Democrats should be prepared not to trust them either. The obstructive, disrespectful, sexist, xenophobic rules of order are still in effect:

“Obama will be on a very short leash, fiscally speaking, over the next four years,” Norquist said. “He’s not going to have any fun at all; he may just have to go blow up small countries he can’t pronounce because it won’t be any fun to be here, because he won’t be able to spend the kind of cash he was hoping to.”

They are all back in line. The White House needs to learn to coordinate support, both with the voters and Democrats in the senate, for every nominee and every initiative outside of it’s walls before they undertake them in this second term. Play politics folks. You’re politicians.

You know, people stood in line for a long time to vote for President Obama. That means an extended black family will be in the White House for the next 4 years. A far cry from US founding father Thomas Jefferson who as MHP smartly points out is featured in the background of Michelle Obama’s official first term portrait. Was a racist who kept his mistress prisoner and therefore rightless even as he freed their children together:

There is, it is true, a compelling paradox about Jefferson: when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, announcing the “self-evident” truth that all men are “created equal,” he owned some 175 slaves. Too often, scholars and readers use those facts as a crutch, to write off Jefferson’s inconvenient views as products of the time and the complexities of the human condition.

But while many of his contemporaries, including George Washington, freed their slavesduring and after the revolution — inspired, perhaps, by the words of the Declaration — Jefferson did not. Over the subsequent 50 years, a period of extraordinary public service, Jefferson remained the master of Monticello, and a buyer and seller of human beings.

Rather than encouraging his countrymen to liberate their slaves, he opposed both private manumission and public emancipation. Even at his death, Jefferson failed to fulfill the promise of his rhetoric: his will emancipated only five slaves, all relatives of his mistress Sally Hemings, and condemned nearly 200 others to the auction block. Even Hemings remained a slave, though her children by Jefferson went free.

Nor was Jefferson a particularly kind master. He sometimes punished slaves by selling them away from their families and friends, a retaliation that was incomprehensibly cruel even at the time. A proponent of humane criminal codes for whites, he advocated harsh, almost barbaric, punishments for slaves and free blacks. Known for expansive views of citizenship, he proposed legislation to make emancipated blacks “outlaws” in America, the land of their birth. Opposed to the idea of royal or noble blood, he proposed expelling from Virginia the children of white women and black men.

Jefferson and Hemmings ancestors are still disenfranchised by descedendants of Jefferson and his wife:

My shock has evolved to sadness and wariness as I watched some of my European American family publish papers, write books, send letters to editors and speak at gatherings, denouncing the descendants of Sally Hemings and anyone who associated with them as frauds, impostors, or ignorant fools and asserting conclusions that are unsupported by many historians, genealogy experts and most of the American public. I have also experienced the manipulative disrespect and abuse directly. The MA refused to allow people attending the Monticello Community Gathering to enter the Monticello cemetery on the grounds that they might damage the grass and the plantings. But a gathering of Virginia Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) members is invited to visit every July.

The only hopeful aspect of the MA’s membership dispute was that one cousin prepared a proposal for a new organization with a larger scope, one to include descendants of everyone who lived at Monticello in Jefferson’s time, linking people through home and heritage, skirting the troublesome kinship connection. There was no support in the MA but it reignited my long-lost fantasy of bringing together the black and white Monticello descendants.

Even in the work around solution was racism. It was called “hopeful”, but it’s intentionally creating a gray area where Hemmings and Jefferson’s ancestors are treated as just descendants of slaves who worked the plantation. Not the master of the plantation.

Yes. The Jefferson portrait indeed matters.

More from MHP on the Obama Family’s time in the White House: