Republicans last week finally began hitting back at the absurd accusation by their Capitol Hill adversaries that criticism of UN Ambassador Susan Rice is racist and sexist.
“When you can’t answer the question, you attack the questioner,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who has been among Rice’s most vocal critics over her handling of the 9/11 terrorist attack in Benghazi.
Added Graham: “The only color I’m worried about when it comes to Benghazi is red — blood red, the death of four Americans.”
Rep. Michael Burgess of Texas — one of 97 House Republicans who signed a letter calling on President Obama not to name Rice secretary of state — was less biting. But he was no less adamant, calling such accusations “factually incorrect.”
It took long enough: For a week, the Congressional Black Caucus and female Democratic legislators accused Republicans of using “code words” and always looking to “pick on women and minorities.”
Obama himself indirectly lent support to those efforts with his heated defense that if Republicans “want to go after somebody, they should go after me.”
Which strikes us as pretty sexist itself — the chivalrous knight having to defend the helpless little lady. (It also ignores the fact that one of those leading the charge against Rice is another woman, Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire.)
Susan Rice can surely take care of herself — and if she can’t, she has no business being UN ambassador, let alone secretary of state.
But the notion that any and all criticism of public officials who are women and/or African-American is animated by their race and/or gender is patent hooey.
Certainly, that accusation didn’t hold water when it was Democrats making far harsher and more personal attacks against another black woman named Rice.
Who can forget how Condoleezza Rice was skewered for advocating a war in Iraq even though as a single, childless woman she would pay no “personal price”?
Fact is, the ambassador’s defense of the then-already discredited claim that the Benghazi attack was a spontaneous mob protest against an anti-Muslim video is a legitimate target of criticism.
That so many Democrats feel the need to resort to the racism-sexism shield in her defense more than makes us wonder just what they think she has to hide.