On “The Daily Show” on Thursday, host Jon Stewart grilled United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice about the Obama administration’s response to the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, last year.
He began by asking about the explanation she provided for the attacks during appearances on Sunday political talk shows just days after the incident. “I shared the best information that our intelligence community had at the time, and they provided the talking points that I used. And they were wrong in one respect, we learned subsequently, and that is that there wasn’t in fact a protest,” Rice said.
Stewart pressed her to explain why there was so much back-and-forth between government agencies and why no one seemed to have the straight story.
“There’s always confusion when you have a tragedy of that sort,” she said. “The bigger tragedy is that we’ve spent all of these months trying to figure out the origin of some talking points, which were cleared at the highest levels of the intelligence community, and in my opinion not enough time doing the service that we owe to our fallen colleagues.”
― “Jon Stewart grills Susan Rice on Benghazi attack,” the L.A. Times, this past Friday. Click to the 4:10 mark in the video on that Webpage to hear Rice make that utterly astonishing juxtaposition. Found via Christian Toto of Big Journalism, who adds, “Jon Stewart Grills Susan Rice on Benghazi After Slamming John McCain for Doing Same.”
And why does Stewart — who plays a Chevy Chase-inspired parody of an anchorman, so often ask the questions that self-described “real” journalists simply won’t?
Update: Welcome readers clicking in from Adam Baldwin’s Twitter feed.
Related: “John McCain Asks NBC’s David Gregory ‘Do You Care Whether Four Americans Died?'” Wow, have some sense of proportion, Sen. McCain. Don’t you care about “the bigger tragedy?”
(Of course, as to whether or not Gregory actually cares, Mike Wallace and Peter Jennings answered that question 35 years ago.)
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