Libya attack: GOP goes after the White House, especially Susan Rice

As the presidential debates and the election approach, questions about how the Obama administration has handled the attack in Libya that killed the US ambassador on Sept. 11 have taken a harder political edge.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee says it’s a scandal worse than Watergate – that the American people “have flat-out been lied to,” as he put it on Fox News Friday.

Eric Fehrenstrom, a senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s campaign (also speaking on Fox News), says, “President Obama needs to be held accountable for his administration's attempts to mislead the American people about what happened in Benghazi.”

Rep. Peter King, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, has called for the resignation of United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice.

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The broader theme here (and in many other partisan and conservative blog comments) is that President Obama wasn’t just unaware of the threat in Libya and its violent outcome, but that he and his administration were purposely untruthful about what happened.

The headline on Karl Rove’s column in The Wall Street Journal this week was “Obama's Biggest Opponent Is the Truth.”

“Every day, it seems, he attempts to disqualify his opponent through deliberate and undeniable falsehoods,” Mr. Rove wrote. “This is only one side of a two-sided coin. The president can't tell the truth about his own record either.”

In predicting what he’ll be dealing with in his upcoming debates with Obama, Mr. Romney himself told “Good Morning America” earlier this month, "I think he's going to say a lot of things that aren't accurate."

The essence of the charge about Libya by Republicans is that the administration purposely tried to play down the incident by asserting that the attack was spontaneous, prompted by riots tied to the anti-Islam YouTube video that set off protests in Egypt, Libya, and many other Muslim countries across North Africa and the Middle East.

In the days following the attack, Ambassador Rice (and others in the administration) left the impression that the attackers took advantage of the riot to quickly gather weapons and target the relatively defenseless consulate.

Only later did administration officials, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, acknowledge that “terrorists” – some with possible ties (or at least supported by) Al Qaeda – likely were involved.

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