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Rep. Tom Cole, a Republican from Oklahoma, says that if lawmakers are going to go after U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice over her initial public assessment of the September attack in Benghazi then maybe Congress should also look at how President George W. Bush pushed bad intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Dan Senor, who worked to spin the Iraq war for the Bush administration as the chief spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), told a Sunday panel on ABC that Rice deserved to be scrutinized because she was "front and center" as the voice of the Obama administration after the Benghazi attack.

"I spoke with one senator who met with her this week," Senor explained. "The consensus is -- this individual conveyed -- is the meetings did not go well. Benghazi was a serious issue. We can debate whether or not Susan Rice should be blamed for it."

"There is a legitimate concern that she was used five days after the fact to propagate a story that we should have known at the time was not the case," Cole agreed, adding that there were also "serious questions about our own intelligence people."

"We saw President Bush out front defending something wasn't true too," the Oklahoma Republican recalled. "Maybe we should ask those guys some questions too."

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) pointed out that 241 Marines were killed in Lebanon in 1982 under President Ronald Reagan and "we came together and said that this is a national tragedy and blame was not parceled out the way that it is now."

Senor, however, insisted that there was "accountability" after the Marines were killed because Reagan appointed a fact-finding committee to investigate.

"Part of the problem here is in the lead up to the election when Benghazi got a lot of attention, the president said, 'Don't talk about Benghazi. If you do, you're politicizing the issue,'" Senor opined. "So you weren't allowed to -- [former GOP nominee Mitt] Romney and others weren't allowed to talk about it in the political context. Here we are after the election and there's no full airing. We still don't know exactly what happened."

Tom Hartmann does something you never hear him do on his radio show. Completely loses his cool with a wingnut caller who insulted him a number of times before he'd finally had enough of him. I agree with the second caller completely. It's easy for people like that wingnut Jason to care less about these useless wars and the toll they take when you don't even look at the people who's heads we're dropping bombs on as human beings. One of the commenters over at DU where I saw this posted said Thom apologized on the next show for this outburst.

I don’t think he needed to. I think the bigger problem is that more people are not as equally outraged about the human suffering that’s gone on in our name and that too many Americans could care less about the number of refugees and widows and orphans that have been created from Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. I’m not any happier with the Obama administration for continuing way too many of Bush’s policies, but Obama didn’t make the decision to invade either Afghanistan or Iraq. Bush did. Now Obama is stuck trying to figure out how to clean up Bush’s mess. That’s one job I sure as hell would not want and don’t envy anyone else having to take on.

I’m just so disgusted right now with what’s happened in both countries that I’m exhausted from it. I’m tired of the killing in our name and with our tax dollars and wondering when it’s ever going to stop. I don’t think we should be escalating in Afghanistan and think we should be getting the hell out of Iraq. I’m grateful there’s someone like Thom Hartmann out there expressing how much all of this pisses me off as well and how outraged anyone should be over the death and destruction the invasion of Iraq has caused if you’re willing to actually take a look at the numbers as Thom did here. It’s just appalling. And our media in this country has completely ignored it. As far as they're concerned, the "surge" has worked and we can move along now. Never mind the carnage we've left behind.

January 08, 2009 BBC World