Clinton And Kerry Get A Free Ride From The Press

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Clinton And Kerry Get A Free Ride From The Press​

Politics: Diplomacy involves considerable travel. What it shouldn't include is free rides from both the media and political establishment. But Hillary Clinton and John Kerry are getting just that as the guard changes at State.

Outside the frothy bubble of U.S. political concerns lie only the hard realities of the real world. That's why hard questions should be asked — and real answers demanded — of U.S. secretaries of state and those who would be them.

That's not the case with either Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who puts up excuse after excuse to avoid testifying on the U.S.' biggest foreign policy failure in Libya, while her would-be successor, John Kerry, wins plaudits from the media despite a long record of anti-Americanism and bad foreign policy calls. Clinton claims she can't testify for Congress on Thursday because she fell down over the weekend and got a concussion. Maybe so, but thus far no one's seen a medical report. What's more, it's the second time Clinton has put off crucial congressional testimony about the murder of a U.S. ambassador and three other U.S. officials by Islamist terrorists in Benghazi, Libya, last Sept. 11. The previous time, she had more pressing business, tasting wine in Australia and checking up on East Timor.

It looks like avoidance of responsibility to preserve her own political viability. Clinton is believed to harbor political ambitions for 2016, but the fact that the State Department failed to provide enough security to embassy personnel, failed to come to their aid after their calls during the attack, and had live video showing just how bad the attacks were, were all her responsibility.

Worse still, her State Department took part in the Obama administration's effort to convince Americans that the deaths were not from terrorist attacks, but were merely a side effect of a spontaneous anti-American demonstration that got out of hand after a U.S.-made anti-Islamic video incited the mobs. With Clinton avoiding testimony a second time, what is she hiding? And why are the media so incurious?

Just as strangely, the media are remarkably full of cheerleading vigor about the naming of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., to succeed Clinton at state in January.

Kerry is being hailed by fellow senators as a lion of foreign policy in the Senate and drawing op-eds calling him "a good fit." That includes influential foreign policy columnists such as David Ignatius, who echoed the Washington establishment in saying, "The fact that Kerry is a known commodity, with a predictable, reliable persona, is one of his strengths."


Read More At IBD:
From Clinton To Kerry, Obama's Secretaries Of State Avoid Hard Questions - Investors.com