The ongoing spectacle of three of the more unfortunate representatives of the Caucasian race: grumpus gramps John McCain with his homunculus sidekick Little Lindsey Graham, along with third member of this not at all Mod Squad, political cypher Kelly Ayotte, leading a typically mendacious Republican crusade of smear and harassment against one of the nation’s most accomplished public servants, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, illustrates with beautifully jocular clarity Republicans’ surviving post-election capacity for gross demographic malpractice. It is a possibility much less than remote, that in the Republican mind Ms. Rice is the perfectly vulnerable punching bag in the attempted demeaning of Obama foreign policy, in no small part due to her gender and race. Otherwise, even from a bastion of irrationality like the Crazy Old White People’s GOP, her targeting makes even less sense than it normally might.

This has to do with the not negligibly inconvenient fact that Ms. Rice, a brilliant and highly experienced foreign policy expert had nothing whatsoever to do with the United States’ consulate in Benghazi, nor its security apparatus of course. Though such is only an incidental point of fact in the Republican mental landscape, Ms. Rice’s dastardly transgression nevertheless is said by these Republicans to have been to go on the Sunday television news programs and to provide what at the time was the known information about the attacks on the Libyan consulate, presenting her facts exactly in accordance with talking points provided by the intelligence agencies, talking points whose inclusions and exclusions had critical investigative rationale behind them. To Republicans’ apoplectic chagrin Ms. Rice’s presentation of information ran contrary to some Republican Make-A-Wish Foundation admission that the attack was on a par with 9-11, that despite the voluminous evidence to the contrary, Obama’s vanquishing of al-Qaeda leadership during the last four years never occurred. Though the prognosis for the post-election Republican Party is dire, such a wish was highly unlikely to be answered.

Ever transparent in their motivations, Republicans’ real reasons for this fusillade of stupid are: a) With scant concern for the best interests of the United States, which the appointment of formidable and seasoned foreign policy pro Susan Rice as successor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton most certainly would serve, Republicans prefer the nomination of John Kerry, in the hopes of taking his Senate seat in an election to replace him, and b) after Republicans blew it on 9-11 and failed for nearly a decade to capture or kill bin Laden, they live in futile hope of casting President Obama and his fellow Democrats as weak on defense and soft on terror, a knock on Democrats benefitting them for several decades and now as dead as Hammer Time with Obama’s routing of al-Qaeda very public knowledge, and c) they’re pissed as all get out and spiteful beyond forbearance that Obama got bin Laden and that they did not, that the President just completed a royal roasting of their sorry asses in yet another election, crucifying Rice for the sin of Democrats being more appealing to the American people than Republicans’ necrotic white meat.

The irony sharper than a New York cheddar is that a Republican president whiffed on 9-11, oversaw the taking of thousands upon thousands of American lives in the United States and abroad over the course of Bush’s ignominious eight years, that the attackers of Susan Rice for the dubious charge of disseminating misleading information either participated in or stridently defended the greatest deception of the American people and its elected representatives in congress to occur in modern times, a calculated campaign of misdirected and redacted intelligence about the non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, an acute and prolonged deception at the highest levels of the executive branch. Not to mention, the eccentrically baseless bullying of Rice is a woefully bungling but gloriously amusing attempt to elide the embarrassingly nagging historical fact that Republican members of congress only recently stymied an increase in funding for diplomatic security requested by the administration.

While high profile representatives of the party of voter suppression and of southern strategy race baiting jumping all over an accomplished black female for no good reason other than utter spite and misguidedly awful politics is an ugly display to watch, it is comforting reassurance that anything approaching astute politics continues to elude Republicans, and that corralling their basest instincts is well beyond any revealed capacity.