Double Standard Alert, Episode 1,238,247...

Victor Davis Hanson notices the obvious:

Rice’s critics were mild in comparison to what Washington is accustomed to from past scandals. After all, it is not as if a special prosecutor had been appointed, like the one who went after Scooter Libby for a crime (supposedly disclosing the fact that Valerie Plame was a covert operative) that was not a crime (she was not a covert operative) — and if it were a crime, it was known in advance to the prosecutor to have been committed by someone other than Libby (Richard Armitage).

Apparently it's OK to let actual CIA operatives die on actual missions overseas in actually dangerous places like Benghazi.   But it's not OK to mention that a non-operative living in Georgetown works at the CIA... at least not when there's political hay against Republicans to be made.

Where does Scooter Libby go to get his reputation back?

But it  gets worse, as Hanson explains:

There is sexism and racism in l’affaire Rice — but sadly it is all originating from the Obama administration and its supporters. First, having a woman or a minority as secretary of state has been accepted as the new normal for over a decade. Indeed, we have not seen a white male in the office since Warren Christopher stepped down in January 1997. Over that period, Bush’s first secretary of state, Colin Powell, was ridiculed by liberal critics for his misleading testimony about weapons of mass destruction on the eve of the Iraq War; I don’t recall him alleging racism. Vocal liberal senators tore into Powell’s successor, Condoleezza Rice, during her confirmation hearings; throughout her tenure, she was subjected to venomous criticism over her role in the Iraq War. Was Senator Barbara Boxer, who mercilessly grilled her, a racist? A disinterested observer over the last decade would conclude that the chief critics of black and female secretaries of state have been liberal Democrats — with no countervailing criticism of them from the Black Caucus, the Washington Post, or the Democratic party. Note in that regard that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales left the Bush administration under vicious liberal criticism — although not quite as harsh as the vitriol directed at Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Again, their critics were not tarred with allegations of racism or anti-Latino bias.

Hanson's summation is elegant:

We are asked to believe that a multimillionaire African-American woman, who boasts that those who “mess” with her end up badly, is a victim of racism for not being welcomed as a nominee for secretary of state — a position that has not been held by a white male in 15 years — after she went on five television shows the Sunday after the Benghazi attack in an effort to convince Americans of the absurd myth that their ambassador had been killed in the course of a demonstration gone bad, rather than being murdered in a preplanned al-Qaedist hit.