I don't know. I've often asked that question myself.

If there's any government blame in this incident, it's on her, not on Rice. Clinton is head of the State Department. She is ultimately responsible for security in the embassies, only the President outranks her.

Remember, that night, there were 20 attacks on US embassies all over Asia, across many time zones, and there was confusion, fragmentary and conflicting reports and the usual fog of war. The first attack, in Egypt, was definitely about the video, and it now appears ALL the others were too. Only the Libya action was later shown to be an organized and planned military operation, and it seems to have taken advantage of, or at least overlapped with, a video-related street demonstration. There was the secret CIA operation going on in Libya, too, which probably complicated things. No one gets access to anything classified unless they're cleared, which slows down things considerably. You have to get people out of bed to sign releases, write memos, give briefings, send cables, decode signals. You can imagine what a Chinese fire drill that was. Even today, the approved version has not been written, and you can count that there were screw-ups somewhere along the line. When something unexpected happens, and you respond haphazardly, there are always screw-ups. That's why we have Monday morning quarterbacks.

I think the GOP went after Rice because she was easy, and because Rice was being considered to replace Clinton at State. It would embarass Obama since she was a close friend of his and she had personally dissed McCain in the past. And like Eric Holder, she was black. Yeah. That too. It's not a question of racism, its just that you have a black president and if several of his black associates are in "trouble", it looks good politically among some constituencies if you can make that link.

They knew as far as Obama was concerned, he would not stake everything on defending her, Rice was politically expendable. She was a fight not worth risking, even if he eventually won it. She got thrown under the bus for political expediency, just like Liz Warren was.

Clinton, on the other hand, is very popular in her own right, and not just with Democrats, an attack on her might have backfired. And in the middle of all this, General Petraeus, the boss at CIA, darling of the Neocons, got caught dipping the wick in his pretty colonel. And of course, it was all about the election and its aftermath. The Republicans had nothing else going for them...