Following her now-infamous round of Sunday talk shows after the attacks in Benghazi that resulted in the deaths of four Americans in September, U.N Ambassador Susan Rice seemed to kind of drop off the face of the earth, despite the ensuing firestorm over what now look an awful lot like deliberately misleading comments. The rumor that President Obama is considering her as a replacement for Hillary Clinton as head of the State Department hasn’t done anything to quell outrage the past few weeks, but still nary a word from her.

Ambassador Rice finally broke her silence on the subject on Wednesday, and defended her remarks by insisting that they were based on the best information she had at the time provided to her by the intelligence community. Via Reuters:

“I relied solely and squarely on the information provided to me by the intelligence community,” said Rice…

“I made clear that the information provided to me was preliminary and that our investigations would give us the definitive answers,” Rice told reporters at the United Nations in her first comments on the controversy. …

“Everyone, particularly the intelligence community, has worked in good faith, to provide the best assessment based on the information available,” Rice said. “None of us will rest … until we have the answer and the terrorists responsible for this attack will be brought to the justice.” …

Rice said some statements about her by McCain were “unfounded.” “I look forward to having the opportunity at the appropriate time to discuss all of this with him,” she said.

She relied “solely and squarely” on info from the intelligence community? That seems a bit odd, considering that the intelligence community suspected terrorism from the very beginning, which means that something doesn’t fit here — and the most obvious possibility for that missing link is that somebody high up in the food chain tweaked the talking points on a very inconvenient situation with only weeks to go before a close presidential election, although the White House has denied having done so.

Anyhow, there may well be bigger things to focus on than Susan Rice’s personal involvement, i.e. who it was that made the call to have her talk up that stupid “video” thing, why security in Benghazi was so poor, etcetera, but as for McCain and others’ criticisms and objection to her potential appointment to secretary of State being “unfounded”? …I don’t know about that. Rice was an active participant in what we still have reason to suspect was a coverup, and to quote Douglas Adams, “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.”