NBC News and Fox News are reporting tonight that Arizona Senator John McCain (R) will be meeting with U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice tomorrow. (Both note that Rice requested the meeting, which will apparently also be with Sens. Graham and Ayotte.) President Barack Obama is considered likely to nominate Rice to be the next Secretary of State, and McCain has been one of the loudest anti-Rice voices in the Senate.
McCain has blasted Rice for what he perceives as her untruthfulness when she appeared on Sunday morning news shows shortly after the terrorist attacks killing the U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others in Libya on September 11. He memorably called her interviews "probably one of the worst things I've observed in my entire life". (Arizona's Politics laid out McCain's and Rice's video out side-by-side with the transcript, and noted that McCain had followed Rice on Face the Nation - in the same seat - and had declined to criticize Rice at that point.)
Tonight, McCain was on FoxNews' O'Reilly Factor, and repeatedly declined to take the host's bait and declare that Obama's likely nomination of Rice would be a "slap in the face" of McCain. He also continued his walk-back of his strident rhetoric about Rice: "I don't think it was a matter of dishonesty. It was a matter of, again, responsibility."
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