Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Egyptian Prime Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr today announced a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, ending eight days of violence that resulted in nearly 150 dead and more wounded. President Obama dispatched Clinton to the region yesterday and the nation’s top diplomat traveled to Jerusalem and Cairo today to help facilitate the deal.

But in a statement on the Gaza ceasefire today, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) — one day after intelligence officials debunked their attacks on the Obama administration over Benghazi — didn’t have any kind words for the president and his team. In fact, the new “Three Amigos” attacked Obama, saying there needs to be “smarter American leadership” in the Middle East.

Yet the three Republicans did have praise for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi:

We commend Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders for the role they played in reaching today’s ceasefire. We also are encouraged by the responsible leadership role played by the President of Egypt and his government. President Morsi deserves credit for successfully bringing an end to the violence and preventing further loss of life on both sides. These actions are befitting the commitment to peace and security that Egypt has traditionally upheld as a leader of the Arab world.

Indeed, Netanyahu, Morsi and others involved ending the hostilities deserve credit — but so does the Obama administration. And given their embarrassing campaign to bring down the Obama administration on Libya, it’s not entirely shocking that McCain and his allies don’t see it that way.

The Republicans’ new focus of attack in the faux “Benghazi-gate” scandal is Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, claiming that he lied about the source of changes to talking points on the Benghazi attack given to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice.

Yesterday, a DNI spokesperson debunked accusations made by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and other Republicans that the White House changed Rice’s Benghazi talking points, saying that it was the intelligence community that made the “substantive” changes to the talking points. Moreover, former CIA head David Petraeus and other top intelligence officials have said there was no politicization of the process and that the talking points were not altered to minimize the role of extremists but to reflect the best intelligence at the time.

McCain appeared to accept the new information but wondered why Clapper and other DNI officials did not provide this information during closed door hearings last week. And now that all their earlier attacks on Rice have fell apart, Republicans and conservative media figures are directing their attacks at Clapper, a George W. Bush appointee:

– BILL O’REILLY: Now it’s James Clapper, President Obama’s national security guy who is saying, “Oh, it’s me. I sent Rice out there and I took out all the al Qaeda stuff.” I’m not buying it. None of this adds up. … All right so there’s a lot of lying going on here.

– CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I’m not buying it because the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said that a week ago in classified testimony that same Clapper said that they had no idea who changed the talking points and now a week later he seems to say he did? That’s kind of strange. I mean I’ve seen amnesia in my day in my clinical days and that one is pretty quick, one week.

– TUCKER CARLSON: I hate to think that the director of National Intelligence lied, is a liar. But I’m not sure I see an alternate explanation. Apparently, he’s contradicting what he testified to just last week. Is there another explanation for this?”

– FOX NEWS’ STEVE DOOCY: They did say it is out of the [DNI] office. It’s not him per se, so we’re supposed to believe that a Clapper aide changed what Petraeus had said? That’s very, very curious.

– REP. TREY GOWDY (R-SC): This is the head of our national intelligence and he changed his mind within the course of 24 hours. So how are you possibly going to have any confidence in what he says?

And while Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) didn’t call Clapper a liar, he told Fox News’ Stuart Varney that he now might be involved in the alleged cover up:

GINGREY: Now have you got someone who basically can trump the CIA, especially if the president says to him — I am not suggesting that he did, but he could have — look, James, we need to kind of clean this up a little bit.. We are doing really well. We’re right about time for the election and we are doing very well on national security and this could blow our cover.

Watch the video compilation of the attacks against Clapper:

The right wing has spent months trying to bring down the Obama administration in politicization the attacks in Benghazi that left four Americans dead and after all of their conspiracy theories and baseless attacks have been debunked, the rabbit hole appears to have led to Clapper and who knows where it will end.

The President of Myanmar agreed to grant international inspectors unprecedented access to its nuclear material and facilities, signalling a major step forward for the reforming authoritarian pariah state. Right on the heels of President Obama’s visit (part of a broader American attempt to smooth the country’s path to democracy), Myanmarese leader Thein Sein issued a statement announcing his government’s intention to move towards greater nuclear transparency:

Myanmar announced it would sign an international agreement that would require it to declare all nuclear facilities and materials. Although it would be up to Myanmar to decide what to declare, it could provide some answers concerning its acquisition of dual-use machinery and its military cooperation with Pyongyang that the U.S. and other nations regard as suspect. …

David Albright and Andrea Stricker of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based nonproliferation group, said in an analysis it was a “remarkable decision.” “This latest move by Burma is extremely positive for its ongoing push for openness about the nuclear issue and for building confidence and transparency with the international community,” they wrote.

As recently as 2010, some analysts had worried that Myanmar was following in North Korea’s footsteps and attempting to insulate itself from foreign pressure to reform by acquiring a nuclear weapon. There is some evidence that Myanmar had plans to build a nuclear weapon in 2006. While this most recent agreement is not an ironclad guarantee that Myanmar is abandoning any nuclear ambitions, it is good evidence that the military junta that still controls most of the government is serious about reforming. It’s also a success for President Obama’s stated goal of limiting the spread of nuclear weapons worldwide.

Though the military government violently put down monk-led protests as recently as 2007, the government held parliamentary elections this April that brought long-suffering opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi into the legislature. The American sanctions-and-diplomacy approach is widely credited with playing a role in the military’s decision to take steps, however tentative, towards a more democratic political system. According to the New York Times, the Obama administration‘s “series of cautious [diplomatic] moves…have significantly eased tensions between the United States and Myanmar.”

Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) appeared on CNN Wednesday morning to press his case against U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, the target of Republican criticism for initially claiming that the Sept. 11 attacks on Benghazi were inspired by spontaneous protests to an anti-Islamic video. Burgess joined 97 House Republicans in opposing Rice’s potential nomination to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, even though her public statements about the incident originated from unclassified talking points provided by the intelligence community.

Host Soledad O’Brien challenged Burgess’ opposition to Susan Rice, noting that Republicans had supported Condoleezza Rice’s nomination as Secretary of State in 2005, despite the Bush administration’s role in the massive intelligence failures that led to the Iraq war. Burgess struggled to explain the contradiction. He initially claimed that the media was far more critical of Bush’s intelligence failures than Obama, but when O’Brien laughed away that claim, he told her to take up the question with Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), both of whom supported Condoleezza but now oppose Susan:

O’BRIEN: I have asked others before how this does not compare, the Susan Rice issue, to the Condoleezza Rice issue on weapons of mass destruction. She was also wrong when she was the national security adviser, right? … Fast forward three years in 2005 when she was up to be secretary of state, it was Lindsey Graham who was furious that the Democrats were pushing back. It was Sen John mccain who were furious that the Democrats were pushing back on Condoleezza Rice to be Secretary of State. She was wrong on weapons of mass destruction. How is this different?

BURGESS: The difference is the scrutiny provided by our free press in this country. Condoleezza Rice was exposed to withering criticism by the press. I don’t see that happening now. Maybe I’ve missed something in the talking points, but I don’t see that happening. ….

O’BRIEN: So you’re confusing me there for a moment. When you say the scrutiny on the press — are you saying five days after comments of weapons of mass destruction, you feel like the media was picking apart Condoleezza Rice? I don’t think that’s true, Sir. Most people say that’s not the case. It took a long time. …. Hey, I’m all about scrutiny. I guess I like consistency, too. You were not calling for more scrutiny and you weren’t saying that the fact that Condoleezza Rice was wrong on weapons of mass destruction was going to damage her credibility as secretary of state. Again, McCain and Lindsey Graham were supporting that. It seems contradictory to me.

BURGESS: You’ll have to take that up with Senator McCain and Senator Graham.

Watch it:

Indeed, the media largely accepted Bush’s argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and rarely aired dissident voices or challenged the administration’s allegations.

The very same Republicans who advanced these false claims and remained silent after it became obvious that the Bush administration molded intelligence to substantiate war with Iraq, are now criticizing Susan Rice’s performance. The Obama administration has changed its assessment of the events that led up to the Libya incident as the intelligence evolved.

An American official involved in formulating and editing U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s talking points on the Benghazi attack told the Los Angeles Times that they were not edited for political reasons or to avoid undermining the Obama administration’s narrative that it has severely diminished al Qaeda’s capabilities.

Former CIA director David Petraeus said last week that the CIA believed al Qaeda was responsible for the attack but that assessment was later taken out of Rice’s talking points after an interagency review, Petraeus said, to deemphasize al Qaeda’s role in the Sept. 11 Benghazi assault in favor of a more general assessment that “extremists” carried out the attack.

Republicans led by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) then accused the White House of making the change to bolster President Obama’s political standing during an election season. “[Rice's] talking points came from the White House, not from the DNI,” McCain charged last week, referring to the Director of National Intelligence.

Even though Petraeus reportedly told lawmakers that the CIA approved the changes and “there was no politicization of the process,” a CNN report on Monday further debunked McCain’s theory. Intelligence officials said that the intelligence community, not the White House, had changed the talking points. And today, the Times backed that story up with more reporting based on information from “senior” intelligence sources involved saying that none of the edits were made for political reasons:

“Early drafts of the talking points included several analytic judgments that were debated and adjusted during the internal intelligence community coordination process,” said the senior intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the issue involved classified material. “The adjustments were focused on producing talking points that provided the best information available at the time, protected sensitive details and reflected the evolving nature of rapidly incoming intelligence.”

Officials at the CIA and at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, headed by James R. Clapper, “were all communicating on an email chain, which is normal in our coordination process,” the official said. “Suggestions were being made and implemented in a collaborative manner.”

The CIA drafted the initial talking points, and they were not “edited to minimize the role of extremists, diminish terrorist affiliations, or play down that this was an attack,” said a second U.S. official familiar with how the material was edited

McCain has been attacking Rice for weeks, a campaign that escalated recently to vowing to “block” her potential nomination as the next Secretary of State. But the Arizona Republican appears to be backing off. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and other senators friendly to McCain smacked down his request for a “Watergate-style” investigation into Benghazi. And yesterday, in a statement released after CNN’s report that the White House was not the office that changed Susan Rice’s talking points, McCain didn’t take issue with those facts and instead complained that he didn’t have this information sooner.