Condi's Speech

I like Condi Rice - kinda.  I think she's exactly what we needed in the White House and over at the State Dept - in about 1983.  What the fuck, lady?

Fred Kaplan at Slate:

After describing a world of freedom fighters and tyrants, Bush’s former secretary of state and national security adviser lamented, “Everyone asks, where does America stand?’ Indeed that is the question of the hour,” she continued, for when “friends or foes alike don’t know the answer to that question, unambiguously and clearly, the world is likely to be a more dangerous and chaotic place … We cannot be reluctant to lead, and you cannot lead from behind.”

The solution, she concluded, is to elect Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. “They know what to do,” she said. “They know that our friends and allies must again be able to trust us.”

First, it’s not at all clear that they have the slightest idea what to do or even—judging from Romney’s disastrously tin-eared trip to Europe this summer—how to think about what to do.

Second (this is the chutzpah part), Condi Rice—a top adviser in the most disastrous, reputation-crippling foreign-policy administration in decades—has no business lecturing anybody on this score.

Finally, Obama has done pretty well in foreign policy, and polls of actual foreigners—including allies—suggest that they think so too.

 Rice was Nat'l Sec Adv when the Daily Brief came out in August 2001, saying "bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside The US".  It said exactly that - not buried on page 11; not parenthetically; it wasn't implying anything.  That was the fucking title of the fucking memo.

But when she's asked about it at he 9/11 hearings, she practically says the warning wasn't deemed actionable because it didn't say exactly when and where and how the attack would happen.



Same ol' nonsense - if the facts don't fit your narrative, then just make shit up.