Why Did We Think She Was Competent?

Here is an interesting article on Condoleeza Rice. It appears that a view months ago, she wrote an article about Lebanon and how public/private partnerships might help in rebuilding the country.

Problem was, no on was willing to publish it. It came back from the "Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and perhaps other papers before the department finally tried a foreign publication, the Financial Times of London, which also turned it down."

Think about that. A sitting Secretary of State could not get a paper to publish her OP/ED because it was so hactacular.

As a last-ditch strategy, the State Department briefly considered translating the article into Arabic and trying a Lebanese paper. But finally they just gave up. "I kept hearing the same thing: 'There's no news in this.' " Floyd said. The piece, he said, was littered with glowing references to President Bush's wise leadership. "It read like a campaign document."

The author goes on tho show how Bush politicized the State Department, as his administration has every other bureaucracy that they could get their hands on.

This misses the real point. The real point is that Condoleeza Rice is a complete incompetent who, much like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, has an unbroken record of failure.

This failure exceeds my wildest imagination. The fact that an academic, who was secretary of state was unable to write an article of sufficient quality for publication is a truly pathetic statement. In the publish or perish world of academe, this is inconceivable.

• In the 1980s, she was lecturing troops in then West Berlin, and when someone wanted details, she did no know what a unit honorific in the Soviet army was.


• In 1991, she was adamant that Boris Yeltzin not be given head of state protocol, because the USSR was going to reconstitute itself.


• Throughout her career, she has been the only Sovietologist who did not recognize the sickness of their economy and society.


• In 2001, she told Clinton's natinal security team that she wasn't worrying about al Queida, that the real threat was a resurgent Russia.

She is a fraud, elevated through right wing affirmative action, because it was convenient to have someone with a PhD in Sovietology to parrot right wing talking points.

No doubt her position as a double minority, black and a woman, has also served to elevate her stature in the party and with the pundits too.

Republicans believe that government is stupid, so they leave the stupid to govern.