Condoleeza Rice for president               She's as unqualified and inept as her boss, so what the hell

Condoleeza Rice has a slew of degrees, real and honorary. She's held some major slots in the government. She's pretty, she's young enough, she's been around the block.  She also has failed miserably in many ways while attempting feebly to serve the people of the USA. So she'd make as shitty a president as her boss has been.  Let's have a look at her complete and utter disqualifications, and examine the rabid nutcases who, for whatever oxygen-starved reasons, think that she would make a good Commander in Chief. March 2006: On a trip to the Mideast, she admitted the USA had made "thousands of mistakes" in the Iraq War. She apparently just noticed that. Good for her.

Her qualifications are often cited as:

• She was a competitive skater
• She is a classically trained pianist
• She used to be on the board of directors at Chevron (oil money connections are always a plus in the Bush administration)
• She was an expert on the Soviet Union (which doesn't exist any more and hasn't been a threat in a looooooong time)
• January 2007: She said "I love my guys at Fox News."  Well, it's good to recognize the only airheads dumb enough to broadcast good stuff about your administration's policies.

Mangy at managing

June 2007: Rice is cited for running a demoralized department in which jobs go unfilled, Congress has long denied her cash to rearrange the diplomatic corps, and her resources have all been sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. The diplomats are all bummed out. Apparently working for a clueless administration is not a good time at the beach.
 

Sucks at security

Five days after Bush first took office, Rice, then the security adviser, was given a memo from Richard Clarke, entitled “Strategy for Eliminating the Threat of al Qaeda.”  Clarke wrote her that the memo was “developed by the last administration to give to you, incorporating diplomatic, economic, military, public diplomacy, and intelligence tools.”  After Bill Clinton blew up at Chris Wallace of Fox News, saying that he'd left behind a plan for dealing with Al Qaeda, Rice denied it. Obviously she's a liar, or forgetful as hell.

October 2006, Bob Woodward put out a new book, "State of Denial," describing how the Bushies fumbled 9/11 and the Iraq war. Condi says she couldn't recall a meeting, mentioned in the book, two months before 9/11 in which she was briefed about terror threats. But then out came the documentation of the meeting. "Oh yeah, THAT meeting," was essentially the reply.

As a result, as National Security Adviser, she presided over the biggest attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor. Rice ignored Richard Clarke and others, who warned her repeatedly of Al Qaeda, while she concentrated, at Bush's behest, on Iraq. She once said, after 9/11, that she couldn't have imagined such an attack could ever occur. Hmmm. Funny how several authors managed to do just that, long before 9/11. The author of one well-publicized book not only imagined several devastating scenarios, he even named Osama Bin Laden as the perpetrator in his conceptions. 
 

No, actually, Bush wanted this war from the moment he took office. It's clear from the Downing Street memo that Bush was going to war against Iraq whether or not the intelligence or the reasoning were there. In fact, Bush and crew had their first meeting about a possible Iraqi invasion within the first two weeks of his presidency, many months before 9/11. The Al Qaeda attacks were merely his excuse.

Referring to 9/11, Condi further spewed:  "The absence of freedom in the Middle East -- the freedom deficit -- is what produced the ideology of hatred that allowed them to fly airplanes into a building on a fine September day."

No, actually, we helped the Afghans against the Soviets, then once the Soviets were gone, we stupidly abandoned the entire region, including Pakistan, and allowed bad feelings to fester. The USA could freaking OWN that part of the world right now, but Bush Sr. simply took off. It was just like Viet Nam: Ho Chi Minh was our friend, until we helped the French retake the "colony" of Viet Nam, which begged for its independence. The Pakis and the Afghans wanted us to hang out, but we ignored them.
 

As Secretary of State, she's been less than brilliant. Even at her confirmation hearings, she couldn't give straight answers to a single question (in all fairness, every single one of Bush's appointees in the last two years has been guilty of the same thing, including his Supreme Court nominees). She got roundly spanked during the confirmation for echoing all of the nonsense of the Bush administration in the leadup to the Iraqi invasion. 

May 2005: Condi Rice visits the troops overseas, and lies to them. She said to them, "This war came to us, not the other way around."

December 2005: In Europe, Rice got spanked by allies for the lousy explanations given by Bush's cronies for the stories of torture, kidnapping, and secret prisons. Unlike Colin Powell, she never pushes back on her boss, and so has put herself in the crappy position of trying to defend the indefensible.
 
 

Clueless in Lebanon

Condi headed over to the Mideast in July 2006, after Israel started dropping bombs on Hezbollah. The Jews didn't bother telling her that they were about to launch a major airstrike, and so she was caught by surprise when they bombed hell out of Qana, in Lebanon. Condi claims she cancelled her trip to Beirut, but the TRUTH is that the Lebanese P.M. is the one who cancelled HER. Meanwhile, there's no meaningful dialogue with Syria or Iran, both of whom provide weapons and training to Hezbollah. Why? Because talking to them "rewards bad behavior.," and the USA won't do that. Therefore, the USA has no influence on events at all.

Two-facing in Venezuela

Condi attended the OAS meeting in Panama in June 2007. There she scolded Hugo Chvez for shutting down a TV station in his country because it broadcast political discourse he didn't like. Condi told him, "Disagreeing with your government is not unpatriotic and most certainly should not be a crime in any country, especially a democracy." This hypocritical statement flies in the face of what the GOP has done in the USA since 2000, namely label anybody who disagreed with the administration's wrong-headed policies as traitorous, unpatriotic, or "working with our enemies." 
 

Same non-head for spotting talent

Rice is as useless as Bush when it comes to evaluating people's skills. Of the completely unqualified Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, Rice said, “She’s got a very probing mind and a probing intellect." Naturally, she made this statement on Fox News.

Speaking of Miers’ critics, Rice, said, “I think that when they get to know her in the hearings, in the confirmation hearings, that they’re going to see a woman of extraordinary talent, extraordinary integrity and somebody who would be an extraordinary Supreme Court justice.”  Instead, the people running the hearings got in Miers a lady who couldn't handle basic questions on Constitutional law, and whose law practice, while she was in charge, got nailed for malpractice.

Rice also said that John Bolton would make a fine ambassador to the United Nations, even though he'd been a failure at his arms control job (lousing up a non-proliferation meeting just a month ago by not preparing), and he's a jerk, even by GOP standards. Of course, she later had to go around Bolton on various occasions, after he mucked up enough things at the U.N.