Secrets From 'Black Flower' Robot-Saint Condoleezza Rice
LatestFormer Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has written a book. Unfortunately, much of that book tries to justify all that lying the Bush administration did to get us into Iraq. Fortunately, she spends some of the book indulging the public’s desire to learn about how everyone in the Bush White House was behind closed doors. Here’s what Condi had to say on what went right, what went wrong, and what went weird.
Don Rumsfeld had a problem with Condi. Condi had a problem with Cheney. Cheney had a problem with everyone. Rice felt that Don Rumsfeld, who had once been her mentor, didn’t respect her as his equal. She recalls a day when he told her that he thought she was “bright,” but that they just couldn’t get along, which, on a Condescending Backhanded Compliment Scale of 1 to 10, is at about a 7, clocking in just below “articulate, and surprisingly well-mannered.”
Like many people who are not made of broken glass and dead orphans, Condoleezza did not much care for that Dick Cheney fellow. In one moment of friction, Cheney wanted to make a terrorism suspect “disappear,” which Condi thought was pretty barbaric, which Cheney thought was pretty lame. She wanted an end to secret prisons for terror suspects; Cheney wanted to send everyone who gave him a dirty look to a secret prison. Everyone was always trying to spoil his fun. Sometimes the President took her side; sometimes he cowered in fear from Cheney’s sideways grimace of evil and just let the Vice President do what he wanted.
Condi was grateful that Muammar Gaddafi’s fixation on her wasn’t raunchy.
The now-deceased Libyan leader harbored a bizarre crush on the former Secretary of State, assembling an adoring scrapbook featuring news photos of her and at one point writing a song called “Black Flower in the White House.” Gaddafi made a video to go with the song. Condi was thankful that it never got too sexual.
Spamalot is a very good musical, but it is not as good as Hurricane Katrina was bad.
Do you remember what you were doing when Hurricane Katrina stuck New Orleans? If you were then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, you were shopping for shoes in Manhattan and then watching Spamalot, the Broadway sensation that was taking the theater world by storm. She now deeply regrets this.
The Arab Spring “vindicated” the invasion of Iraq.
Rice, like everyone else in the Bush administration who has written books, spends time attempting to retroactively lionize herself and her WMD misplacing cronies by saying that what they did — lie and get us involved in a crappy war — was not actually what they did. They’re liberators! Freedom birthers! Why, they even did things that sort of kind of led to this year’s “Arab Spring!” Oh, wow. Really? Unwelcome foreign involvement in a sovereign country by the US almost decade ago caused other countries in the region to overthrow their respective governments?
Everything unfolds as a result of other things that have unfolded before it. If you inbound a pass in a basketball game and five plays later, someone on your team steals the ball and ends up getting tangled up and falling on her way down the court and severing her ACL, that doesn’t mean that your inbound pass caused your teammate to hurt her knee. In much the same way, invading Iraq did not cause the people of Egypt, Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Yemen to rise up or attempt to rise up, unless they figured that if they didn’t overthrow their governments, the US would lumber in and do it for them.
There you have it. We’ve just saved you the time it would’ve taken to read the 700+ page book. Love her, hate her, admire her, or pity her, it’s clear that the highest ranking African-American woman in the history of the US Government is either a saint, a robot, or a robo-saint for being able to spend time around that army of clowns.
Condi’s Quick Takes
[The Daily Beast]
In Memoir, Condoleezza Rice Tells of Clashes with Cheney [NYT]